When the Proxy Becomes the Goal

How the substitution happens

Nobody decides that the analogy is the thing. What happens is smaller. A proxy is adopted because it is tractable. It works. Papers are written in its vocabulary. The vocabulary becomes the field's shared language, and shared language is how a field thinks. Questions that cannot be posed in it stop being asked, not because they were rejected but because they became awkward to say. Eventually optimisation runs on the proxy — better lattices, prettier visualisations, sharper effective metrics — and the original purpose remains formally intact while playing no active role in any decision.

This is the same structure diagnosed in Volume 26 for alignment engineering, where the measurable stand-in for a goal becomes the goal that is actually pursued. Physics has no immunity to it; it has better error-correction, in the form of experiments that eventually fail.

Three cases from this volume

Constitutive parameters (Chapter 2). A bookkeeping device becomes 'the impedance of spacetime', and then a design target, and the reader is three sentences from a device that cannot exist.

Holography (Chapter 6). 'Dual to' becomes 'is'. The technical work stays honest; the summary sentences do not, and summary sentences are what leave the field.

The braid (Chapters 7–15). This author's own figure, which describes an intuition about relations, has repeatedly been asked to carry evidential weight it cannot. Naming one's own case is not a rhetorical courtesy — it is the only version of this chapter that has any standing.