1# WP35 — Decision log and amendments23| ID | Date | Phase | Decision | Reason | Before/after seeing results |4|---|---|---|---|---|---|5| D-001 | 2026-11-01 | 0 | Use Seshat **Polaris-2026** (GitHub snapshot, commit 55ca5fbc2b) as the primary historical source; Equinox-2020 as robustness | Current official snapshot per seshatdatabank.info/data; MIT-licensed repository; contains CrisisDB consequences | before |6| D-002 | 2026-11-01 | 0 | Obtain V-Dem v16 from the official `vdemdata` R package (commit f4dd26922e) rather than the web form | Programmatic, hash-verifiable, same data; no credentials needed | before |7| D-003 | 2026-11-01 | 1 | **Pre-registration frozen.** SHA-256(research/preregistration.md) = `ecda8804e17f931789be8e274ba1ff989000de356700a85b638b043928182e3a` | Mandate: pre-register before examining outcome associations | before (no association computed) |8| D-004 | 2026-11-01 | 1 | = z(\log D) - z(K)$ with $ standardized but **not** logged | $ is a bounded share/latent score that can be 0; the mandate allows the log form only when strictly positive | before |9| D-005 | 2026-11-01 | 1 | Historical unit = polity, not polity-year; CrisisDB test = severity conditional on crisis; add polity hazard (Y2) and modern onset panel (Y4–Y6) | 93.7% of Polaris facts are undated; CrisisDB is crisis-selected (150/626 polities) | before |10| D-006 | 2026-11-01 | 1 | Macro-regions and era blocks fixed in `configs/regions.yaml` (10 macro-regions, 6 eras) | Needed for FE and leave-region-out; 42 regions too many for N≈150 | before |11| D-007 | 2026-11-01 | 1 | No paid LLM API calls; literature verified via Crossref/public pages | No keys configured; mandate forbids unapproved spending | — |12| A-001 | 2026-11-01 | 4 | Added a fold-internal re-estimation of the $D$ loadings and of the standardization of $P$ for the Seshat leave-one-region-out comparison (`econometrics/leakage_check.py`) | Pre-registration §(mandate rule) requires preprocessing fitted on training folds for predictive tests; the main CV used full-sample (outcome-free) preprocessing | after seeing the main CV results, before the adversarial reviews; conclusion unchanged (P beats scale-only in 2/10 folds vs 3/10) |13| A-002 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | After the historical-anthropologist review: (i) the five robustness variants announced in §6 (range bounds, inferred codes dropped, within-era/region standardization, ranks) had not been computed at the crisis level because the crisis-level file lacked those columns and the code skipped them silently — now computed (`build_indices.py`) and reported; (ii) item-level CrisisDB analysis and dimensionality diagnostic added; (iii) cultural-sphere hold-out scheme added to H5 (`configs/regions.yaml`); (iv) periodization control (polities per NGA) added to the Cox model; (v) crisis-sample saturation of K reported; (vi) "pre-crisis" wording qualified (3.6% dated facts) | Reviewer-identified text–results mismatch and interpretive gaps | after results, after review |14| A-003 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | Pre-registration §3.5 says "13 instability items" but lists 14 (and the code uses 14) — typo in the frozen text; the list is authoritative | reviewer | after |15| A-004 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | Cross-validation repairs after the economist and computational reviews: test rows with fixed-effect levels unseen in the training fold are mapped to the training mode instead of being dropped (the first forward-chaining split and 14 Seshat model-folds had failed silently); Seshat k-fold now blocked by polity; `t_since` for countries with no observed prior event = years since panel entry plus an indicator (was: panel maximum) | silent fold failures misreported fold counts; polities with several crisis records shared identical predictors across folds | after |16| A-005 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | Simulation accounting corrected after the computational review: codeword bits counted on every relay hop; every administrator on the relay path is charged; the SAME total administrative budget for central and federated designs (ratio x expected relayed load of the central design), allocated to administrators in proportion to a warm-up measurement of their load; distribution-shock statistics restricted to non-uniform plan cells (KL = 0 otherwise); shock effects reported by bandwidth | bits ignored relay hops; only the LCA administrator was charged; the capacity ratio was defined against a load that ignored withdrawn producers; the uniform cells made the shock a no-op | after |17| A-006 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | Seshat specification repairs after the economist review: placebo index fitted without the production-infrastructure control (the previous placebo was an exact reparametrization of the scale-only baseline — its reported coefficient carried no information); `epidemic_v` dropped from the control set (it is a CrisisDB consequence item); all covariate specifications and baselines fitted on a common sample (n = 93); A3 relabelled (it conditions on the complexity component, not on D and K); C3 (modern) labelled as the reparametrization of B5 that it is; Wald test of beta_D + beta_K = 0 added; D without settlement hierarchy and K without administrative levels added as overlap checks | reviewer-identified tautology and mislabels | after |18| A-007 | 2026-11-01 | 9 | Interpretation per the written rules: the modern negative control PASSES the pre-registered literal rule (past 0.44 < future 0.48) and is reported as such with the caveat that the gap is within one SE; the modern H4 rule IS met (hinge 12/15, spline 13/15) and H4 is therefore "not rejected" in the modern panel, with the size of the improvement reported; Theorem 1 remark added (optimal code never longer than fixed-length; the simulation's Shannon code can be) | reviewer-identified misreadings of the pre-registration | after |19