{
  "id": "lag.temporal",
  "term": "lag",
  "sense": "temporal",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 15,
  "arena": "maintenance",
  "domain": "emergence",
  "style": "window",
  "definition": "feedback arriving within the window but too late for the correction to land before the next drift.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "window.range",
      "drift.aimless",
      "feedback.communication",
      "parameter.condition",
      "late.temporal",
      "next.temporal",
      "time.dimension",
      "land.geography"
    ],
    "interaction": "The interaction of feedback, drift, temporal sequencing, a persistence window, and the notion of corrective arrival upon a parameter state enables feedback to arrive too late for correction before the next drift.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "untimely correction",
      "arrival within bounds but after need",
      "drift-correctable window"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In the 2012 Knight Capital trading glitch, feedback from delayed stock price updates arrived too late to prevent erroneous trades piling up in under 45 minutes.",
      "domain": "computing"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Therac-25 radiation therapy machine administered lethal overdoses because software feedback about beam intensity arrived after the next cycle had already begun.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "During the 2008 financial crisis, credit rating updates for mortgage-backed securities lagged behind actual defaults, missing the window to adjust investor behavior.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "maintenance.upkeep",
      "type": "abstracts",
      "note": "maintenance must account for lag to preserve parameters in window"
    },
    {
      "id": "drift.aimless",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "drift occurs regardless of feedback; lag is about timing of corrective feedback"
    },
    {
      "id": "buffer.region",
      "type": "abstracts",
      "note": "lag determines minimum necessary buffer size"
    },
    {
      "id": "error.mistake",
      "type": "abstracts",
      "note": "uncorrected error accumulates when feedback lags"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "lag",
    "lagged",
    "lagging",
    "lags"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "retrofit:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.8,
    "sources": [
      "Sample/hundred-words-six-terms.md"
    ],
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "windows.open  is not constitutive — it is metaphorical; land.geography is included as 'land' in 'land before' refers to settling of correction, not physical geography."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-lag.temporal"
}