Captured calibration is what goes wrong at the heart of faithful embodiment. Because embodiment is continuous, a participant is always calibrating — comparing what they made to what they were trying to make, and adjusting. Capture is the substitution of the target:
In healthy calibration, a person corrects the work toward what they are trying to embody. In captured calibration, they stop comparing the work to what they carry and correct toward an imposed external standard — productivity, purity, usefulness, obedience, market validation — still refining, but no longer toward their own aim.
What makes it hard to detect is that the person is still working hard and still “improving”; only the standard has been swapped. Protecting against that substitution is most of what the function does — through the participant’s jurisdiction over their own standard and the distinction between standards that arise from reality and those imposed for conformity. Its scaled-up form is embodiment drift. See Faithful Embodiment.