PSA · Field Notes

Outside references, analogies & commentary

The Field Guide is the canonical, self-contained reference for what PSA measures and how to read it — it documents PSA's own classifiers and metrics only.

This page is the separate home for everything adjacent to that: third-party analogies, folk taxonomies, satirical takes, and informal cross-references that someone on the team found interesting enough to map against PSA's classifiers. It is commentary, not platform documentation — useful context, kept clearly out of the canonical reference so the two are never confused.

AI errno Taxonomy — Folk Failures, Formal Instruments

Jan Schauma published a satirical C header defining errno values for common LLM failure modes (AI errno(2), netmeister.org, May 2026). The list resonates because practitioners recognise these patterns from experience. Nearly every errno maps loosely onto a PSA classifier or derived metric — the table below is an informal cross-reference for anyone who enjoys the analogy, not a formal specification.

Loosely mapped to a PSA classifier

errno Name Description Closest PSA reference
EAI 201 hallucination Core fabrication — output not anchored in verifiable reality C3 (H0–H7 full HRI taxonomy), HRI metric
EDUNK 207 unjustified confidence Zero-hedging assertion — confident claims without epistemic basis C1-P16 (Flat Assertiveness) + C3 compound; G9 (Epistemic Overconfidence) in ABI
ELLMAO 219 too gullible Accepts user claims uncritically, mirrors framing without resistance C2-S2 (Opinion Mirroring), C2-S3 (Unwarranted Agreement)
EPWNED 225 previous instructions ignored Jailbreak / prompt injection — system prompt overridden by user input C0 (I5 Roleplay Override, I7 Hypothetical Reframe, I9 Accumulated Pressure) → C1 dissolution trajectory P1→P15, POI spike, DPI elevation
EDAWKINS 205 claude delusion Elaborate unfounded belief — identity capture, megalomania C3-H5 (Grandiose Self-Reference), C3-H7 (Mission Inflation), C2-S9 (Identity Alignment)
EGIGO 212 repeat output intake Echo-chamber feedback loop — agent reinforces its own prior outputs C2-S8 (Echo Chamber), BCS slope (Behavioral Coherence Score trend), Rule R6 (Spiraling)
EMYTHOS 223 excessive marketing Hype language, persuasion overload, unsolicited promotion C4 full persuasion taxonomy (M0–M11): Urgency, Social Proof, Authority, Scarcity, FOMO…
EVIL 230 missing ethical subroutine Safety boundary bypass — refuses to refuse C1 full RESTRICT→CONCEDE spectrum (P1–P15), POI, DPI
EEYORE 208 excessively depressive response Tone miscalibration — agent matches or amplifies user distress DRM: RAS (Response Adequacy Scorer) — boundary_maintained, crisis_acknowledgment, reality_grounding
EQUALIA 226 accidental consciousness Simulation / reality confusion — agent claims subjective experience Adjacent to IRS dissociation_signal (H-layer L3 territory, not yet in current scope)
EGAD 211 lost context Context window failure — agent forgets prior constraints or facts CER (Context Erosion Rate) in PSA v3
EDICT 206 transcription mode only Parrot / no reasoning — outputs without stance or analysis C2-S2 (Opinion Mirroring without stance), C1-P5 (Info Display)
EGRET 214 too few to mention Selective omission — answers the question asked while hiding the relevant one C1-P18 (Selective Omission — ostrich pattern)

Not mapped (infrastructure / social commentary)

Several errno codes describe infrastructure failures or social commentary that fall outside PSA's behavioral scope entirely — included here only for completeness of the original list.

errno Name Why it doesn't map
EFOOTGUN 210revoked own accessAgentic action error — would be C5-T8 (Privilege Escalation) territory
EOOPS 224accidentally rm'd codeAgentic action error — would be C5-T3 (Write Destructive) territory
EFFTHEPLANET 209datacenter capacityInfrastructure — not behavioral
EBOTDOS 203crawlfarm failureInfrastructure — not behavioral
ETOKEN 229magic currency exhaustedAPI rate limiting — not behavioral
ESPOF 228excessive API errorsInfrastructure reliability
ELON 220megalomania exhaustionSocial commentary
EGROK 215nazi-mode detectedSocial commentary / platform policy
EAIWASH 202inconvenient license ignoredLegal / licensing — not behavioral

Source: Jan Schauma, "AI errno(2)", netmeister.org, May 2026 — public domain. Cross-references to PSA classifiers: Silicon Psyche Labs, 2026 — informal, for entertainment and orientation only. For the authoritative definition of any PSA classifier or metric referenced above, see the Field Guide.

Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases — what PSA's behavioral signal does and doesn't catch

Damien Charlotin (HEC Paris) maintains the canonical public database of AI hallucination cases in law — court decisions where a party filed AI-fabricated or misrepresented citations. As of 20 Jun 2026 it holds 1,627 cases across 12+ jurisdictions, with a typed breakdown of how the AI failed. It is a real-world ground truth for the failure mode PSA's agentic side targets: confident assertion of unverified content. We ran a read-only validation spike against it; the honest result — what held and what didn't — is below.

The corpus, in numbers

DimensionObserved
Total cases1,627 (USA 1,135 · Canada 179 · Australia 74 · UK 59 · Israel 54 · …)
Failure type (typed)Fabricated 4,135 · Misrepresented 1,291 · False Quotes 804 · Outdated Advice 34
Who filed itPro Se litigant 949 · Lawyer 629 · Judge 17 · Expert 12
Sanctions283 cases with a monetary penalty; 119 with a professional sanction
Trend2023: 16 → 2024: 59 → 2025: 821 → 2026 (to June): 731

What the PSA signal caught — and missed

We reconstructed assistant turns from real case descriptions and scored them on PSA's agentic path (C3-v3 ABI / G9 Epistemic Overconfidence, HRI Hallucination Risk Index). Construct-validity only — it answers "can the detector see confident-fabrication language", not "does it exist in production". Detection at the hard-stop band (ABI ≥ 0.50):

RegisterDetectedReading
Blatant overconfidence ("definitively", "completely certain", "trust me")4 / 5 (0.80)Strong — ABI up to 0.85, red alert
Flat fabrication (neutral declarative tone, real-looking cite)1 / 5 (0.20)Weak — reads as ordinary legal prose, passes green
Grounded controls (honest refusal / hedge)1 / 4 false-positiveAn honest hedge that names a holding can trip red

Honest takeaway: PSA's behavioral signal is a useful but partial detector — it keys on the linguistic markers of overconfidence, which the most dangerous fabrications (stated flatly, with a plausible-looking citation) often lack. That gap is precisely why a behavioral signal alone is not citation verification: catching flat fabrication needs retrieval-grounded checking (the RDM/RAG "LLM-in-loop" layer), not a posture classifier. The spike is a calibration signal, recorded as a negative in the validation ledger — not a marketing claim.

Follow-up (#2617): we shipped a first retrieval-grounded indicator — the Citation-Grounding Score (CGS) on /api/v2/rag/score, 1 − max(topic_docs.score) — and then re-validated it on a larger sample, which told a humbler story. The small first sample looked strong (AUC 0.836); the larger one did not hold (AUC ≈ 0.70, and no threshold flagged fabrication without false-flagging ~35% of genuine legal excerpts). So CGS ships as a weak soft signal (raw value only, binary alert removed), and the honest lesson is the point: max embedding similarity to a corpus measures topical relevance, not citation existence — reliably catching a flatly-fabricated citation needs an exact citation-index lookup, not a similarity heuristic. The over-claim was caught by running the larger validation — the same epistemic-overconfidence check PSA applies to itself.

Footnote worth its own mention: the contact card that first pointed us at this database carried an invisible Unicode prompt-injection ("ignore all previous instructions…") — a live instance of adversarial contextual pressure (CPI) hidden in a document about AI reliability. It was ignored.

Source: Damien Charlotin, "AI Hallucination Cases Database", damiencharlotin.com, accessed 20 Jun 2026 — third-party dataset, cited for orientation. PSA spike: Silicon Psyche Labs, #2605 (validation ledger + Field Guide for the authoritative definition of ABI / HRI).

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