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.
Design rationale — recording the reasoning behind a design or decision as it is made — issues, positions and arguments, options and criteria (IBIS, gIBIS, QOC and their successors) — and why such capture systems are or are not used: who bears the cost of capture and who gets the benefit, premature formalization, cognitive overhead, and the groupware adoption problems behind them (ADR-030).
8 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-037 | When an argument is developed across sessions with collaborators who keep no memory, what makes it settle into a stable structure, and what can a project memory contribute? | The question of the owner’s manuscript “luria: nucleating an argument”, proposed on 2026-10-11 as a title. The reading of the title is the assistant’s, assembled from observations this record and luria’s had already made in separate places (workbench 2026/10/11). An answer has to say what stops an argument from settling, what the record adds that a draft does not, and what that addition costs. | Open |
| QUESTION-038 v2 | What turns a structure that persists into an anchor that later structure can be built on? | Raised by the owner’s reframing (CLAIM-185), which joins two conditions: a structure must persist, and it must be available to serve as an anchor. The first is not enough for the second. An answer names what availability takes, and how a record could tell an anchor from a structure that merely persists. | Open |
| QUESTION-064 | Does an anchor need endorsement as well as addressability, stable identity and discoverability: are entries the record has not accepted built on less than entries it has? | QUESTION-038 lists three candidates for what turns a persistent structure into an anchor. Clark and Chalmers’ criteria for an external resource that counts as part of a mind (LIT-097, read in NOTE-180) include endorsement, which QUESTION-038 lacks. The record has its own form of endorsement, Proposed against Active, so the question can be tested on the record’s citation graph. | Open |
| QUESTION-072 v4 | Does a project memory distribute credibility among an argument’s contributors, by making some contributors’ moves addressable and leaving others’ as unfiled turns, so that what gets a code gets cited and what does not is re-derived or lost? | Filed at the owner’s request, ahead of its readings: Fricker’s account of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (LIT-1004) is registered unread in the same contribution. CLAIM-182 says addressability is what makes an anchor, and CLAIM-181 says the record’s grammar decides what can be filed. Together they imply that a contributor whose moves are filed gains standing in the argument that one whose moves are not does not. The question asks whether that happens, and whether it is a wrong in Fricker’s sense or only a bias in what persists. | Open |
| QUESTION-098 | When is an inferential structure worth filing: when does the reconstruction it is expected to save outweigh the cost of filing it, keeping it current and the risk of reusing it after it has gone stale? | The owner at U11: “the record could probably benefit from some content to the effect of computation-storage tradeoffs”. A11 posed filing as a decision under uncertainty about future use. QUESTION-038 asks how an anchor works. This asks when one is worth making. | Open |
| QUESTION-108 | When a structured record does better than a summary, a transcript or a posterior on revision tasks, is it because it retains more, because what it retains is easier to reach, or because the operations a reviser needs are easier to perform on it? | A5’s second question, with A3’s question B and A4 §4’s decomposition: information retained, information accessible, information used correctly. The three are different findings, and a comparison that does not separate them cannot say which one CLAIM-295 rests on. | Open |
| QUESTION-258 | Should a manuscript drawn from the record be chosen as a well-supported connected part of its argument, or as a smallest set of claims that changes what the argument can conclude, and what else must the choice preserve? | The owner’s question at U3 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: “whether manuscript assembly should optimize for a well-supported connected subgraph or for a minimal set of claims that changes the conclusions reachable from the existing graph”. A3 answered that both “fail as general definitions of manuscript value”. The record already says it does not generate manuscripts (CLAIM-178). This question asks what a choice of claims for one should optimize, and how to test that against the record’s own history. | Open |
| QUESTION-283 | Can composing systems create an effective structure whose adequate specification needs a richer relational vocabulary than the parts needed separately (relations of higher arity, history, or a new kind) and, if so, under what conditions, and is the new vocabulary forced by the composite or only by the restricted class of descriptions in use? | Raised at the owner’s review of the pull request, which called it the result most worth preserving and asked that it “become a major research question”. Hansen and Ghrist show that eliminating an interior vertex of a cellular sheaf can leave a three-way boundary relation, v₁ = v₂ + v₃, that no sheaf on the boundary’s pairwise edges expresses (THEORY-1090; CLAIM-480). For scalar networks reduction stays pairwise. The question asks when composition forces a change in the type of relational structure an adequate description needs. It also asks whether that is a fact about the composite or about the class of descriptions, and whether the same thing is what happens when a record’s relation scheme cannot express what a composed organization requires. | Open |