{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__religious_studies_theology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"brg-rst-interpretation-stress-test-02","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Bounded Interpretation Stress-Test for Contested Textual Claims","problem":"When a religious-studies journal or research center convenes competing interpretations of the same bounded textual or historical question, the participants contend for scarce editorial attention, verification resources, and provisional standing as the reference interpretation. In an ordinary symposium, an interpretation can prevail through author prestige, selective quotation, an unanswerable volume of supporting material, shifting claims between rounds, weak objections supplied by allies, or caricature of a rival. These tactics can outperform the production of an interpretation that survives symmetric examination of the relevant evidence.","actors":["Scholars or research teams advancing rival interpretations","Journal editors or research-center conveners","Independent philological, historical, and methodological judges","Evidence auditors who verify quotations, translations, provenance, and citations","Authors assigned to challenge competing interpretations","Members of living religious communities discussed by the claims","Readers who may treat the selected interpretation as a reference position","Qualified challengers proposing later reinterpretations"],"observable_state":"Within a bounded corpus of completed scholarly exchanges, observable indicators include rival claims addressing the same passage or event but using different evidence scopes; unannounced changes to the proposition being defended; asymmetric word counts, research assistance, or access to sources; quotations whose context or translation cannot be reconstructed; objections that attack positions the rival did not state; repeated pairs of scholars offering one another unusually weak challenges; evaluation reasons that track reputation rather than declared criteria; and an initially favored interpretation becoming the default citation despite unresolved counterevidence.","consequence":"A rhetorically or structurally advantaged interpretation may acquire provisional authority without having survived the strongest discriminating tests, while alternatives are obscured, readers mistake a contest result for settled religious truth, affected communities bear misrepresentation costs, and later challengers face an incumbent standard partly created by the earlier victory.","affected_objective":"Identify which interpretation of a precisely stated textual or historical question currently survives the strongest symmetric evidential tests, while preserving documented uncertainty, rival explanations, responsible treatment of living communities, and a credible path for revision.","intervention":"Establish a voluntary, editor-governed interpretation stress-test with a frozen proposition, common evidence dossier, fixed research and response budgets, and a staged double-elimination structure. Eligible teams submit explicit claims, assumptions, predicted evidence patterns, and possible falsifiers. In each round, paired teams must first produce an auditable steelman of the rival position and then identify evidence that discriminates between the two accounts. Judges score explanatory coverage, provenance, translation transparency, consistency, responsiveness to counterevidence, and calibration of uncertainty—not religious truth, spiritual authority, community worth, or popularity. A sequestered comparison packet chosen before entrants are known tests whether finalists generalize beyond their preferred examples. Finalists receive publication space for their claims and unresolved evidence; only one receives the scarce verification grant and a time-limited designation as the best-supported account under the stated dossier. Audit, appeal, correction, challenger, and post-contest review procedures prevent the designation from becoming permanent authority.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use direct competition among interpretations to expose discriminating evidence and stress-test explanatory claims, rather than to determine religious truth."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"One independently administered verification grant and one time-limited reference designation are available, although multiple finalist reports are published."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Teams qualify by addressing the frozen proposition, disclosing relevant expertise and conflicts, accepting the common evidence and resource rules, and stating a claim capable of evidential challenge."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Permitted moves are documented interpretation, source criticism, translation analysis, contextual argument, and direct response. Fabricated evidence, decontextualized quotation, undisclosed claim changes, personal attacks, pressure on judges, coordinated weak challenges, and claims to adjudicate a community's legitimacy are prohibited."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Scoring covers evidential coverage, provenance, reconstruction of inferential steps, treatment of counterevidence, predictive discrimination, uncertainty calibration, and fidelity when representing rivals."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process","domain_realization":"The proposition, dossier rules, scoring weights, pairings, tie-breaks, conflicts, decision reasons, correction procedure, and limited appeal grounds are fixed before judging."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Steelman verification constrains caricature; relationship disclosure and cross-round review identify possible reciprocal weak challenges; anomalies trigger independent inquiry rather than an automatic verdict."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Claims about living communities receive a separate accuracy-and-harm check, labels distinguish scholarly findings from theological judgments, and correction rights persist after publication."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Equal word, response-time, research-assistance, and supplemental-evidence budgets prevent victory through unbounded production capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"The designation expires, underlying evidence and unresolved objections remain accessible, and the winner cannot control the next proposition, judges, or challenger eligibility."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"A post-publication review tests whether the format surfaced decisive evidence, rewarded proxy performance, generated misrepresentation, or caused the provisional winner to be treated as settled authority."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"bracket_or_tournament_structure","role":"Sequences direct comparisons through double elimination, giving each interpretation more than one opportunity while making discriminating head-to-head tests manageable.","counterfactual_removal":"Without structured pairings, participants could talk past one another in parallel essays, and evaluation would collapse into an impressionistic comparison of incomparable submissions."},{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes the proposition, evidence rules, allowed moves, scoring, conflicts, tie-breaks, and appeals before entrants are evaluated.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a binding rulebook, teams or editors could change the question, evidence scope, or evaluative standard after learning which interpretation benefits."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Equalizes word counts, response time, research assistance, and supplemental-source allowances so resource intensity does not substitute for evidential quality.","counterfactual_removal":"Without caps, well-resourced teams could overwhelm rivals with material that cannot be checked within the round, creating an interpretive arms race."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Attaches graduated responses to misquotation, fabricated provenance, undisclosed claim changes, personal attacks, judge pressure, and repeated failure to correct a rejected caricature.","counterfactual_removal":"Without published consequences, damaging a rival's apparent credibility could remain more effective than answering the rival's actual evidence."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Reviews disclosed relationships, cross-round challenge strength, repeated pairing behavior, and reciprocal endorsements for patterns warranting independent conflict inquiry.","counterfactual_removal":"Without uniform monitoring, allied teams could preserve the appearance of adversarial testing while exchanging weak objections; if monitoring itself issued verdicts, innocent intellectual agreement could be mislabeled collusion."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Maintains criterion-level round standings and requires provenance, translation, and claim-stability audits before any finalist receives the verification grant or provisional designation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without finalist audit, a high score could crown an interpretation whose decisive quotation, translation, or source attribution does not reproduce."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Publishes more than one surviving interpretation and its unresolved evidence even though only one team receives the scarce verification grant.","counterfactual_removal":"Without decomposing recognition from the scarce grant, one contest outcome could erase materially distinct surviving explanations and exaggerate certainty."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Expires the reference designation and permits a qualified challenger to reopen it upon presenting specified new evidence or at a scheduled review date.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a real reopening path, provisional evidential success could harden into citation lock-in unrelated to later evidence."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Examines whether the contest rewarded genuine discrimination, exported representational harms, distorted subsequent citation, or created winner control over the field.","counterfactual_removal":"Without retrospective review, a misleading metric or harmful reference designation could be repeated after attention shifts away from the contest."}],"causal_chain":["A journal or research center has limited verification capacity and editorial prominence for several strategically opposed interpretations of one bounded question.","Because one interpretation can become the provisional reference account, teams benefit not only from supporting their own claim but also from weakening rivals, expanding the evidential burden, influencing judges, or avoiding serious challenge through allies.","Ordinary symposium exchange does not necessarily equalize evidence budgets, freeze claims, require direct discrimination, audit decisive sources, or constrain reciprocal weak criticism.","The rulebook and resource cap establish symmetric claims and test conditions; paired rounds force each team to represent and answer a specific rival rather than merely accumulate support.","Steelman checks, foul penalties, relationship screening, independent judging, and finalist audit make misrepresentation, covert accommodation, and unverifiable evidence less reliable routes to advancement.","Publishing multiple surviving accounts preserves warranted pluralism, while the single verification grant directs a scarce resource toward the account that best survives the declared tests.","Expiration, challenger access, and impact review keep a temporary win from controlling later inquiry and reveal whether the arena's scoring remained coupled to evidential performance."],"baseline":"The baseline is a conventional edited symposium or special issue in which invited scholars submit parallel essays and replies, contribution lengths and evidence access may differ, editors make holistic judgments, claims can drift during exchange, source verification is selective, no structured pairing ensures that the strongest rivals meet, and publication prestige can turn an editorial choice into a durable reference position without an expiration or rematch rule.","nearest_rivals":["Conventional double-blind peer review: can reduce identity effects and reject weak work but ordinarily evaluates each manuscript independently rather than engineering direct, symmetric tests among rival interpretations.","A collaborative consensus symposium: may clarify shared ground and preserve collegiality but can suppress unresolved disagreement or produce wording acceptable to all without determining which evidence discriminates among accounts.","An unranked evidence synthesis: can catalogue sources and interpretations without competitive distortion but supplies less pressure for advocates to expose their own claim's vulnerabilities or answer the strongest rival.","Open post-publication commentary: permits broad correction and challenge but does not equalize resources, guarantee direct response, bound attacks, or prevent attention and prestige from determining which objections matter."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"This intervention is warranted only when several interpretations answer the same narrow, evidence-responsive question; their outcomes are strategically interdependent; and the sponsor deliberately wants bounded adversarial pressure to reveal discriminating evidence. If the interpretations address different questions, cannot be responsibly compared, express non-evidential confessional commitments, or require collaborative synthesis rather than a scarce designation, the tournament should not be used.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The journal's editorial board or research center's authorized scholarly-governance body controls participation, publication, and the verification grant. Independent judges may score only the frozen scholarly proposition. Existing research-ethics, copyright, cultural-protocol, employment, and community-consultation authorities retain their jurisdictions.","authorized_first_step":"Conduct a read-only retrospective process audit of no more than twelve completed, lawfully accessible paired scholarly exchanges concerning bounded textual or historical questions. Preregister codes for claim stability, evidence symmetry, quotation reproducibility, rival representation, response strength, disclosed relationships, decision reasons, and later correction. Do not rescore religious truth or name suspected misconduct.","excluded_actions":["Adjudicating religious truth, revelation, sanctity, orthodoxy, spiritual authority, or community legitimacy","Compelling scholars or community members to participate","Changing publication, employment, funding, citation, or curriculum decisions during the retrospective audit","Publishing participant-level accusations based on textual patterns","Using confidential, sacred, restricted, or culturally controlled materials without authorization","Inferring collusive intent from agreement, shared affiliation, or weak criticism alone","Treating a provisional contest designation as institutional doctrine or settled historical fact","Contacting represented communities or identifiable participants without the required ethics and governance approvals"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if the scholarly proposition cannot be separated from a judgment about religious legitimacy, if lawful source access or cultural permissions are absent, if de-identification is infeasible, or if reviewers cannot distinguish process coding from substantive truth adjudication. Remove participant linkage from working data, issue no ranking or misconduct inference, retain only authorized aggregate observations, and return any prospective design to ordinary editorial and ethics review."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The completed exchanges already use stable common propositions, symmetric evidence access, reproducible source citations, strong and accurate rival representations, disclosed conflicts, independent reasons, usable correction channels, and later openness to challengers; outcome differences are explained by the evidence rather than prestige, production capacity, sabotage, accommodation, or lock-in.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified in the studied setting if the purported rivals do not answer a common evidence-responsive question, no scarce designation or verification resource is at stake, participants cannot strategically affect one another's outcomes, or observed asymmetries do not alter evaluation or later reference status.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is disfavored if an authorized mock replay produces rankings that change materially with pairing order or judge identity, suppresses necessary context through its caps, rewards tactical falsifier-writing over responsible interpretation, increases misrepresentation of living communities, or gives the provisional winner more citation lock-in without producing clearer discriminating evidence than an unranked synthesis.","risks":["The tournament frame could portray religious inquiry as combat or imply that traditions themselves are competing.","A frozen proposition could exclude context that responsible interpretation requires.","Common evidence packets could privilege materials already favored by powerful scholarly traditions.","Resource caps could penalize methods requiring linguistic, archival, ethnographic, or community-consultation labor.","Steelman scoring could standardize a contested account of what a rival actually claims.","Pattern monitoring could stigmatize ordinary intellectual agreement or mentorship networks.","A sequestered comparison packet could reward superficial adaptability rather than historical depth.","Readers could ignore the designation's scope and expiration and cite the winner as settled truth.","Publication of multiple finalists could still expose communities to harmful or decontextualized claims.","The administrative burden of auditing sources and translations could exceed the value of the scarce decision." ]},"next_evidence_step":"Select up to twelve completed paired exchanges from one authorized journal or center archive, excluding doctrinal disputes that cannot be framed as bounded evidential propositions. Before reading outcomes, preregister a coding manual and alternative explanations. Two independent coders then record claim changes, evidence quantities, source reproducibility, steelman accuracy, response symmetry, disclosed relationships, decision rationales, corrections, and subsequent reference treatment. Reconcile coding without deciding which interpretation is true, and compare observed process failures with what ordinary blind review or unranked synthesis would address. The bounded output is a determination of whether a prospective, nonpublic mock tournament merits ethics and editorial review.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governs faculty teams competing for a portfolio of teaching modules in a shared introductory course; its purpose is curricular selection, its principal unit is a deliverable module, and its causal route runs through portfolio complementarity, pedagogical scoring, bounded proposal labor, and rotation of course slots. This proposal instead governs research teams advancing mutually incompatible interpretations of one textual or historical proposition; its purpose is adversarial evidential discrimination, its principal unit is an explicit falsifiable claim, and its causal route runs through symmetric head-to-head testing, steelman requirements, source audit, double elimination, and expiration of a provisional reference designation. It can be adopted by a journal or research center without changing any course, curriculum committee, teaching allocation, or module-selection process, and proposal 1 can operate without this research contest.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}