Lifecycle of long-form work
SEED → DRAFT → WORKING → STABLE
A Seed is worth preserving but has not yet become an argument. A Draft has structure but may still be rewritten as a whole. Working material is ready for serious reading while still expected to absorb counterexamples and evidence. Stable means that no structural change is expected in the near term, not that the work is complete forever.
Content stage is separate from disposition. Disposition includes active, archived, superseded, abandoned, and retracted. Superseded work must point to its successor. A retracted central conclusion will not be collapsed or silently disappear.
Mode, certainty, and importance
Mode describes what a text is doing, including inquiry, argument, synthesis, reflection, log, and experiment. Certainty is the author's discrete assessment of argumentative strength, not a statistical probability. Importance expresses how much attention the author believes the subject deserves, not confidence that a claim is true.
Lifecycle of public judgments
REGISTERED → OPEN → RESOLVED | UNRESOLVABLE | RETRACTED
The registered snapshot preserves the original claim, record type, initial probability, resolution criteria, review date, and initial assumptions. These fields cannot be silently changed after publication. New evidence, reviews, and resolutions are appended as dated events.
A forecast may use a numerical probability. Decisions and beliefs do not count toward forecasting accuracy. Git provides an inspectable history of changes, but this site does not describe Git as a tamper-proof ledger.
How projects are recorded
A Project records how a question passes through judgment and becomes an artifact. Project pages will gradually include current status, decisions made, artifacts and evidence, and any failure, termination, or change of direction. A project page is not a product marketing page and does not pretend to represent a separate institution.
Revisions and corrections
When an argument, conclusion, structure, or key piece of evidence changes, the version number and substantive revision note are updated together. Spelling, typography, and broken-link repairs remain in version history without creating reader-facing revision noise.
Errors may be corrected and positions may change, but the change must remain visible. Essays may be rewritten. Registered judgments may only append events. These two systems must not be conflated.
Retraction and deletion
The default is to preserve public history with a tombstone, redirect, superseded status, or retracted status. Hard deletion may be used for privacy exposure, security risk, legal obligation, unauthorized material, or harm to a third party that revision cannot remove. When safety permits, the fact of deletion enters the changelog, but sensitive material is not exposed again.
AI collaboration and author responsibility
Formal work will disclose whether AI contributed to research, adversarial review, editing, or generated prose. A tool may help form a text, but it cannot replace the named author's responsibility for topic selection, judgment, sources, and public consequences.
Conflicts of interest
This site makes no blanket “no conflicts” claim. Funding, employment, investments, or other relationships relevant to a specific piece and capable of affecting judgment will be disclosed on that page. The absence of a listed disclosure should not be read as proof that the author has no relationship with any organization discussed.
Separation of Fiction
Fiction does not use the certainty field applied to factual work, but still discloses authorship and AI provenance. Fictional writing does not enter the Ledger and is not presented as observation, evidence, or public prediction.