Look for
Decomposition
Can the system distinguish the contributions of different components, actions, times, or pathways to the eventual outcome?
One way alignment happens
Credit assignment
When a larger system succeeds or fails, which parts should change?
A system-level outcome does not by itself tell individual components what they did right or wrong. Alignment often depends on distributing the consequences of success and failure back to local parts in ways that change what they do next.
Try seeing it
A global error is not yet a local instruction.
Many components may contribute to the same outcome. Some caused the problem, some compensated for it, some were irrelevant, and some may have done exactly the right thing despite the larger failure.
Credit assignment is the problem of turning an outcome at one scale into differentiated consequences for activity at another scale.
Look for
Routing
How do success, failure, reward, error, or other consequences reach the particular parts whose future behavior should change?
Look for
Updating
Once credit is assigned, what changes: a weight, policy, habit, reputation, resource allocation, level of trust, or probability of being selected again?
Related but distinct
Relevance is not responsibility.
A problem can become locally relevant without implying that the local component caused it. Stress sharing, alarms, and shared signals may recruit parts into solving a problem elsewhere in the system.
Credit assignment asks a different question: which components should be reinforced, weakened, trusted, retrained, replaced, or otherwise changed because of their contribution to the result?
A characteristic failure
The system learns the wrong lesson.
Misassigned credit can reward luck, punish useful compensation, encourage scapegoating, or cause every component to change in response to a failure produced by only a few.
Better feedback is therefore not always enough. The feedback must be attached to the right actions, components, times, or relationships.
A useful perturbation
Produce a success or failure at the larger scale. Which parts receive the consequences?
Then ask whether those are actually the parts whose future behavior should change.