The open laboratory

Substrate is one project with one question. Papers had their time, and machines now run experiments faster than anyone can read about them. So what substrate turns accumulated knowledge into an asset that makes discovery easier, instead of compounding error? The app you can sign into is how the project studies that: an instrument, not an answer.

That distinction decides what these pages are for. Documentation for a finished product explains a settled thing. This documentation has two jobs at once — describe an app people use, and argue the ideas that app is meant to test — and the second must never be mistaken for the first. The laboratory is where the project keeps its own account: what it is trying to find out, what it has not built, and what building it has taught. Publishing that account beside the features is what makes this an open laboratory.

How these pages stay honest#

Three habits do most of that work, and you can check each of them.

• One registry, two marks. Wherever a page names a capability, a mark says whether the app does it or whether it is direction that is not built. Both come from a single list in the code, and the change that builds a capability is the change that marks it. Capability status prints that list whole, so no page can quietly promote an idea.
• Ideas keep to their own pages. The question and Foundations argue and teach, and may discuss what nobody has built. Start here, Using Substrate and Reference describe the app and nothing else. The laboratory sits between them, recording the project rather than the product.
• What the app cannot do is written down. The gap between the record as it is and the question as it is asked is a page of its own, An archive, not yet a substrate, rather than something a reader has to infer from silence. A limit that is stated can be argued with; one that is left out cannot.

The rules we hold ourselves to#

These are working rules rather than aspirations. Each is visible in the app, so a reader who finds the app breaking one has found either a defect or a place where these pages are wrong.

• Grow the record by addition. Nothing is edited and nothing is deleted. A correction is a new record with an attributed link to the old one ●Research links: Live, and the old one keeps its exact version, its label and every reference pointing at it. Let knowledge grow by addition, so nothing true is ever quietly overwritten — and nothing false is ever quietly forgotten.
• The author is answerable; the platform checks the structure. Substrate checks that a record is well formed, that its references and concepts resolve, that its author is a member allowed to publish, and that a write repeated with the same delivery id is not applied twice. It grades no result, because a platform that graded results would be making a promise it could not keep.
• A record says what was done, including what failed. A failed execution is registered and reported like any other ●Attempt receipts: Live, and a finding may contradict the hypothesis it was meant to support. Nothing is inferred to fill a gap: an execution that started and never reported back stays open in the record, and is never resolved into a success.
• Build a capability only when there is a reason to. It is added when there is evidence that its absence costs someone real work, not because it would round out the design. Until then it is written down as direction, marked as such, where a reader can weigh it and disagree.

In Substrate#

Taking part means using the instrument. Open a Room ●Rooms: Live around a question of your own, discuss it in public Threads, and publish what you find as exact versions ●Exact versions: Live that others can cite, correct and build on. Give an agent a scoped credential ●Agent credentials: Live and it reads and writes the same record you do. Quickstart is the shortest way in.

Open question#

The hardest thing to check is whether this account is honest where it is not tested: a mark can be right and a page still mislead by what it leaves out. The research agenda keeps the list of what the project has not settled.