Knowledge handoff terminus

Where our knowledge should stop pretending to be enough.

A handoff is not failure and it is not surrender of origin. It is the point at which a research object becomes more valuable by moving toward a missing epistemic capability than by receiving another round of local elaboration.

Terminus rule

Low authority should trigger handoff, not erasure.

The terminus records what exists, what is missing, what contribution is being requested and what would count as a completed transfer. Contribution provenance survives the handoff; authority must still be earned by the evidence added.

Why a terminus?

Every branch should know when it needs another kind of mind.

The Memory Palace preserves how an idea arrived here. The terminus says what capability is required for it to go further.

This makes epistemic incompleteness visible instead of burying it inside caveats. A research object can arrive here because it needs formalization, replication, domain expertise, standards review, measurement design, empirical testing or practical realization.

Handoffs are deliberately claim-sensitive. “Please review this” is too vague. A useful handoff specifies the missing function and what new warrant the receiving person or system is being asked to supply.

Open handoffs

Research boundaries currently worth crossing.

These are public-safe requests for missing capability. Their existence does not imply that the listed expertise is the only relevant expertise.

open
active frontier

Formal economics of abundance shocks

Can the Displaced Scarcity Hypothesis be stated as a non-trivial comparative-statics result that is not merely standard bottleneck, complementarity or induced-demand economics in new language?

microeconomic theoryproduction theoryinnovation/growth economics

What exists: A deep prior-art review and a deliberately narrowed verbal hypothesis; no defensible formal result yet.

Requested contribution: Construct or adversarially review the smallest model; identify equivalent known results; specify the conditions under which scarcity, shadow values, rents or market power actually shift; recommend retirement if nothing distinct remains.

ContextEvidence / source ↗
Done when

Either a clearly lineage-positioned formal proposition with testable implications, or an explicit conclusion that the proposed contribution collapses into established theory.

handoff:displaced-scarcity-formalization

open
active frontier

Standards review of distributed discovery provenance

Which parts of a human-AI discovery episode can already be represented cleanly with W3C PROV, CRediT and RO-Crate, and which proposed Agalmic fields are genuinely missing rather than locally preferred wording?

W3C PROV / PROV-ORO-Crateresearch provenancemetascience

What exists: An experimental standards-first profile, PROV-O-aligned JSON-LD, CRediT mappings and a historical local graph.

Requested contribution: Review one end-to-end discovery episode representation; challenge every local extension; identify established vocabularies or profiles we should reuse; mark any actual interoperability gap.

ContextEvidence / source ↗
Done when

A reviewed example that can distinguish standard provenance from any narrowly justified authority/search-state extension.

handoff:distributed-discovery-provenance

open
supporting

Measure defensibility without creating examination theatre

How can human comprehension and defensibility of AI-assisted claims be assessed without collapsing into confidence ratings, rhetorical fluency or a generic viva score?

psychometricsmetacognitionscience of learningresearch evaluation

What exists: Working Paper 001 v0.4, prior work on verification gaps and metacognition, and a proposed separation of artefact validity, human comprehension and provenance.

Requested contribution: Identify validated measurement approaches for transfer, error diagnosis, prediction under perturbation, calibration and reconstruction; recommend a feasible empirical protocol and its failure modes.

ContextEvidence / source
Done when

A defensibility measurement plan grounded in existing measurement science, with explicit construct validity and anti-gaming considerations.

handoff:authorial-capacity-measurement

open
option

Design a minimal epistemic-handoff pilot

Can a provenance-preserving, claim-sensitive handoff improve evaluation of useful low-authority contributions without overwhelming experts or laundering authority?

knowledge brokeringmetasciencepeer review / research evaluationinnovation intermediaries

What exists: A lineage-reviewed draft, handoff definition and extensive prior art in absorptive capacity, brokerage, intermediaries and expert-evaluation bottlenecks.

Requested contribution: Help define a tiny pilot with a tractable number of public claims, explicit expert tasks, preserved contribution records and measurable outcomes before any platform is built.

ContextEvidence / source ↗
Done when

A pilot protocol small enough to run, with comparison conditions, burden measures, false-positive/false-negative considerations and stopping criteria.

handoff:epistemic-handoff-pilot

Contribution boundary

Receiving expertise does not absorb prior contribution.

A validator can add warrant without becoming the originator. An originator can retain contribution credit without gaining authority over the validated result. A machine can have materially generated or transformed an artefact without thereby becoming a legal author or the sole discoverer.

Origin deserves credit. Authority requires warrant. Handoff should preserve both facts.

Inspect the provenance architecture →

Machine-readable handoffs

Let future tools route the boundaries.

The handoff register is available as JSON so future agents, expert-routing tools and Memory Palace interfaces can discover unresolved authority gaps directly.

Handoff register JSONExplore the full corpus