Research Status
Research inventory by arc phase — the Double Freytag model of inquiry (Tempo, Rao 2011). Hover a dot for details.
Active / ongoing
Stagnant or superseded
Blocked or refuted
| ID | Name / Type | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ExplorationCuriosities — open provocations, awaiting cheap trick14 items | |||
| C-001 | Insight Ossification ≠ formalization | Street food markets can be highly formalized (licensing, fees, operating hours) yet remain behaviorally adaptive — which suggests ossification and formalization are not coupled phenomena but independe… | |
| C-002 | Insight Ossification as requisite-variety failure | Protocol ossification might be best understood as a complexity mismatch: internal adaptive capacity frozen while external environmental variety keeps growing. | |
| C-003 | Insight Rules-as-code lowers loophole search cost | When rules are formalized into machine-readable code, they become auditable, differentiable, and learnable — which reduces the search cost for strategic actors discovering exploitable boundaries. | |
| C-004 | Insight Update opacity as diachronic failure | Adaptive deployed systems generate a distinct epistemic failure mode: users cannot track why identical inputs produce different outputs across model updates. | |
| C-005 | Motif Shadow processes as variety sink | Protocols compress variety by design but cannot eliminate it — only redirect it. | |
| C-006 | Insight Regulatory delay as bifurcation parameter | In adaptive multi-agent systems, stability is not monotonic in regulatory response speed: below a critical observation-to-intervention delay threshold the system equilibrates, above it instability eme… | |
| C-007 | Motif Capability advertisement lemons problem | Agent capability advertisement protocols treat competence as static and truthful, but actual agent capability is probabilistic, input-dependent, and subject to self-deception — agents cannot reliably … | |
| C-008 | Example Ringelmann — topology constrains effective capacity | A two-parameter scaling law maps nominal agent count to effective team size in multi-agent LLM systems, classifying configurations into hard-ceiling, sublinear, and linear regimes via a structural exp… | |
| C-009 | Curiosity Conservative potential fields in protocol evolution | If conserved quantities constrain the evolutionary trajectory of protocol systems — analogous to symmetries generating conservation laws in physics — then protocol adaptations would not be random but … | |
| C-010 | Curiosity Ashby corollary for distributed rule-regulators | In classical cybernetics, a regulator must possess at least as much variety as the system it regulates. | |
| C-011 | Curiosity Notation as a coordinate system for revision | Iverson argues that the notation in which a problem is expressed determines what solutions are conceivable — not just what is easy to express, but what can be thought at all. | |
| C-012 | Insight Suggestivity vs. mastery: the expressive notation trap | Iverson explicitly notes that the suggestiveness of a notation — its power to open productive next steps — makes it harder to learn, not easier. | |
| C-013 | Motif Efficiency circularity as a lock-in mechanism | Iverson observes that overemphasis on efficiency generates a feedback loop: early programming languages were designed around the constraints of early computers, and each computer generation was built … | |
| C-014 | Curiosity Multiple representations as a protocol design skill | Iverson consistently works with multiple representations of the same mathematical object (polynomials as coefficient vectors vs. | |
| SensemakingHypotheses — post-cheap-trick; building toward a falsifiable claimnone currently | |||
| None currently. | |||
| ValleyCandidate Laws — evidence accumulation; no external validation yet3 items | |||
| CL-001 | Lifecycle The Formalization Ratchet | Under conditions of stress, conflict, or scaling pressure, informal coordination norms tend to be replaced by explicit protocols, and this transition is nearly irreversible: once formalized, informal … | |
| CL-002 | Coordination Coordination Cost Conservation | The total coordination cost in a protocol system is conserved across protocol layer transitions — when a protocol redesign reduces coordination cost at one layer, it increases it at adjacent layers by… | |
| CL-003 | Lifecycle Trust Ratchet in Safety-Critical Protocols | Trust in safety-critical protocols accumulates as a function of operational age and stability rather than technical correctness, creating a systematic bias toward under-updating when technical conditi… | |
| Heavy LiftTheories — synthesis committed; approaching separation event4 items | |||
| T-001 | Lifecycle Protocol Ossification Under Adoption Pressure | Protocols that achieve widespread adoption become progressively harder to modify, independent of the quality of proposed improvements, because the cost of coordinating change grows superlinearly with … | |
| T-002 | Hardness Hardness Asymmetry | In any protocol with a verification function and an execution or forgery function, the verification cost and the circumvention cost are structurally decoupled and can differ by arbitrary orders of mag… | |
| T-003 | Failure Goodhart Generalization: Metric Capture | Any protocol that uses a measurable proxy for an unmeasurable goal will, under sufficient optimization pressure, cause participants to optimize the proxy in ways that degrade the underlying goal. | |
| T-004 | Evolution Gall Generalization: Working Systems Resist Restructuring | A complex protocol system that functions correctly cannot be safely redesigned from scratch; it must be evolved from a simpler working system. | |
| RetrospectiveFalsification Monitors — registered; monitored for counterexamplesnone currently | |||
| None currently. | |||
21 items across all phases. Generated 2026-06-07. Source: research/ on GitHub.