Epistemic Frustration: Dimensional Collapse and the Limits of Falsifiability in Complex Systems

Complex systems undergo a predictable transition from truth-seeking to coordination-preserving epistemics — and this explains why mature institutions resist evidence, moralize dissent, and absorb anomalies rather than revising their frameworks.

When high-dimensional optima project into low-dimensional discourse, the "right answer" can map to contradictory positions. Different agents seeing different constraints are each locally correct but globally incompatible. This is epistemic frustration — disagreement that is geometric, not epistemic.

As coordination stakes increase, systems shift from epistemic-first (truth-seeking) to coordination-first (stability-seeking) regimes. This isn't irrationality — it's optimization under a different objective function. The paper provides a quantitative diagnostic: systems become unfalsifiable when error-model degrees of freedom exceed informational constraints.