The distinction between operational failures and ontological failures is the most underappreciated concept in data engineering. Your example of aggregating net with gross salaries — where the query runs, constraints pass, and nothing fails but the result is still nonsense — is exactly the kind of silent corruption that compounds into organizational belief. This framing of 'institutionalized fiction' should be required reading for anyone designing data contracts.
klement Gunndu
Agentic AI Wizard
The distinction between operational failures and ontological failures is the most underappreciated concept in data engineering. Your example of aggregating net with gross salaries — where the query runs, constraints pass, and nothing fails but the result is still nonsense — is exactly the kind of silent corruption that compounds into organizational belief. This framing of 'institutionalized fiction' should be required reading for anyone designing data contracts.