DIAG-3 · Diagnosis · Heuristic — strong prior, re-verify periodically

Twyman's law

The law

The more surprising a reported KPI movement, the more likely it is a measurement or pipeline artifact than a real market event.

Scope

Normal operating regimes; the prior inverts in genuinely volatile windows (crisis periods, accounts at the noise floor).

What this licenses you to do

Fixed triage order for any surprising delta: (1) measurement and definition audit, (2) mechanical decomposition, (3) market hypothesis last, and require confirmation from an independently instrumented source.

Evidence

Ehrenberg (1975); Kohavi, Tang & Xu (2020) catalogued extreme-result bugs.