Notes — what this section is for

Research papers on this site are deliberate, hashed, and pre-registered. Each one represents a months-long commitment to a single empirical question, with retraction conditions stated up-front.

That's the right bar for claims about evidence. It's the wrong bar for thinking.

Notes is for the in-between work.

Half-formed arguments. Observations from a debugging session. A small chart that surprised us. A question we don't know how to answer yet. A counter-argument to one of our own papers that we want to think out loud about before deciding whether it deserves a retraction.

The rules are simpler here:

• Dated, signed, and not retroactively edited. If a note turns out to be wrong, we add an update at the bottom — we don't quietly fix it.
• Shorter than a paper. Most notes will fit on one screen. Some won't.
• No pre-registration. These are opinions, observations, and provocations — not evidence claims. The empirical claims still go through the paper process.
• Comments live elsewhere. If you want to argue with a note, write your own — we'll link back.

If a note matures into something that deserves the paper treatment, it gets promoted: hashed, pre-registered, retraction-conditioned, dropped into the research index. Most won't. That's fine. Not every thought is a paper.

This is where we think out loud.