Three Kinds of Correct but Wrong

A legal chess move can lose the game. Formally Correct describes a system that knows every rule available at its layer and nothing about the strategy above it. The move is not corrupted or hidden. The system sees it completely. It simply cannot evaluate what the move means.

What the Interface Decides is a different failure. The bytes are stable, but one observer sees a blank terminal line while another sees an instruction. Nothing is missing inside the object. The interface changes which object appears to exist.

Nothing Past the Zero splits the third kind in two. SQLite stores all seven bytes and displays three; a lower-level accessor can recover what the reporting layer hid. WYSIWYG stores the italics but not why they were italicized. There is no accessor to add later because the richer fact never entered the document.

Clean Transcript contains both versions at once. Whisper drops an “um,” but the raw waveform keeps it: hidden, recoverable. An organization omits the failure prevented by quiet maintenance, and no incident report contains the missing event: never recorded.

“Look underneath” is therefore useful advice only after one question: underneath what? If a richer layer survives, change the accessor. If it never existed, change the format that captures the event. If the system has all the data but lacks the concept needed to judge it, neither move will help. That is not a display bug. It is the boundary of the model.