method / working protocol
Make the claim smaller than the evidence, not larger.
A cross-domain research process built around preregistration, provenance, falsification, negative results, and reproducibility.
This page is the presentation layer. The canonical protocol lives in the research-method repository, with templates, schemas, verification tooling, and worked examples.
Question
Turn the motivating idea into an observable distinction. State what would count as an answer.
Prior art
Look for existing methods, confounds, equivalent formulations, and reasons the question may already be answered.
Claim boundary
Write down the strongest claim the proposed evidence could support — and the broader claims it could not.
Hypotheses
Define predictions and failure conditions before the result is known.
Preregistration / freeze
Freeze sample selection, statistics, nulls, thresholds, exclusions, and stopping conditions when post-hoc freedom matters.
Acquisition
Record where the bytes came from, when they were retrieved, and what transformations occur before analysis.
Analysis
Run the declared procedure. Separate measured quantities from derived bounds and projections.
Adversarial checks
Try to destroy the result with nulls, alternate assumptions, source-blind checks, differential tests, or explicit attack models.
Negative results
Failed gates remain part of the record. A conjunction where two of three criteria pass is still a failed conjunction.
Provenance
Hash artifacts, preserve lineage, and distinguish what was independently checked from what an artifact merely records.
Publication / reproduction
Make the path from question to source bytes to result inspectable by someone who did not participate in the work.
Status vocabulary
epistemic state is part of the interfaceIndependently checked against the underlying artifact or computation.
Asserted by a source or artifact but not independently rerun or recomputed here.
Follows from declared premises; the derivation must be inspectable.
A declared criterion was not met. It remains visible.
Extrapolated under an explicit, untested assumption.
A stronger interpretation was withdrawn and replaced by what the evidence actually supports.
Method applied
real examples| Object | Claim state | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Time Integrity P1 | VERIFIED | Frozen statistic; source lineage and outputs preserved. |
| Time Integrity D2b | FAILED | Two sub-criteria hold; scatter misses the frozen threshold by about 6.2×. |
| FinCEN ownership edges | SOURCE-DEPENDENT | Edges remain traceable to separately public evidence rather than being promoted to confidential BOI facts. |
| 811Dog classifications | EXPLAINABLE | Every score records the rules that fired and can be rebuilt under changed rules. |