Naming is infrastructure

There is a reasonable allergy to framework acronyms. Most of them are consulting packaging: a familiar idea with a memorable shell, sold as a method. The test for whether a name is doing work is simple — does the practice change when the name exists?

Sometimes it does. Before 'pre-mortem' had a name, a person raising failure modes before a launch was a pessimist. After it had a name, that person was running a known exercise with a defined duration and an expected output. Nothing about the activity changed. What changed was that it could be scheduled, delegated, and — critically — declined without it being a personal statement. A named practice can be argued about on its merits. An unnamed one can only be argued about as a character trait.

That is what a name buys: permission and portability. You cannot ask someone to 'do that thing where you write down what you'd see if you were wrong.' You can ask them for a null-case. The compression is not decoration; it is what allows the practice to survive the transition from one person's habit to a team's default.

The failure mode is real and worth stating. A framework becomes a liability the moment it is applied where it does not fit, because the acronym has become easier to follow than the situation is to read. Every model on this site ships with the conditions under which it breaks, for that reason. A framework without a stated failure boundary is not a tool, it is a script.

The other honest thing to say: naming a discipline is itself a claim, and claims can be wrong. Data science spent years being dismissed as statistics with a marketing budget before the name stuck to something real. It stuck because there were practitioners doing work the old names did not cover. That is the bet here, and it is running in public with a kill criterion attached.