---
type: claim
domain: mechanisms
description: "Cross-domain pre-deployment assessment that maps full affordance chains produces categorically different outcomes than domain-specific red teaming — social media's catastrophic effects were nth-order affordance cascades that no domain-specific assessment would have caught"
confidence: experimental
source: "Schmachtenberger 'Development in Progress' (2024) Part II, extending military red team/blue team methodology"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
  - "for a change to equal progress it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities because immature progress that ignores cascading harms is the most dangerous ideology in the world"
  - "epistemic commons degradation is the gateway failure that enables all other civilizational risks because you cannot coordinate on problems you cannot collectively perceive"
---

# Cross-domain pre-deployment assessment produces categorically different risk identification than domain-specific red teaming because the most catastrophic technology effects are nth-order affordance cascades invisible within any single domain

Schmachtenberger proposes "yellow teaming" as a distinct pre-deployment methodology. Where red teaming asks "can this be broken?" and blue teaming asks "can we defend it?", yellow teaming asks "what else will this touch?" — mapping full affordance chains across environment, health, psychology, communities, power dynamics, and arms race potential.

The arguable claim is not the methodology's existence but its necessity: **the most catastrophic effects of exponential technologies are nth-order cascades that cross domain boundaries and are therefore invisible to any domain-specific assessment.**

The social media case is the strongest evidence. Domain-specific red teaming would have caught privacy vulnerabilities, content moderation gaps, and platform stability issues. It would NOT have caught: the attention economy's effect on democratic sensemaking, adolescent mental health epidemics from social comparison algorithms, epistemic polarization from engagement optimization, or the weaponization of recommendation algorithms for political manipulation. These were not failure modes — they were success modes. The platform worked exactly as designed; the catastrophic effects were nth-order affordance cascades across psychology, politics, and epistemology.

If this pattern generalizes — if exponential technologies consistently produce their worst effects through cross-domain cascades rather than direct failure — then domain-specific assessment is structurally inadequate for governing them. AI, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology all have cross-domain affordance profiles that suggest the same pattern.

**The operational gap is real:** No company, government, or international body has implemented systematic cross-domain pre-deployment assessment at scale. The closest precedents are environmental impact assessments (narrow in scope) and technology assessment offices (historically defunded — the US Office of Technology Assessment was eliminated in 1995). Whether yellow teaming is institutionally feasible or merely a good idea that can't be implemented under competitive pressure is the open question.

## Challenges

- Yellow teaming at full scope may be computationally intractable. Mapping nth-order effects across all domains requires predictive capacity that may exceed what any team can achieve. The social media case is clear in hindsight; predicting AI's nth-order effects in advance may be qualitatively harder.
- The methodology risks analysis paralysis. If every exponential technology must pass a full cross-domain assessment before deployment, innovation slows dramatically and competitive dynamics (Moloch) ensure non-compliant actors deploy first.
- Without enforcement mechanisms, yellow teaming is advisory. Schmachtenberger provides no mechanism for ensuring results are acted upon — the same competitive dynamics that produce externalities will pressure actors to ignore yellow team findings. The gap between identifying problems and creating incentives to address them is precisely the gap between Schmachtenberger's framework and mechanism design approaches.
- The social media case may not generalize. Social media's nth-order effects were severe because it directly modified human cognition and social behavior at scale. Not all exponential technologies have this profile — some may have effects that are catastrophic but domain-contained.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[for a change to equal progress it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities because immature progress that ignores cascading harms is the most dangerous ideology in the world]] — yellow teaming is the operational methodology for the progress redefinition
- [[epistemic commons degradation is the gateway failure that enables all other civilizational risks because you cannot coordinate on problems you cannot collectively perceive]] — social media's effect on sensemaking is the paradigm case of nth-order affordance cascade

Topics:
- [[_map]]
