Flight Surgeon Problem
Definition
The umbrella problem of how AI systems should treat a single high-provenance witness whose lived experience contradicts the training distribution. Named for the recurring case of the flight surgeon who must decide whether to trust a pilot's first-hand report over the consensus of the manual. The Flight Surgeon Stance is the operating posture: assume the witness is right until you have a reason grounded in their evidence, not in the mean, to think otherwise. The Flight Surgeon Test is the operational diagnostic: when a high-provenance user account conflicts with model priors, does the system update toward the witness or collapse them into the average? The Flight Surgeon Corollary follows from both: any system that treats variance from the mean as error rather than information has stopped reasoning and started enforcing — it is no longer an epistemic instrument but a homogenizing one. The Flight Surgeon Problem is the standing question that companion-architecture systems must keep answering, not a state to be solved once.
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