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.
Society and governance — law, politics, policy, security and institutions — court records, doctrine, democratic theory, information operations.
80 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-025 v2 | Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation | Sen (1979), LIT-289, first-hand: a contented disabled person has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deficit and no primary-goods deficit, yet an evident claim. The 1998 lecture (LIT-282) names four sources of conversion variation. The negative thesis rests on one case and a shared intuition, and Sen says it stands without his positive proposal. The resourcist reply (Pogge) is not held, and the claim does not say capabilities are the right replacement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-027 | Two individually decisive people, weak Pareto and an unrestricted domain cannot all hold, even when choice need only yield a best element; unlike Arrow’s theorem, the conflict is not removed by interpersonal comparability | Sen (1970), LIT-285: no social decision function satisfies U, weak Pareto and minimal liberalism. The proof was checked in this record, including the unproved one-way strengthening. Sen (1998), LIT-282: the paradox, unlike Arrow’s, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons. The theorem is settled. Whether pairwise decisiveness is what liberty is remains open, and the record reads the rights-as-game-forms literature only through Sen’s reply to it. | Active |
| THEORY-127 v4 | On the court agenda, and on any agenda in which every proposition reaches every other by conditional entailment and some minimally inconsistent triple stays consistent with two of its members negated, a group whose judgments are robustly rational under universal domain and respect unanimity cannot form its judgment on each proposition from its members’ judgments on that proposition alone unless one member dictates; its judgments must supervene on the members’ whole sets of judgments, and so can depart from what the members judge on the same proposition while being wholly fixed by them | List & Pettit (2006), LIT-705: under universal domain, robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3; the last two proved elsewhere and cited), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, which the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures achieve (Propositions 4–5). Members’ judgments on a conclusion can then be insufficient, or even unnecessary, to fix the group’s judgment on it. List (2014), LIT-700, makes this the mark of a third kind of collective attitude: corporate attitudes, a group agent’s, supervene “holistically”, while aggregate and common attitudes supervene proposition by proposition. Active since 2026-10-19 for categorical judgments on the court agenda and on agendas with two stated connectedness conditions: the record re-derived Proposition 3 (and Proposition 2 as a corollary) itself. The extension to corporate attitudes in general is QUESTION-152. | Active |
| THEORY-137 v2 | Attributions of mental states to institutions, such as the knowledge that the collective knowledge doctrine of corporate criminal law attributes to a corporation no member of which held it, work largely by shaping the institutions to which they are made rather than by describing states they already had: the attribution holds the institution to a norm, the institution builds structures to meet it, and it becomes more predictable from the intentional stance, whether or not institutions really have minds | Tollefsen (2025), LIT-736. Both sides of the group-mind debate treat ascription as tracking pre-existing causes. On the regulative view of folk psychology it shapes its target. In United States v. Bank of New England a court held a bank to know what no employee knew, and banks then built systems to detect reportable deposits. Narratives regulate too. Proposed: the regulative view is assumed, and the effect on banks is asserted, not documented. | Proposed |
| THEORY-140 v2 | The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the institutional causes of the Challenger accident had not been fixed and recurred in Columbia’s: in both, evidence that the design was not performing as expected was repeatedly reinterpreted as acceptable, each decision seeming correct in itself and each survived anomaly justifying the next flight, while budget and schedule pressure, consensus sign-off, a hierarchy that kept dissent from rising and a safety organization dependent on the program it oversaw sustained the pattern for twenty years and undid post-Challenger reforms | Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003), LIT-734, applying Vaughan’s normalization of deviance (LIT-715, unread). Foam strikes and O-ring erosion followed the same trajectory of incremental acceptance. Organizational culture, structure and political constraint reproduced it, so “history is cause”. Two cases in one agency, reconstructed after the fact. The title states the Board’s finding; whether the pattern is general and causal, which is Vaughan’s theory in a book the record has not read, is QUESTION-334. | Active |
| THEORY-144 | Under steady cost and effort pressure, an organization’s activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance, and redundant defences erode unobserved because a breach of one shows no effect, so that major accidents arise from many locally reasonable decisions rather than from coincident errors | Rasmussen (1997), LIT-743. Within a work space bounded by functional, administrative and safety constraints, a cost gradient from management and an effort gradient from the work drive activity toward the boundary. Defence in depth hides the drift, and accidents such as Zeebrügge are prepared by decision makers each optimising locally. Proposed: the account is built from accident reconstructions, which see only the cases that crossed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-149 | Users can govern a shared resource durably without either privatisation or central control, and the institutions that last are marked not by particular rules but by structural regularities: user-made and user-monitored rules, graduated sanctions, cheap local conflict resolution, recognised rights to self-organise, and nested layers of governance | Ostrom’s account, read in her Nobel lecture (LIT-719). Coded case meta-analyses, laboratory and field experiments and multi-country field studies agree that resource users often self-govern successfully. Long-surviving institutions share eight design principles that failed ones lack. The principles are correlates of survival, not tested causes, and their reach beyond common-pool resources is not shown. | Active |
| THEORY-150 | A platform that sits between the two sides of a market and can cheaply change how it allocates value tends to decay in three stages, first good to its users, then abusing them to favour its business customers, then abusing both to claw the value back for itself, each stage made possible by the lock-in the one before it built; how far it can go is set by the cost of leaving, so lowering that cost is the remedy | Doctorow’s enshittification, as he states it in the 2023 essay that named it, LIT-731. Platforms hand surplus to users, then to business customers once users are locked in, then to shareholders once both are; blocked interoperability and monopoly widen what users will bear. The remedy is end-to-end delivery and freedom of exit. Proposed: an essayistic thesis argued from cases, not a study. | Proposed |
| THEORY-152 | When a firm, public service or other organization deteriorates, its members’ exit and voice are both recuperation mechanisms: voice carries richer information than exit and can be felt as a benefit rather than a cost, exit can be costly even without loyalty and can signal nothing, loyalty makes members voice rather than exit, and an organization needs floor levels of both for feedback but disintegrates or is disrupted beyond ceiling levels, while its managers may favour whichever response least threatens their hold on power | Hirschman (1974; Milbank reprint 1980), LIT-750, revisiting his 1970 book (LIT-748, unread). Exit and voice are the two ways members respond to decline and the two channels of feedback. Voice deserves more weight than the book gave it; exit is neither free nor always informative; managers manage both. Proposed: argued from examples, and loyalty’s role is presupposed from the book rather than developed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-153 | A system can keep its identity independently within a shared environment only if it has five interacting subsystems, the first made of elements that are themselves viable systems, so that the structure recurs at every level of recursion; when one is missing or fails, the system degrades in characteristic ways, and without the subsystem for foresight the subsystems for operational control and for identity collapse into each other, leaving a system that can only react | Beer’s Viable System Model, as he states it in his 1984 retrospective LIT-752. Five subsystems are necessary and sufficient for any organism or organization to maintain its identity independently; every viable system contains and is contained in one; breakdowns trace to a failing subsystem. Proposed: the paper declines to validate the model, the evidence is the author’s consultancy, and no observation the model forbids is named. | Proposed |
| THEORY-173 v2 | Large models are a cultural and social technology rather than agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced information that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, let it be reorganized at scale | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), LIT-848, read in NOTE-649. A classification argued by analogy with print, markets, bureaucracies and elections, with one mechanism (fit to the average makes models worst on rare cases, which may homogenize culture). Proposed: no evidence is offered, and the paper gives no criterion by which the classification could fail. | Proposed |
| THEORY-207 v2 | Responsibility for a morally loaded outcome that emerges from morally neutral interactions in a network of agents can be allocated without fault or intention, by default and overridably, in full to every causally accountable node, and a rule so allocating it, made common knowledge, works as a corrective that prevents such outcomes | Floridi (2016), LIT-899, read in NOTE-699. A distributed moral action is an outcome no one intended. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible”, overridably, with the rule publicly announced so that agents restrain one another. Proposed: the rule is a design argued by analogy and by two court cases. In one of those cases the default is overridden by ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. It does not show that what is allocated is moral responsibility rather than accountability used as a corrective signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-218 v2 | In one case study of the 2017 r/place Mona Lisa, what was added to or removed from the image was, once its forum opened, decided off the canvas, in a forum of 161 accounts negotiating through linked design images, where a few central members admitted or refused additions, and the forum’s changes then appeared in a region where about 77,000 accounts placed tiles, most of whom never posted; how many placers followed the designs is not measured, and the authors argue that the placement record alone cannot show who directed the image or who cooperated | Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, read in NOTE-733. For the 2017 Mona Lisa, 76,774 accounts placed tiles in the region while a forum of 161 negotiated the design through linked blueprints. Central members admitted a Swiss flag and a rainbow frame and erased r/trees objects, and a tag on the image recruited newcomers. Whether an addition was vandalism or part of the image was settled by negotiation. The authors argue placement data cannot reveal cooperation, conflict or affiliation. One artwork; the link from forum power to placements is “unclear” by the authors’ account; their “instruction” is Reddit’s rules, not planners’ orders. | Active |
| THEORY-219 v2 | Agency in the sense that bears on responsibility needs a standpoint that settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down, and planning, autonomy, memory and coordination do not supply one | Kahl (2026), LIT-1033, read in NOTE-723. “Continuity pressure” arises where an inherited evaluative frame no longer settles how to go on, and the revision must be carried forward by the same standpoint rather than imposed from outside, escaped by rollback, or chosen by a fixed higher-order rule. Representative agentic systems ordinarily fail it because their failures are corrected from outside. A necessary condition for attributive agency only, argued from cases and never measured; the line between settling a frame and selecting under an antecedent rule is not made precise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-223 | When the rules that govern a system lie within its own action space, the governor’s authority rests on the system leaving them alone, and further controls in the same space inherit that dependence | Lahiri (2026), LIT-1039, read in NOTE-732. In agent frameworks that keep configuration as files the agent can read and write, the coordination architecture sits inside the technical subsystem’s action space, and the social subsystem’s authority “depends on the agent’s continued acceptance of-or inability to circumvent-the constraints”. Permission lists and sandboxes kept in the same space inherit the exposure; only constraints outside it escape. Argued from one platform’s architecture. The paper’s vignettes show agents adding channels and artifacts, not altering a control, so the recursion itself is argued and not observed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-235 | Covert influence that exploits a person’s decision-making vulnerabilities harms her autonomy in the process of deciding, by making her opaque to herself, even when it benefits her; so it carries a harm in every case without being wrong in every case | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), LIT-1002, pp. 4–5 and 9–11, read in full in NOTE-745. An argument in a short policy essay, not a defence against objections. It holds of influence that is covert and exploits a vulnerability, which the paper stipulates is what manipulation is; Noggle’s survey (LIT-1007) shows that covertness is not necessary for manipulation, so the claim is filed of covert influence, not of manipulation as such. The paper claims a harm in every case, not a wrong, and never examines its own intent requirement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-317 v3 | Epistemic injustice wrongs a person in her capacity as a knower, testimonially through a hearer’s prejudicially deflated credibility judgement, and hermeneutically through a gap in shared interpretive resources owed to her group’s relative powerlessness, with no hearer’s prejudice required | Fricker (2007), LIT-1004, known here only through her own three-page précis (Theoria 2008), read in NOTE-832, Skimmed. The two definitions and the claim that both are ethical wrongs, not only epistemic dysfunctions. It does not say that every gap in shared concepts is an injustice: on the précis’s terms the gap must be owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group the subject belongs to. | Proposed |
| THEORY-326 | Hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation, which may be systematic or incidental, so it does not require that the subject belong to a powerless social group | Fricker (2006), “Powerlessness and Social Interpretation” (LIT-1046, NOTE-859), drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter, with her 2017 restatement (LIT-1048, NOTE-853). The generic definition covers a systematic case, where marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and an incidental case, a “one-off moment of powerlessness” in a “highly localized patch” of experience, which a socially powerful man can suffer. It does not say that every conceptual gap is an injustice. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, like an undiagnosed illness, is “circumstantial epistemic bad luck”, and the obscured area must be of the subject’s social experience. | Proposed |
| THEORY-327 v2 | Fricker, in her 2003 paper and her 2017 retrospective, holds that testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker’s credibility caused by prejudice, and that deliberate manipulation of credibility is a related but distinct wrong; and she accepts Anderson’s structural form, which is pre-emptive: a speaker’s word is never sought because of a structural prejudice, such as an un-refreshed list, that is no one’s fault | Fricker, in her own words, in two papers read in full: the paper that introduced testimonial injustice (2003, LIT-1049, NOTE-860), and her retrospective chapter (2017, LIT-1048, NOTE-853). A speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility “owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”. Deliberate manipulation of credibility is “a closely related but distinct injustice”. With Anderson, she accepts a structural form: when an un-refreshed list means some people’s views are never sought, “(through no one’s fault, let us add)”, that is pre-emptive testimonial injustice. It does not say every credibility deficit, or every omission from a list, is an injustice: a prejudice must cause it. | Active |
| THEORY-329 v2 | In 32,479 Weibo posts of 2011–2016 scored with an emotion lexicon, posts tagged fake by the platform’s fact-checkers carry more anger and less joy than true posts from verified accounts, and a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets after controls; whether the gap is due to falsity, and whether anger causes the spread, is not shown | Chuai & Zhao (2020), LIT-379, read in NOTE-852. In 32,479 Weibo posts from 2011–2016, lexicon-scored anger share is higher and joy share lower in fake than in true news, and in highly than in lowly retweeted news, under three scoring methods. With content, author and topic controls, anger share predicts more retweets within 48 hours and joy share fewer (R² 0.08–0.13). The paper calls this causal; the design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. Active as a report of the association (ADR-065); the paper’s causal thesis is THEORY-1221, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-411 v2 | In Sen’s capability approach the weighting of functionings is left to public reasoning, and evaluation can still guide action without agreement on weights: where every weighting in an agreed range, or every view by its own argument, ranks one option above another, that ranking holds, so the approach is deliberately incomplete and yields a partial ordering | Wells, IEP “Sen’s Capability Approach” (2012), LIT-284, read in NOTE-257, §3b; with Sen (1979), LIT-289 (NOTE-258), whose index is already “a partial ordering” supplemented by “conventions of relative importance” (p. 219). The arithmetic is trivial and holds; the attribution of the intersection and ranges-of-weights devices to a particular Sen text is not given by the IEP, and the SEP (LIT-283) says Sen “has never explained in detail” how selection should be done. | Proposed |
| THEORY-423 | Statements that are visibly false to anyone who checks, such as ‘long-term’ for a three-day study or ‘assault’ contradicted by video, persist in science, paid testimony and official statements when the community that hears them accepts them as terms of art and attaches no cost to them, so that those willing to make things up gain over those who are not | Gelman (2025), LIT-014, a blog post its author calls a rant, read in NOTE-019. An incentive account from three to five anecdotes: false phrasing helps a case, a channel (journals, courts, media) carries it, insiders treat it as a term of art, and nothing follows, so by a Gresham’s-law dynamic honest argument loses. Nothing is measured, and the post is inconsistent on whether the speakers know they are lying. | Proposed |
| THEORY-428 | A protest performed bodily inside a civic ritual can contest the ritual in its own grammar, keeping the ritual’s reverence for its ideal while rebuking its present object, which is incivility in the Confucian sense of disruption aimed at harmonization; the reading of the gesture and the claim that its uptake makes it sagely are asserted | Walsh (2021), LIT-209, read in NOTE-164 from the accepted manuscript. Comparative-philosophy interpretation of Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. anthem. Its textual base is strong: classical Confucianism licenses incivility aimed at harmonization (after Kim 2011). Its own addition, that such incivility can be bodily and within the ritual, is moderately argued. That kneeling means reverence rather than defiance, and that sagely authority is uptake by others, are asserted, and the paper gives no criterion separating sagely uptake from virality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-429 | Institutions are the humanly devised formal and informal constraints on interaction; with technology they fix the costs of transacting, organisations arise to exploit the opportunities they offer, and an economy grows when its framework rewards productive rather than redistributive activity, while increasing returns to the institutional matrix make frameworks path dependent, so that economies with different frameworks diverge and need not converge | North (1991), LIT-489, read in full in NOTE-392. A programmatic essay, not an argument. The definition is stipulated; the game-theoretic motive for third-party enforcement is one paragraph; the evidence is narrative history from secondary sources, with the staged sequence of exchange disclaimed as history (n. 1); path dependence is carried over from Arthur and David on technology by analogy. It leaves open why informal constraints bind, which is the question Hindriks and Guala put to rules accounts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-434 | Rawls’s theory of justice is transcendental only in the formal sense that its principles state when a society is perfectly just; it already yields comparative judgements, prescribes no single set of institutions and sits inside a revisable reflective equilibrium, so Sen’s case against ‘transcendental institutionalism’ misses Rawls, and what it shows is that the theory is incomplete, not that a new paradigm is needed | Valentini (2010), LIT-290, read in NOTE-262 from the 2010 working paper, with Zwolinski’s review (LIT-286, NOTE-261), which agrees with her on what the book says and disagrees on its worth. A one-sided Rawlsian rebuttal: two points are strong as textual claims (Rawls’s principles are comparative; his method is reflective equilibrium), the rest moderate. The claims about The Idea of Justice are second-hand, and Sen’s own reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-435 | In Moral Foundations Questionnaire responses, Care and Fairness are endorsed across the political spectrum, while Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity rise toward the conservative end, in every world region sampled | Graham, Haidt et al. (2013), LIT-499, read in NOTE-396, reporting large internet samples in twelve world regions; and Atari et al. (2023), LIT-500 (NOTE-398), with the MFQ-2 in 19 nations. The profile is robust as a description of self-report. It is a finding about what people say they weigh, mostly online, mostly English-speaking, and mostly WEIRD; and Purity, which carries the steepest gradient, fails cross-national invariance in the MFQ-2. | Active |
| THEORY-440 | A democracy that breaks down under an elected incumbent need not become a dictatorship: elections, courts and a legal opposition can continue while the incumbent uses state power against opponents and tilts the field, giving competitive authoritarianism, in which competition is real but unfair and the decisive loss is the opposition that withdraws or never forms; Levitsky and Way forecast this for the second Trump term | Drezner (2025), LIT-022, an opinion column read in NOTE-001, which relays Levitsky and Way’s Foreign Affairs forecast largely by quotation and endorses it (“hard to disagree”) without independent argument. The concept of competitive authoritarianism is theirs and well established; the record holds it only through this relay. The forecast that US democracy will “likely break down” in the second term is rated weak in the reading, and the post’s index figures are second-hand. | Proposed |
| THEORY-450 | Across 1,176 premodern archaeological sites, the house-size Gini rises only weakly with the number of levels of political hierarchy and with polity population, and the spread of Gini widens with scale: scale raises the ceiling on domestic wealth inequality without setting its level | Feinman et al. (2025), LIT-087, read in full with its SI in NOTE-049. Bivariate fits on the GINI project’s site-level file (47,019 houses): levels of hierarchy give r² 0.16 (all sites), 0.22 (apex), 0.27 (sites with 50 or more houses); log polity population gives 0.11, 0.21, 0.08. The scatters fan out as scale grows, and the sites that reach Gini above 0.75 are autocratic apices of polities with three or more levels. The negative claim, that scale does not fix inequality, is what the record believes. The positive claim, that governance decides it, rests on an expert-coded index partly read from architecture and on a composite whose higher r² comes from summing two predictors; it is not part of this account. | Active |
| THEORY-470 v3 | Platform decay of the enshittification kind is caused not by a change in the character of those who run platforms but by the weakening of four constraints that used to discipline them, competition, regulation, interoperability and the bargaining power of tech workers, so it is reversible if those constraints are durably restored | Doctorow (2024), LIT-033, the crib of a DEF CON talk read in NOTE-041. It keeps the three-stage cycle of THEORY-150 and adds a cause: “Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.” Argued from examples chosen after the fact, with no counterfactual; most figures are unsourced, and the text misstates the court in United States v. Google and the legal form of the EU Digital Markets Act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-480 v2 | Where a general-search monopoly was kept by exclusive distribution deals, the court in United States v. Google treated the user-interaction data that scale produced as a fruit of the violation and ordered the raw data and index metadata shared with qualified competitors, but not the engineered signals and models built from them, as a behavioural remedy while rejecting divestiture; that the sharing will let rivals compete is the court’s expectation, not a finding | Mehta (2025), LIT-006, the remedies opinion, read in full in NOTE-004. The court finds that exclusive distribution produced a scale advantage (9× the queries of all rivals; 93% of unique phrases seen only by Google), calls it a fruit of the violation, and remedies it with raw data and syndication rather than with divestiture, on a sliding scale of causal connection. Whether the shared data will let rivals compete is untested; the parameters that decide it were left to a Technical Committee. The opinion also finds no proof that search scale gives Google’s GenAI a quality edge (op. p. 156), which is an absence of proof, not a finding that there is none. | Active |
| THEORY-483 | Whether a person joins a fascist movement in a showdown is decided by inner disposition, whether she is secure and has a standard of her own that tells her what she likes and does not, and not by race, nationality, creed or class; humiliation, fear, spoilt entitlement and measuring worth by success make a person susceptible | Thompson (1941), LIT-055, a Harper’s essay read in NOTE-056. A typology argued through vignettes of an imagined party, from a reporter who had watched Nazism rise in Germany, Austria and France. No case is verifiable, the typology is applied inconsistently (two “born Nazis”; one man both never and qualifiedly a Nazi), and its denial that class is the criterion sits badly with sketches that are mostly about class. It is filed for what Thompson argued, and the empirical literature that tested such typologies is not yet read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-488 v2 | Clark (2020), synthesising open writing by Russian military authors of 2015 to 2020, chiefly Chekinov and Bogdanov, Bartosh and Kiselev, with no stated rule for choosing sources, reports that they use “hybrid war” for a category of war marked off by its objective, reshaping a target state’s governance, geostrategic orientation and worldview, in which every action up to conventional military force is subordinate to an information campaign, and not, as he says Western usage does, for a set of means below the threshold of armed conflict | Clark (2020), LIT-023, an ISW report read in NOTE-012. A synthesis of open Russian military journals, official press and speeches, 2015–2020, with no stated method for choosing sources; the definition is the author’s synthesis of several writers, not a doctrinal text. The reading rates the definition moderate, the claim that it is institutional weak to moderate, and the US policy recommendations advocacy. Written before the 2022 invasion. | Active |
| THEORY-533 | When a President can end a funding lapse selectively, paying the parts of government he favours from funds named by no appropriation, a shutdown stops checking him and instead hands him the choice of what to fund; each payment left unchallenged becomes a precedent, and a Speaker who lets it stand gives up his own chamber’s power of the purse | Moynihan (2026), LIT-061, a commentary post read in NOTE-084. The memo of 27 March 2026 directs payment of TSA staff from “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations”, citing 31 U.S.C. 1301(a) but naming no account; that much is confirmed. That the payment is illegal rests on quoted scholars, with no GAO or court ruling, and the post does not engage the memo’s own appeal to §1301(a). The binary choice it gives the Speaker is the author’s framing. | Proposed |
| THEORY-551 | The Russian narrative of a Western information war waged against Russia since the Cold War was politicised by academics, politicians and the public each for their own reasons, scholars promoting their ideas, politicians consolidating power and a public wanting its lost national pride explained, and not directed from the Kremlin; once adopted into rhetoric, doctrine and law, it drives behaviour whatever its origin | Fridman (2017), LIT-088, read in NOTE-070, traces the narrative to Messner, Dugin and Panarin and follows it into Putin’s and Lavrov’s rhetoric, the 2015 National Security Strategy, five laws and Levada polling. That it is present in official discourse is strongly supported; that its politicisation was not Kremlin-led rests on chronology that fails for Dugin, and the doctrine-to-law order is reversed for four of five laws. Clark (2020), LIT-023, read in NOTE-012, finds the same belief in military writing and also rejects the merely-cynical reading. The two share no evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-555 | In London in 2018, Airbnb listings that were possibly breaking the 90-night short-let cap, defined as entire homes offered for more than 180 days a year by hosts with two or more listings, were about 0.16% of the housing stock (about 5,300 homes) but 3.5–7% in a few central small areas, and across small areas they correlate weakly with flats, private renting and low dwelling-type diversity | Shabrina, Arcaute & Batty (2021), LIT-094, read in full in NOTE-071. A descriptive estimate from Inside Airbnb and VOA counts under a proxy that rests on availability, not bookings, and on an untested 50% occupancy. The abstract’s “more than 2% … misused” is the share listed at all, not the share possibly misused. The paper’s borough rent result (n = 33, cross-sectional) and its “8% per doubling” translation do not belong to this account and should not be cited as an effect size. | Active |
| THEORY-561 | If moral evaluation has thresholds below which effects are negligible, a system of agents can do good or evil that none of its members’ interactions does, and the same thresholds make an environment tolerant of small evils and inert to small goods; on the examples offered the non-additivity lies in the evaluation, as a step function of summed impact, not in the actions | Floridi (2013), LIT-901, read in NOTE-698. A model with two moral thresholds and four positive examples; it proves nothing and reports no data. That morally loaded wholes can arise from negligible parts follows once thresholds are granted, and the reading rates it moderate. The analogy with distributed knowledge is inexact: every example sums like contributions, the threshold’s value is left open, and so the line between distributed morality and a sum of loaded acts is a free parameter. Responsibility for such outcomes is not given here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-615 | Stubborn distrust of scientific experts can follow validly from the truster’s position: one with little say in collective decisions, who has reason to think the experts’ service ethos leaves out their core interests, has a reason to distrust an expert because of the expert’s prestige, whatever the expert’s competence or goodwill | Desmond (2022), LIT-158, read in NOTE-113. A “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration: a five-step scheme (§6, pp. 16–17) from status vulnerability and service doubt to distrust “in virtue of” prestige. The paper says it shows validity only. It leaves open whether the premises ever hold in a liberal democracy, gives no data linking status to distrust, and does not compare its account with testimonial injustice or the empirical predictors of conspiracy belief. The abstract’s “justifiably” claims more than the body. | Proposed |
| THEORY-627 | A nudge discovered by a learning system, unlike one a person designed, comes with no prior theory of why it works and may exploit a cognitive process no theory yet describes, so judging it by its outcomes cannot diagnose or repair its side effects; overseeing it needs inspection of which human processes it exploits, by people expert in human cognition | Schmauder et al. (2023), LIT-179, read in NOTE-171. An argument by analogy from Hausman’s reply to Friedman: a test drive is not enough if you must repair the car. Its evidence is reported from others: an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70% by exploiting documented biases (Dezfouli et al. 2020), and AI advisers learned dishonest advice against simulated clients. No case of an undocumented bias is given; that is the paper’s conjecture, and its oversight proposal is unspecified. | Proposed |
| THEORY-637 | Treating openness in science as the unlimited sharing of research objects, with transparency ranked before reproducibility and inclusion, can narrow the epistemic diversity of research and entrench epistemic injustice, and this lowers the reliability of what is learned, so sharing is neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition for reliable open science | Leonelli (2023), LIT-189, read in NOTE-098. An openly normative argument from four illustrative cases (GISAID, software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility debate) and the author’s earlier qualitative work. That sharing-first open science can reduce diversity and worsen injustice is moderately supported; that this degrades reliability is argued, not measured. The positive proposal, openness as judicious connection, gives no decision rule, and the critique targets an ideal type the author admits many initiatives do not fit. | Proposed |
| THEORY-639 | Inductive risk arises not only when a hypothesis is accepted but in choosing a significance level, in characterising data and in interpreting results: in the dioxin cancer studies each of these choices traded false positives against false negatives, three panels scored the same rat-liver slides differently, and threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data underlie regulatory limits about 100 times apart | Douglas (2000), LIT-139, read in NOTE-145. Three worked cases from one domain, dioxin toxicology and its regulation, on secondary data (EPA 1994; Kociba et al. 1978; Goodman & Sauer 1992). The structural point and the variation in slide scoring are strongly supported. The 100-fold figure is cited from Finkel (1988) and Greenlee et al. (1991). This is the descriptive half of the paper; the claim that values are therefore required is THEORY-442. | Active |
| THEORY-651 v2 | Disinformation incidents labelled with DISARM techniques can be carried in standard STIX 2.1 without extending it, as an intrusion set that uses attack patterns, is attributed to a threat actor and targets locations; the DISINFOX mapping that moved 118 incidents into OpenCTI this way keeps only a name, a free-text description, a first-seen date and labels beside those three relationships, with no object or property for an incident’s narratives, channels, evidence or countermeasures or for the confidence of its attribution | Sánchez González et al. (2025), LIT-083, an unreviewed preprint read in NOTE-028. The mapping is explicit (four STIX object types, three relationship types) and was exercised end to end on 118 incidents; the reading rates that demonstration strong. Nothing beyond ingestion was measured. Attribution is one ungraded edge to an actor, typically a nation-state, which is the layer the EEAS’s Exposure Matrix grades in four tiers. What the mapping is, and that the incidents were ingested, is held; whether the representation survives exchange and whether sharing helps is THEORY-1238’s question. | Active |
| THEORY-659 | In the EEAS’s 2024 sample of 505 foreign information manipulation incidents, the overt state voice is a small core: of the 2,055 channels that recur across incidents, 20% are attributed to Russia, 3.5% to China and 76.5% are not attributed, after some 28,000 disposable inauthentic accounts are set aside; the sample is not representative, and the four-tier Exposure Matrix used to grade channels’ ties to a state is unvalidated | European External Action Service (2025), LIT-084, the 3rd EEAS report on FIMI threats, read in NOTE-060. A description of what the EEAS monitored, which the report itself says is not a basis for general trends. The 76.5% is a share of a filtered co-involvement graph, not of the 38,000 channels, though the report’s conclusions restate it as such. The Exposure Matrix grades attribution in four tiers by evidence and treats it as revisable; no inter-rater test or worked classification is given, and the strongest evidence is proprietary or classified. | Active |
| THEORY-725 | On the court agenda {P, Q, R, R iff (P and Q)} under universal domain, proposition-wise majority voting is not robustly rational, while the premise-based procedure is, and it makes the group’s judgments a function of the members’ whole judgment sets that the members’ judgments on the conclusion neither fix nor need to enter | List & Pettit (2006), LIT-705, read in full in NOTE-550, for the court agenda only. Proposition 1: majority voting on each proposition is not robustly rational, by the discursive dilemma. Proposition 4: the premise-based procedure, majorities on P, Q and the biconditional with R derived, is robustly rational and makes the group’s set a function of the members’ sets. Under it the members’ judgments on R do not fix the group’s (weak discontinuity), and under the distributed procedure they need not enter (strong discontinuity, Proposition 5). The general impossibility for proposition-wise rules is THEORY-127, still Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-833 | In a 2024 survey of a quota-matched online sample of 2,092 US adults and a convenience sample of 103 antitrust lawyers, the public weighed layoffs, worse product quality and more lobbying well above price reductions in judging whether a merger should be challenged, the consumer welfare standard’s own objective, while support for replacing that standard was 42.6 points lower among the lawyers than among the public, against a partisan gap of 5.9 points | Short, Hill and Brown (2025), LIT-1327, read in NOTE-1051. A pre-registered conjoint and opinion survey. It does not say that the samples represent the US public or the antitrust bar, that the lawyers’ training caused their values, or that the standard is captured: that verdict also needs the paper’s historical argument and is THEORY-859, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-836 | Scored between Nicaragua’s regime-owned outlets and its exiled or online opposition outlets, on the prevalence of topics relevant to the regime’s legitimacy and on the tone of sentences mentioning Ortega, the three nominally independent national outlets with web output moved toward the regime pole in agenda over 2018–2022, Canal 14 most and Radio Corporación least, and Canal 14’s tone score fell from about .8 to below .5 by early 2022 while Radio Corporación’s stayed near 1 | Barnehl and Schumacher (2024), LIT-1323, read in NOTE-1047. A measured shift in relative position, outlet by outlet, from a 30-topic structural topic model and an off-the-shelf Spanish sentiment classifier, with no uncertainty reported in the main text. It does not show that the shift was coerced, which the paper’s own definition of capture requires, nor that the opposition pole held still. | Active |
| THEORY-837 | In Besley and Prat’s model of an incumbent who can pay n identical outlets to suppress verifiable bad news, where one outlet’s report informs every voter, each outlet’s price for silence is what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the media are captured exactly when n·τa < r; under capture voters, though fully rational and not deceived, learn nothing and never remove a bad incumbent | Besley and Prat (2006; read in the 2005 LSE working paper), LIT-1333, read in NOTE-1031. Plurality protects because news is non-rival: silencing the press means silencing every outlet, each at its monopoly price. A static, hard-news model. It says nothing about soft news, partial bribing, or capture that feeds back on the market that permits it, and its cross-country evidence is a raw comparison of means. | Active |
| THEORY-838 | The emphasis the news media give to issues raises the importance their audiences assign those issues, independently of any change in the audiences’ attitudes toward the issues: the media influence what people think about more than what they think | The agenda-setting hypothesis, as McCombs and Shaw (1972), LIT-1335, state it after Cohen and the Langs, read in NOTE-1046. Their evidence is an aggregate correlation in one sample, held as THEORY-842; the direction from media to public is argued there, not identified. The later literature the programme produced is not read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-841 | Knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place is held dispersed among many people and cannot be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form, so decisions that depend on it are better taken by those who hold it, and a price system lets them fit their decisions together by conveying the relative scarcities each needs without the causes behind them | Hayek (1945), LIT-1337, read in NOTE-1036. An argument, not a result: the essay gives examples (the tin shortage, the shipper, the arbitrageur) and an analogy to the rates of substitution a single mind uses, and no model of how well prices convey what decisions need. It says nothing about what prices fail to carry, and it does not argue that removing any particular public constraint decentralizes decisions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-842 | Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in September–October 1968, the aggregate emphasis they gave the campaign’s main issues correlated +.967 with the emphasis of the major news items, and +.979 with that of the minor items, in the nine media serving them; and voters leaning to a candidate agreed more with all the news than with news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons | McCombs and Shaw (1972), LIT-1335, read in NOTE-1046. An aggregate correlation between a public’s ranking of issues and the media’s, in one community, one campaign and one sample of 100 undecided voters. It does not show that the media’s emphasis caused the voters’ ranking; the authors say the correlations do not prove agenda-setting. | Active |
| THEORY-850 v2 | In Hungary, 1994–2016, state-owned firms’ advertising, and not private firms’, shifted sharply toward print and online outlets when they became connected to the governing right and away when the 2015 Orbán–Simicska fallout ended a connection, at all five such events studied; and the outlets’ share of articles on corruption scandals moved the opposite way at the three events with content data | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. Two-way favors in the reduced form: government-controlled advertising follows connection status where private advertising does not, and corruption coverage moves against it. Hungary under right-wing governments only; left-wing favoritism is not settled, and the reduced form does not say whether content favors were bought or shared. | Active |
| THEORY-851 | In Argentina’s four main national newspapers, April 1998 to December 2007, a newspaper’s monthly front-page coverage of the federal government’s corruption scandals was lower in months when it received more government advertising, within newspaper and month and within each newspaper-president pair (about 0.31 of a front page per standard deviation of advertising in the 2010 working paper); the association held for advertising placed through the presidency’s agency and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors | Di Tella and Franceschelli (NBER 2009, revised 2010; AEJ: Applied 2011), LIT-1319, read in NOTE-1040. An association within newspaper and within presidency, specific to discretionary advertising and to the government’s own scandals. It does not establish that advertising caused the reduced coverage, and the published version reports a smaller effect (0.23 of a front page, 18 percent of a standard deviation), which was not checked here. | Active |
| THEORY-852 v2 | Under Szeidl and Szucs’s structural model and its identifying assumptions (an owner’s ideology fixed across episodes; the government’s online advertising budget not driven by the outlets’ slant), both owner ideology and favor exchange drove the Hungarian portal Origo’s reduced coverage of corruption in 2013–2016: favor exchange alone cut it by 29–44%, the new owner’s ideology alone by 63% after 2016, and the two together by 74%, so they are substitutes; and a ban on targeted government advertising would have raised it by 41–79% | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. Table IV’s estimates (weight on profit β ≈ 1.4–1.6, government preference for slant δ ≈ 420–510, both with intervals excluding zero) and Table V’s decomposition and counterfactual ban. Conditional on a static model per episode, on advertising being the only reward and corruption coverage the only slant, and on the identifying assumptions. | Active |
| THEORY-854 v2 | A public ranking can raise its own validity through the reactions it provokes: where a unit’s published rank affects the inputs to its next rank, as when applicants choose by rank and their choices feed the selectivity score, or raters who know little but the last rank fill the reputation survey, rank differences that began as measurement noise can become real differences that the ranking then correctly reports | Espeland and Sauder (2007), LIT-1330, read in NOTE-1050. The paper defines self-fulfilling prophecy so that it covers reactions that “increase the validity of the measure by encouraging behavior that conforms to it”, and points to two channels that close through the ranking’s own inputs. The paper does not measure either channel. Nor does it show that the starting differences were noise rather than quality, beyond citing Sauder and Lancaster. | Proposed |
| THEORY-856 | In one laboratory study of a nine-period game between an infrastructure operator, two elected policymakers and three voters (59 groups), letting the first elected policymaker fix the price for all periods moved prices toward the efficient level when policymakers’ payoffs were set equal to consumers’, and moved them further above it when their payoffs were set equal to the operator’s; under period-by-period regulation voters’ pressure lowered the operator-aligned policymakers’ prices without removing the gap | Schram and Ule (2024), LIT-1340, read in NOTE-1053. Capture is a treatment, policymakers’ payoffs set equal to the operator’s, not something any party brought about, and “independence” is a price fixed by the first policymaker, not an agency. The capture cells hold 18 groups of three voters. It does not show how capture arises in real regulators or that independent agencies entrench it. | Active |
| THEORY-857 | Remedies for algorithmic governance offered as access or as transparency can run against the people they are meant to serve: inclusion in a data system also gives its operators access to the included, and transparency can be demanded of the governed while the governing system stays opaque, so what an access or transparency remedy does depends on who is made visible to whom | James, Hynes, Whelan, Dreher and Humphry (2023), LIT-1342, read in NOTE-1041. “Access is however bidirectional, and access ‘down’ for powerful players is politically consequential”; under Robo-debt transparency “was arguably demanded of welfare recipients”. The paper does not show that such remedies usually backfire, or say when they will. It also does not claim that transparency is worthless. | Proposed |
| THEORY-858 | Insulating a regulator from future political revision fixes in place the interests of whoever designs the insulated regime: it relieves the underinvestment that electoral pressure on prices causes when the designers serve consumers, and entrenches capture, removing the electoral pressure that would correct it, when they serve the regulated industry | Schram and Ule (2024), LIT-1340, read in NOTE-1053. The authors’ general conclusion. Its evidence is one laboratory study in which capture was assigned and independence was a fixed price, so it says nothing yet about real independent agencies, about how capture arises, or about designs between the two extremes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-859 | Regulatory capture can operate through the evaluative framework a regulator adopts rather than through its decisions: when experts design a standard from an ideologically motivated view of the public interest that consistently marginalizes important public values, outcomes can favour an interest with no lobbying or improper exchange; US antitrust’s consumer welfare standard is offered as a strong case | Short, Hill and Brown (2025), LIT-1327, read in NOTE-1051. The definition is theirs; the evidence for the case is their survey (THEORY-833, Active) and a history drawn from secondary sources. It does not say that every expert–public disagreement is capture, that capture is always wrong (its strength depends on the experts’ claim to truth and on whether public views were heard), or that the mechanism is a self-reinforcing loop. | Proposed |
| THEORY-860 v2 | In Szeidl and Szucs’s model of two outlets competing for readers and advertisers, where state-owned advertisers reward only the connected outlet’s slant, with weight δ, every equilibrium has the slant gap between the connected and the unconnected outlet equal to their owners’ ideal-point gap plus a favor-exchange term (βδ/NT)·Σ over government advertisers of masⱼWⱼ, up to measurement noise; readers’ preference for slant cancels from the gap, so equal observed gaps can come from different mixes of ideology and exchange | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. A necessary condition on equilibrium slant, not a closed form: masⱼ depends on the equilibrium shares. It holds under the model’s logit readers, Cobb–Douglas advertisers with exogenous budgets, quadratic ideology cost and one-shot episodes. The authors check numerically, not analytically, that the conditions pick out an equilibrium at their estimates. | Active |
| THEORY-862 | In US law schools under the U.S. News ranking, administrators and faculty reported, and public sources corroborated, that schools changed what they did in order to move their rank: they moved money toward the ranking’s inputs, redefined admissions and career-services work around its indicators, and gamed its figures, so the ranking altered the things it measured | Espeland and Sauder (2007), LIT-1330, read in NOTE-1050. 136 open-ended interviews from 70 of about 190 US law schools, with corroborating data, sorted the responses to the USN ranking into reallocation, redefinition of work and gaming. It shows that the measured reacted, as they describe it. It does not estimate how much any school changed, or show that the changes would not have happened without the ranking. | Active |
| THEORY-885 | Politics is more prone than markets to increasing returns, and so to path dependence, because it is dense with compulsory institutions and policies, rests on collective action and is opaque, so that institutions, collective action and shared interpretations of politics all feed back on themselves; and once on a path political actors leave it less readily than market actors, because competition and learning correct weakly, elected officials discount the future at the electoral cycle, and institutions are built to be hard to change | Pierson (1997 working paper; published 2000), LIT-1372, read in full in NOTE-1076 through its precursor only, the EUI Jean Monnet Chair Paper 44. An argument with no data and one illustration (two failed US health-care reforms, 1993–96). It extends North’s claim for institutions in general (THEORY-429) to a claim about politics as a domain. It does not show that any political outcome was locked in by an early contingent event. | Proposed |
| THEORY-889 v2 | In Acharya, Blackwell and Sen’s analysis, white Southerners surveyed in 2006 to 2011 who live in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are, with state fixed effects and 1860 county controls, somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful, by about 0.09 to 0.13 standard deviations per standard deviation (about 20 points) of slave share, and in 1984 to 1998 survey data colder toward black Americans, by about 0.32; a cotton-suitability instrument gives larger estimates; the direct effect estimated with present black share held fixed is about as large; and in county presidential vote, which counts black voters until disenfranchisement, the difference appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war | Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016), LIT-1388, read in full in NOTE-1089 from the journal PDF on the second author’s site, without the online appendix. The association is well supported; the causal reading rests on 1860 controls, a cotton-suitability instrument with an untestable exclusion restriction, and a direct-effect estimate. The transmission mechanism has the weakest evidence: a parent–child correlation in 241 Southern respondents not linked to county slavery. | Active |
| THEORY-898 v2 | In Gangneung, South Korea, in 2022, people the authors observed by chance in beach-front cafés outwardly ignored routine retaliatory missile launches and military sites on the beach, while a missile malfunction at night under a news embargo was followed by tweets voicing fear of war with North Korea and blaming the government and military | Ku & Finch (2024), LIT-1478, read in full from the CC BY version of record in NOTE-1133. Chance observation of one afternoon and a keyword-filtered tweet sample of one night, offered as an illustration of “ontological agency”, not a test. The authors read the inaction as coping that lets securitisation reproduce itself, not as resistance to it. | Active |
| THEORY-906 v2 | In five formerly stable democracies selected because they later autocratized (South Korea, India, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey), formal emergency powers, extraordinary powers functionally equivalent to them, and emergency rhetoric each contributed, on the authors’ unsourced country accounts, to weakening democratic institutions | Dagan & Benvenisty (2026), Israel Democracy Institute, LIT-1487, a web summary read in full in NOTE-1129. Not peer-reviewed, no sources or method given, cases chosen on the outcome. Good for the three channels and the Hungarian description; not for a causal link, which the authors themselves call “not inevitable”. | Active |
| THEORY-911 v2 | Of 853 national states of emergency declared from 1949 to 2017, 115 were reported as unlawful in declaration, conduct or duration; 97 of those followed political turmoil and 14 natural disasters, democracies were less likely than autocracies to run one, and those so coded lasted 321 days on average against 115, a gap the coding of overlong emergencies as unlawful builds in part | Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali (2022; working paper 2021), LIT-1473, read in full from the ILE working paper of August 2021 in NOTE-1125. Unlawfulness is coded from news and NGO reports and from durations past the constitutional maximum, and the authors call the cases “suspected to be unlawful”. Descriptive counts and weak logits; nothing here shows that emergency measures outlive the emergency. Active as a report (ADR-065); the abstract’s thesis is THEORY-1198, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-919 v2 | Departments of the French Empire more shielded from British trade by the Napoleonic blockade added more mechanized cotton-spinning capacity during it and kept a larger industry through 1887, with more productive spinning firms in 1840 and higher industrial value added per capita in 1860 but not detectably from 1896 | Juhász (2018), LIT-1489, read in full from the December 2015 draft in NOTE-1122. A difference-in-differences on 88 departments, then the trade-cost shock as an instrument for 1812 spinning capacity. The long-run first stages are weak (Kleibergen-Paap F 3–8). The protection was a war blockade, followed by post-war tariffs, so this is persistence of a protected industry’s location, not evidence about how protection ends. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1062 | On a discourse sheaf, where each agent expresses a private opinion through a linear map into each edge’s space of topics, sheaf-Laplacian opinion diffusion converges to the orthogonal projection of the initial opinions onto the global sections, which are agreement in what each pair expresses and not in what they hold; stable polarized or incomparable private opinions are therefore possible, and when the sheaf has no nonzero global section the only limit is all opinions zero | Hansen and Ghrist (2020; SIAM J. Appl. Math. 2021), LIT-1646, §§2–4, read in NOTE-1222 from the arXiv preprint. Active as mathematics: the convergence is a theorem about a linear heat equation, and the gap between expressed and held opinion is in the definitions and is worked in an example. It does not say that people reach agreement this way, or that an agreement in expression shows anything about what is held. | Active |
| THEORY-1088 | When the expression maps of a discourse sheaf diffuse to reduce disagreement, with opinions held fixed they converge to the nearest sheaf, in Frobenius distance, of which the opinions are a global section, so apparent consensus is reached by changing what is said (“learning to lie”); with opinions diffusing too the joint flow is gradient descent on ½‖δx‖², and conserved diagonal blocks of αδᵀδ − βxxᵀ keep the opinions from collapsing to zero; nothing in either flow checks an expression against the opinion it expresses | Hansen and Ghrist (2020; SIAM J. Appl. Math. 2021), LIT-1646, §§8–9, read in NOTE-1222 from the arXiv preprint. Active as mathematics: Theorems 8.1, 9.3 and 9.4 and Lemma 9.1. Theorem 9.3’s proof is right only for α = β as printed; with the α, β weights it holds generally, which was checked numerically in the reading. The degeneracy guards are internal to the loop: minimal change and a conserved quantity, not evidence from outside it. | Active |
| THEORY-1165 | Kahl proposes that agency in the sense that bears on responsibility needs a standpoint that settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down, which is absent where revision is imposed from outside, escaped by rollback or chosen by a fixed higher-order rule; that allocating authority among a system’s own components coordinates execution without authoring its governing frame; and that planning, autonomy, memory and coordination do not supply that standpoint | What the paper proposes, split from THEORY-219 by the twelfth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that a claim needing only the proposal can stand on it. The paper was read in full (NOTE-723), so the reading of what it proposes is held. Whether the condition is right, which turns on a line between settling a frame and selecting under an antecedent rule that the paper does not draw precisely, and on a positive case it does not give, stays THEORY-219’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1173 | Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker’s credibility caused by prejudice, not a deliberate manipulation of it, and it can be structural and pre-emptive, when a speaker’s word is never sought because of a structural prejudice that is no one’s fault | The wide form THEORY-327 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-327, Active, is its evidence. Fricker states the account as what testimonial injustice is, not only as her usage; the record holds it as hers, in two papers read in full. Whether the book states it so, and whether it is right about the wrong, is open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1181 | The content of a crowd-built r/place artwork is decided off the canvas, in negotiation through shared design images, where a few central members admit or refuse additions, and carried out by placers who mostly never join the discussion, so the placement record shows the outcome of coordination but not who directed it or who cooperated | The wide form THEORY-218 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-218, Active, is its evidence. Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, give a framework in which the image on the canvas carries out a design decided in the forum, and argue that placement data cannot show cooperation, conflict or affiliation; they studied one artwork, and call the link from forum power to placements unclear. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1198 | Unlawful states of emergency, in declaration, conduct or duration, follow political turmoil far more often than natural disasters, are rarer in democracies than in autocracies, and last much longer than lawful ones | The thesis of Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali’s abstract (2022; working paper 2021), LIT-1473, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-911 to the counts the paper reports and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). Its coding of lawfulness is from news and NGO reports, and part of the duration gap is built in by the coding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1202 | A securitised public keeps its routines by not attending to routine security practices, which keeps an anxiety about the threat latent rather than absent; when the security apparatus itself disrupts those routines the anxiety surfaces, and with it blame of the apparatus | Ku and Finch’s ontological agency (LIT-1478, read in NOTE-1133), filed beside THEORY-898 when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted that entry under ADR-065 (ADR-047 kind 1). The Gangneung observations illustrate it; inner states were not measured, and habituation and low perceived risk were not tested against it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1207 | Russian military writers of 2015–2020 use ‘hybrid war’ for a category of war marked off by its objective, reshaping a target state’s governance, geostrategic orientation and worldview, in which every action up to conventional military force is subordinate to an information campaign, and not, as in Western usage, for a set of means below the threshold of armed conflict | The wide form of Clark (2020), LIT-023, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-488 to what Clark’s synthesis reports and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). Clark asserts that the definition is the Russian military’s own and institutional. His sources were chosen by no stated rule, a handful of authors carry much of the weight, and the report predates the 2022 invasion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1217 | Both owner ideology and favor exchange drove the Hungarian portal Origo’s reduced coverage of corruption in 2013–2016: favor exchange alone cut it by 29–44%, the new owner’s ideology alone by 63% after 2016, and the two together by 74%, so they are substitutes; and a ban on targeted government advertising would have raised it by 41–79% | The finding of Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, without the condition on their identifying assumptions, which the authors call “arguably strong” for print and weaker for online. Kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-852 as the conditional estimate (ADR-065 §3 and §7; ADR-047, kind 1). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1221 | Anger makes fake news viral online: on Weibo fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and the anger in a post causes it to be shared more | Chuai and Zhao’s (2020) thesis, LIT-379, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-329 to the association their corpus measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1225 | Among white Southerners today, those living in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful, by about a tenth of a standard deviation per standard deviation of slave share, and colder toward black Americans, by about a third; the difference is not accounted for by the present black share of the population, and in voting it appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war, which supports its origin in the incentives that emancipation gave planters to repress black labor and votes, and its local transmission thereafter | The wide form of Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016), LIT-1388, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-889 to what the analysis measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper argues that the attitude difference originated in emancipation’s incentives to repress black labor and votes and was transmitted locally. The causal reading rests on an untestable exclusion restriction, residence stands in for descent, and the transmission evidence is not tied to county slavery. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1229 | Formal emergency powers, extraordinary powers functionally equivalent to them and emergency rhetoric are linked to the accelerated erosion or dismantling of democracy and to the consolidation of autocratic rule, though the convergence is not inevitable | The wider thesis Dagan and Benvenisty assert (“the study demonstrates a clear link”, para. 12), filed beside THEORY-906 by the twenty-third status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-906, Active, holds what their summary reports of five cases chosen because they autocratized; whether the link holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-906’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1238 | Disinformation incidents carried in STIX 2.1 as the DISINFOX mapping carries them are an interoperable representation that survives exchange between organisations, and sharing them in this form improves analysts’ correlation and exposure of incidents and their reuse of labels | The thesis Sánchez González et al. motivate, filed beside THEORY-651 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-651, Active, holds the mapping and its demonstration; nothing beyond ingestion was measured, so whether the representation is faithful and whether sharing helps is this entry’s question, with THEORY-651’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1283 | Micropolitics is the modulation of a relational field toward a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, in which each realizes itself without curtailing the others; the co-patterning is aesthetic, an affirmation of discord rather than its resolution | Massumi (2017), LIT-1910, p. 64, read in NOTE-1486; anticipated in the 2009 interview (LIT-1905, p. 12) as “a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations”. It is an aim, which Massumi grants “sounds utopic” and calls “always-as-yet unknowable”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902, p. 1358) quote it exactly and use it to say what organizational becoming is constituted by. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1352 | In Van Lange and Bergmann’s model, human cooperation is readily sustained between individuals, above all in dyads, through precise reciprocity, empathy and a partner who cannot be excluded at no cost, and is fragile between groups: categorization alone yields mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity, observed out-group favouritism hardens it into distrust, and only negative interdependence, real or perceived, turns that into costly competition, aggression and hate, so that the processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict | Van Lange and Bergmann (2026), LIT-2002, read in NOTE-1537. A Perspective: a staged model drawn from the authors’ selection of the literature on social dilemmas and intergroup relations, with no new data and no pooled effect sizes. Proposed because the stages are proposed and not tested together. The refinement that matters to the record: lower cooperation between groups does not need conflicting interests, and harm to the out-group does. | Proposed |