A Social Uncertainty Principle with Application to Principal Agent Problems
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I consider the complementarity of concrete and abstract construals, and show how it relates to problems of group coordination, specifically principal agent problems. I base this argument on evidence that the brain is composed of deeply interlocking layers which alternate in representing things concretely (direct correspondence to sensors), or abstractly (allowing for mental travel). I discuss how this complementarity, when applied to problems of collective behavior, leads to a social uncertainty principle in which a situation may not be modeled arbitrarily precisely both concretely and abstractly. Further, both abstract and concrete construals are intimately tied to action, the ultimate goal of any intelligent agent's neural system. The key message in this paper is that the complementarity between functional levels induces a collective choice of how uncertainty is managed in individual minds, and in enclosing or external groups, and leads to important differences in the cooperative behaviors of individuals and groups. I also describe a computational model of an instance of this process, and discuss the complementarity of principal agent problems.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it