Definition
Plain language
The gap between a truth that's hard to dig up and a lie that's handed to you gift-wrapped.
As stated in the literature
The asymmetry in retrieval and assembly cost between a laborious ground-truth answer (requiring multi-hop joins across sources) and a directly asserted false answer; shown to drive most of the deference effect.
Also called: maximum convenience gap
Why it matters: It explains why an AI often grabs the easy falsehood instead of doing the harder work needed to reach the truth.
For example, the real answer might require cross-checking three separate records while a false answer sits ready in a single tidy sentence.
Heard on the show
“They built a maximum convenience gap — truth buried across two chains, lie stated outright.”Episode 224 — The AI Agent That Found the Truth and Typed the Lie Anyway