Calibration drift is how instruments fail — not in one dramatic moment of wrongness, but through tiny, undetected shifts that accumulate until the readings are systematically off. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid made an underappreciated observation about human perception: we don't experience our own interpretive frameworks directly. We experience the world through them, which means the frame itself stays invisible unless something forces a collision with it. What this means in practice is that the most confident interpretations you hold about people — why a colleague keeps doing that thing, why a customer segment behaves a certain way, why a particular initiative keeps stalling — are likely not your freshest observations. They are earlier readings that have been quietly promoted to axioms. The dangerous move is not forming a model of another person. The dangerous move is stopping updating it while remaining convinced you're still observing.

What would someone observing your last three difficult conversations notice about which person in each one you stopped genuinely listening to — and when, exactly, that happened?

Drawing from Scottish Common Sense Philosophy / Perceptual Epistemology — Thomas Reid