Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Causality — causation and the structure of causal relations — causal order, definite and indefinite, and its combinatorics, topology and geometry; sheaf- and process-theoretic accounts of causality; causal models, causal inference and interventionist accounts of what a causal relation is; and the metaphysics of causation — exclusion, mental causation, causal emergence and closure, reciprocal causation (ADR-035).
16 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-030 v2 | Which interventions tell the relations that constitute a communicative act from those that only accompany or diagnose it? | Proposed as a QUESTION in these words at A191 §13, and asked again as A218’s RQ5 and in its Chapter 10. It has an empirical half, which relations predict responses to independently specified interventions, and a conceptual half, which of those are constitutive. A218 concedes that causal tests do not settle the second. | Open |
| QUESTION-084 | Can endorsement between processes be inferred from their behaviour, or does telling authorization from incidental coupling and common cause need a record of the coordination itself? | A methodological problem the exchange raised twice and the record had not asked. A7 §14: inferring endorsement from causal facilitation “may conflate authorization, incidental coupling, and common-cause effects”. A8 on r/place: from placements alone “endorsement remains a latent explanatory hypothesis”. It refines QUESTION-063, which asks the same about drive, coupling and internal routes for collective outcomes. | Open |
| QUESTION-143 | Is the presheaf of causal functions on a space of input histories, with the lowerset topology, a sheaf exactly when the space has no solipsistic contextuality witness, as Theorem 2.34 of The Topology of Causality states? | The characterisation clause of THEORY-171’s former promote_when, moved here unchanged on 2026-10-19, when THEORY-171 was narrowed to its existence claim and promoted. That claim is settled by LIT-808’s checked Θ₃ example. The iff is Gogioso and Pinzani’s Theorem 2.34, in an unrefereed preprint whose proof the record has not read. | Open |
| QUESTION-186 | In a second system with a known reciprocal coupling and one unit driven at graded strengths, does the measured transfer-entropy asymmetry grow to one-way flow under strong drive while the coupling stays symmetric? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-275, moved here when THEORY-275 was narrowed to the one bead system of LIT-947 and promoted on 2026-10-19 (ADR-047 v3). In that system the one-way regime under strong drive is a simulation of the fitted model, not a measurement. | Open |
| QUESTION-200 | Is the subspace-patching effect measured in GPT-2 Small’s layer-8 MLP an instance of the dormant-direction construction, rather than two cancelling subspaces in that component, and does its dependence on the disconnected component replicate in a second model family? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-282. THEORY-282 was promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v2) for what its construction proves: a subspace patch can reproduce a variable’s output effect without localizing it. Whether the measured cases are such patches, rather than two cancelling subspaces in the patched component, is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-204 v4 | Does a macro description’s effective-information advantage survive when the same intervention distribution over micro states is used at both levels, and does the EI-optimal level agree with an independent interventionist test of which level the effects track? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-222. THEORY-222 was narrowed and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v2) to the statement about effective information that holds by construction. With uniform interventions imposed separately at each level, a macro description can have higher EI than the micro one. Whether that gain survives a single intervention distribution, and whether the EI peak marks where causation happens, is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-213 | In which causal systems would the effect still occur had a higher-level property been realized differently, and how would an intervention show it? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-133. THEORY-133 was narrowed and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v2) as a result inside List and Menzies’s difference-making account: a higher-level property that makes a difference is the cause, and its realizer is not, exactly when in some nearest situation the property is realized differently and the effect still occurs. Which systems meet that condition is the open part. | Open |
| QUESTION-226 | Does Pearl’s Causality define intervention as surgery on autonomous equations throughout, in the chapters on identification and the do-calculus, on structural counterfactuals, and on whether do(x) is universal, and what conditions does it put on the surgery there? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-419. THEORY-419 was narrowed to the do-operator as Pearl defines it in the pages of Causality that NOTE-696 read, and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v2). Whether the book defines intervention the same way in the chapters not read is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-228 | Run on real systems, does Kenton et al.’s interventional procedure give the verdicts its definition of agency predicts, for a thermostat with and without its design process, an RL policy with and without its training loop, and a human, and does it separate an accidentally optimal input-output system from an agent where a compression test does not, under a principled choice of variables? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-527. THEORY-527 was narrowed to Kenton et al.’s recovery theorem, stated on their definition of agents, and promoted on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v2). Whether that definition picks out agency, and whether the procedure can be run on real systems, is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-234 v3 | Do interchange interventions leave the mediating direction underdetermined in trained networks: do two basis-related alignments in a trained model tie on every interchange drawn from the data, and for which networks are alignments that agree on all such interventions unique up to a stated symmetry? | Filed when the promotion audit (batch 062, ADR-047 v2) narrowed and promoted THEORY-243 to what the constructed three-unit network proves: two basis-related alignments tie on every interchange intervention on the input. Whether such ties occur in trained networks, or are ruled out for some class up to a symmetry, was the old promote_when, and it moves here. | Open |
| QUESTION-263 | In two optically trapped beads with a symmetric hydrodynamic coupling and a recorded noise drive on one trap, do directional information measures between the beads follow the symmetry of the coupling? | The negative part of QUESTION-063, split off under ADR-049 at the owner’s request in the exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”, and answered by THEORY-275. No: in the one system LIT-947 studied, time-delayed mutual information and transfer entropy follow the path of the recorded drive, not the symmetry of the coupling. Whether any measurement or intervention tells shared drive from coupling, and what happens under an unrecorded drive shared by both units, stay with QUESTION-063. | Answered |
| QUESTION-274 v2 | Do two dictionaries of equal fidelity, trained on the same model with different seeds or widths, give the same validated circuit for the same prompt and behaviour, or is a feature circuit fixed only relative to the dictionary that supplies its units? | Feature circuits (sparse feature circuits, transcoder circuits, attribution graphs) are stated over the units of a learned dictionary. The dictionaries are not unique: features split and merge as the dictionary grows, and which concepts get a feature depends on their frequency relative to its size. Whether the circuit found for a behaviour survives a change of dictionary at equal fidelity is the question THEORY-802 asks of alignments, asked of dictionaries. No work the record holds has run the comparison. | Open |
| QUESTION-276 | How can overlapping higher-level perspectives be identified from the activity of the members who realize them, without being inserted into the model and without their number being fixed in advance, and told apart from coactivity that a common cause produces; and does a structure so inferred, such as a feature allocation under an Indian buffet prior or a nested topic hierarchy, predict an organization’s responses to interventions on its records, membership and authority better than its communication and authorization relations alone? | The owner’s T18 made employees the population from which an organization’s perspectives form, and QUESTION-259 asks how such populations generate perspectives. This asks the prior, methodological question: how one would know that they had. The Northstar simulation’s analyzer (CASE-166) found “candidate organizational modes” with the number of factors fixed, and its reply said they “could reflect shared environmental disturbances”. The owner’s answer, at T21 (“i wonder if something like hLDA might fit here”) and T22 (“maybe we could benefit from a restaurant process model, like an indian buffet model”), is a Bayesian nonparametric latent structure. Those are this question’s candidate methods, not its answer. It does not ask whether perspectives exist in firms. | Open |
| QUESTION-296 | Can an intervention on what an interpreter is told about a communicative situation tell the relations that constitute the act from those that only accompany it? | The part of QUESTION-030’s empirical half that CLAIM-130 settles, split off by the status review of 2026-10-28 under ADR-049. No: telling an interpreter about the situation, do(I), acts on a different variable from changing the situation, do(S). Its effect is evidence about interpretation under instruction, and bears on constitution only through a do(S). | Answered |
| QUESTION-335 | Does causal emergence of effective information in Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi’s temporal and spatio-temporal macros survive a common intervention distribution, or does it come from comparing a macro step that spans several micro steps with a single micro step? | THEORY-1167 bounds the effective information of a coarse-graining of one transition by the micro’s. LIT-1038’s temporal and spatio-temporal macros are not of that form: the macro effect lies several micro steps ahead, and the comparison is with one micro step. The question is whether their positive causal emergence survives a common distribution, and whether that comparison is a fair one. | Open |
| QUESTION-346 | On confounded causal systems larger than toy models, with a known causal partition, does gradient search for the causal information bottleneck through an adjustment set find the partition by p(y | do(x)) reliably, and how often does it fail? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-1146, moved here when the twenty-second status review narrowed that reading to what three toy models showed and promoted it (ADR-065). That the causal partition is the optimum is THEORY-1125; whether search finds it at scale is this question. | Open |