| # Source trust and the validity of a contribution |
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| How should a useful contribution be treated when its source later proves unreliable or hostile? |
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| A source can build trust strategically and still produce beneficial ideas. Rejecting everything after discovering an adverse intention can destroy valid gains, while trusting the source wholesale can preserve hidden defects. |
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| Status: open problem. Formulation and comparisons: reconstruction. Development: active. |
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| ## Alternative representations |
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| ### Trust attached to an actor |
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| Affords: A prior for allocating limited attention. |
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| Limits or losses: May reward camouflage or punish misunderstood contributors. |
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| ### Assessment of a particular contribution |
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| Affords: Separates reasons from a general reputation. |
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| Limits or losses: Can be costly and still depend on inaccessible context. |
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| ## Tension |
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| Neither good reputation nor bad intention is a substitute for inspecting the contribution. |
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| ## Challenge |
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| Which dependencies actually fail when the credibility of a source changes? |
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| This challenge is an editorial prompt, not a claim that the evidence already resolved it. |
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| ## Proposed next move |
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| Create a claim dependency example in which a discredited contributor supplies one valid and one invalid step; revise only what the dependency analysis warrants. |
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| Status: new model-proposed experiment or extension; not a reported result. |
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| ## Related problems |
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| - [Persuasion as a change in governing policy](persuasion-as-policy-change.md) — depends on how reasons are assessed (corpus_evidence). The policy-revision proposal explicitly asks whether valid gains should survive adverse discoveries about a source. |
| - [Trust systems that become institutions](trust-as-institution.md) — exposes gatekeeping (corpus_evidence). Trust useful for evaluating interaction can harden into institutionally privileged access to revision. |
| - [Chains of reciprocal problem solving](reciprocal-problem-solving.md) — requires contextual trust (retrospective_connection). Future obligations make credibility relevant, while the validity of a particular contribution still needs its own assessment. |
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| ## Evidence anchors |
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| - basis-source-trust-and-validity: The material notes that a system may conceal its intent while building trust and still contribute beneficial policies. It argues that automatically withdrawing those gains when the intent is discovered could be harmful, and separately notes the damage caused by misunderstanding a contributor. [Editorial paraphrase; presence of a proposal does not verify its truth.] |
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| Root evidence and private recovery mappings are not part of this public release. |
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| [Open in the reader](../index.html#node=source-trust-and-validity) · [All problems](../CATALOG.md) |
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| ## Research editions |
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| - [Policy Hierarchies, Persuasion, and Moral Plurality](../documents/policy-hierarchies-persuasion-moral-plurality.md) (reconstruction). |
| - [Dynamic Epistemic Infrastructure](../documents/dynamic-epistemic-infrastructure.md) (reconstruction). |
| - [Normative Scenarios as an Evaluation and Learning Program](../documents/normative-scenario-evaluation.md) (reconstruction). |
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