Sentinel Headline
by Lyle Seaman
in Error'd
on 2025-04-11
When faced with an information system lacking sufficient richness
to permit its users to express all of the necessary data states,
human beings will innovate. In other words, they will find creative
ways to bend the system to their will, usually (but not
always) inconsequentially.
In the early days of information
systems, even before electronic computers, we found users choosing
to insert
various out-of-bounds values into data
fields to represent states such as "I don't know the true value for
this item" or "It is impossible accurately state the true value of
this item because of faulty constraint being applied to the input mechanism"
or other such notions.