The Closed N and the Open Reality
When mathematicians and systems engineers summarize human agency as "Science is Best-of-N, Engineering is Worst-of-N", a seductive formal symmetry emerges. Science is cast as a peak voyager across hypothesis samples, while engineering guards against the catastrophic floor of system failure. Yet this neat polarity smuggles a fatal blind spot: the Closed-World Assumption, which presumes all possible variance is pre-packaged within a bounded set of size N.
Living reality is always N+1. This unconditioned plus-one is no mere statistical outlier; it is the inexhaustible ontological openness of…
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