Derived principle B
Regime Problem
Wrong regime diagnosis silently invalidates correct methods.
The claim in full
Before choosing a method, diagnose which operating regime the system is in. Wrong regime diagnosis silently invalidates otherwise-correct methods — the output looks valid, the computation succeeds, and the answer is systematically wrong. The error doesn't announce itself.
What it is composed from
Law IV — you need an instrument to diagnose the regime; regime is the hidden variable. Law V — misdiagnosis is a targeting error. What it adds that neither law warns about is the failure signature: methods that pass without error on the wrong regime produce plausible, confident, systematically wrong outputs.
- Law IV Instruments Over Theory Hidden structure stays hidden until you build the instrument.
- Law V The Targeting Problem Misaimed capability always wastes the aimed-at effort, but harms the system only when the misfire is hard to detect or re-aim — so treat a suspected wrong target as a hypothesis to test, not a verdict.
What would falsify it
A law that cannot fail is not a law. Each of these is the observation that would break this one, written before the evidence was looked for, so the frame can lose.
A genuinely regime-agnostic method performing optimally across all operating regimes without pre-diagnostic classification — not by being trivially conservative, but by being invariantly correct.
Essays
No essay declares this one yet. It is carried here because it is part of the framework, not because it has been written about.