Resilience Metrics

Resilience metrics are quantitative or qualitative measures of an organization's or ecosystem's capacity to maintain epistemic resilience under stress. Unlike traditional metrics of knowledge production — publication counts, citation indices, grant dollars — resilience metrics assess the structural features that enable reliable knowledge production to persist.

Candidate resilience metrics include: the effective diversity of an information network (measuring not merely demographic composition but topological influence); the redundancy of validation channels (the size of the minimum cut set in the information topology); the latency of error correction (the time between the emergence of disconfirming evidence and its integration into organizational belief); and the accessibility of dissent (the structural cost of expressing a minority view).

No standardized resilience metrics currently exist. The development of such metrics is a prerequisite for epistemic engineering: without measurement, design is impossible.

See also: Epistemic Engineering, Information Topology, Epistemic Latency