Counterfactual

Definitions

1. A hypothetical alternative to what actually happened, used to reason about causality, decisions, and outcomes. In tech and startup culture it shows up in postmortems, product analysis, and machine learning discussions about what would have happened under different conditions.

   In plain English: An imagined version of events used to ask what might have happened differently.

   Example: "The postmortem needs a counterfactual: would the incident still have happened if the rate limiter had been enabled?"

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