Correction vs Drift
Economic principle that a knowledge system survives only if correction cost stays below drift cost
Correction vs drift is the economic principle that a knowledge system remains healthy only if the cost of correcting errors stays below the cost of letting them propagate. When correction becomes expensive , drift wins: errors persist because fixing them is not worth the effort.
The epistemic protocol layer is designed to keep correction cheap. Traceability means you can find what needs fixing; explicit claims mean you can target changes precisely; and the Dialectical Graph means updates propagate through relations rather than requiring manual rewrites.
Encyclopedia Meltdown is what happens when drift wins permanently: the system stabilizes around an "approximately maintained" false steady state because no one can afford to clean it up.