# Counterfactual Opportunity **Domain:** Rights / Predictive Governance / Allocation **Doc Type:** Canonical Constitutional Principle **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Counterfactual opportunity** is protected access to some of the conditions capable of disproving a consequential prediction about a person. If a forecast causes every job, treatment, educational route, relationship or rehabilitative context that could falsify it to be withheld, the model becomes institutionally unfalsifiable. ## Operational Requirements - reserve meaningful opportunity across adverse classifications; - disclose the classification at a resolution sufficient for challenge; - prevent contestation from counting as confirmation; - limit how long and how far a classification travels; - record institutional interventions as causal variables; and - require beneficiaries of prediction to share responsibility for preserving falsifiability. ## Interfaces [[wiki/Model Contestability|Model Contestability]] challenges the model; counterfactual opportunity preserves a world in which the challenge can be tested. [[wiki/Score Separability|Score Separability]] prevents one forecast from closing unrelated domains. [[wiki/Promotion Legibility|Promotion Legibility]] preserves a discoverable route out of administrative closure. ## Principal Source [[articles/Peak Person and the Predicaments of Prediction|Peak Person and the Predicaments of Prediction]] ## Key Insight **A prediction cannot be called knowledge after the institution has removed every condition under which it might become false.**