EX. 01 / EXAMINE
Examine is where the working underneath the essays is kept open: the method that decides whether an essay is earned, and the sources and limits behind every claim that reaches publication.
An essay makes a case. This surface exists so the case can be checked without asking anyone to take the writing on trust. Every Season 01 essay has a public source note carrying the same evidence the argument was built on, including the places where that evidence runs out.
Nothing here is scored. There are no reliability grades, confidence percentages or certainty meters. Those compress a judgement the reader should be making. What is offered instead is the kind of each source, what that kind can carry, and where the argument stops.
The sourcewhat the essay uses it forwhat it supportswhere it stops
Each note lists what the essay drew on, what kind of evidence it is, and where the argument stops. They are listed here in the canonical order of the season.
Kinds are read from each source’s own status line. A source can be more than one kind; nothing is graded.
One line per source: the source, what it supports, where the evidence stops. 28 of 28 end in a stated limit. Select a line to read it.
Essay 01 · 06 sources · 06 limits
Essay 02 · 01 source · 01 limit
Essay 03 · 07 sources · 07 limitsUpdate U-3 recorded in the ledger
Essay 04 · 04 sources · 04 limitsEditorial update U-1 recorded in the ledger
All figures above, verified against the paper’s full text. On the 37.4 percent: that is the average across the five tactic-producing apps (equivalently, 374 of their 1,000 responses). It is not the pooled six-app rate, which would be lower because Flourish contributed zero.
This remains a working paper at the point checked, not yet a peer-reviewed journal publication. It establishes patterns in app behaviour and short-run engagement effects; it does not establish durable harm to any individual user, nor any particular designer’s intent to harm.
Essay 05 · 05 sources · 05 limitsEditorial update U-2 recorded in the ledger
Essay 06 · 05 sources · 05 limitsCorrection C-1 recorded in the ledger
§ 02 · The ledger
A correction repairs something that was wrong. An update makes a passage more precise or records a development in a live matter; it is dated and disclosed, and it is not logged as an error. Each entry leads back to the evidence it touched.
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
C-1
Correction
Correction (registered 8 September 2026; carried into the 9 September 2026 site release). Two factual points in the touch-study passage were corrected. What was published: “significantly more often (63 percent against 37) … with some rise in positive feeling”. What it now says: the within-group counts, 17 of 21 (touched) against 10 of 21 (not touched), with six unclear responses excluded (N=48), and “less negative feeling”. Why: the 63/37 figure was the split of all “yes” answers across the two groups (17/27 and 10/27), not a within-group compliance rate; and, on affect, the study (Hoffmann & Krämer, 2021) found significantly lower negative affect after the interaction, while the difference in positive affect after the interaction was not statistically significant. The essay’s conclusion was bounded accordingly. See the corrections log.
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
U-1
Editorial update
Editorial update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). In “The goodbye test” the essay now cites one reproducible outcome measure from the paper’s Table 3 — about 98 seconds of continued engagement after a fear-of-missing-out farewell versus about 16 seconds after a neutral one — in place of the earlier phrase “as much as fourteen times”. This is a precision about which figure the essay uses, not a finding that the paper is wrong; the paper’s own “up to 14×” headline is recorded in source 4 as an attributed author claim. It is not a correction of a factual error.
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
U-2
Editorial update
Editorial update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). The data-protection passage in “Whose past is it?” was made legally more precise: it is now anchored to the GDPR accuracy principle and the rights of rectification, completion, erasure and portability (arts 5(1)(d), 16, 17, 20), and notes that an assessment can itself be personal data (CJEU, Nowak, C-434/16). This refines an earlier, narrower characterisation of correction rights; it is editorial precisification, not a correction of a false statement, and not legal advice. See the legal-basis note below.
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
U-3
Update
Update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). Source 7 now reflects the 27 August 2026 rulings in the Anthropic–US government dispute, read directly from the court’s orders (Dkt. 250 and 251). This is a development in a live matter, not a correction of an earlier error: the essay’s original description was accurate as of its date. The current status carries an early-September reference date and remaining uncertainty about post-ruling appellate movement.
§ 03 · How an essay is earned
Seven steps run between a question and a published essay, from hypothesis to freeze. The method page sets out each of them, the principles that decide whether the evidence clears the bar, and what the publication does not claim.
§ 04 · Kinds of evidence
Source notes name the kind of each source rather than ranking it. These are the five classes that recur across the season.
Studies published after review by other researchers in the field.
Carries — The strongest available support for a general claim about how people behave, respond or change.
Limit — Review is not proof. Samples are often small, Western and short-term, and a finding about a laboratory task may not survive contact with ordinary life.
Research circulated before peer review, including preprints and institutional working papers.
Carries — Early signal on questions moving faster than journals can publish — which is most questions about deployed AI systems.
Limit — Unreviewed. Cited when it is the only evidence that exists, and always marked as such, never as a settled result.
Model cards, system cards, policy pages, technical reports and terms published by the companies that build these systems.
Carries — Direct evidence of what a provider says a system does, what it is designed to optimise for, and what the company will commit to in public.
Limit — It is the provider's own account. Useful as a record of stated intent and disclosed behaviour; not independent verification of either.
Legislation, regulatory decisions, court filings, official inquiries and public statistics.
Carries — What has been formally established, required or contested — the facts of the record rather than an interpretation of them.
Limit — Jurisdiction-bound and slow. A rule in one country describes that country, and a filing is a claim until it is decided.
Reporting from publications with named authorship and a correction practice.
Carries — Documented cases, internal material and first-hand accounts that no other source class reaches.
Limit — A reported case shows that something happened, not how often. Single cases are used as evidence of possibility, never of prevalence.
Noticing that people respond socially to a system is an observation. It does not establish that anything is present on the other side.
Documented incidents establish that something can happen. They do not establish how commonly it does.
Systems are deployed to hundreds of millions of people years before the research on their effects arrives. Where the evidence is thin, the essay says so instead of borrowing confidence from elsewhere.
Each source is identified by kind so its weight can be judged. Assigning it a score would replace that judgement with a number that only looks like precision.
Every experience on this site publishes a mechanics register: what it claims to be, what it measures, what is stored and for how long, what is deliberately excluded, and where its result stops meaning anything. The register is binding — what is not written in it, the experience does not do.
These formats do not exist yet. They are listed so the direction of the evidence layer is visible, not because something is finished and withheld.
Not yet published
A cross-essay view of where the evidence for a recurring claim actually sits, and where it thins out.
Not yet published
Following a single claim from the source that supports it to the sentence that uses it.
Not yet published
The essays that did not clear adjudication, and the reason the evidence was not sufficient.