Research Brief · Human Agency Under Consequential State
A source record was corrected. What happens to what it already produced?
Micheal Charles Preble · Independent Researcher · Research paper (not the policy paper)
The Question
After consequential state materially changes — withdrawn, replaced, annotated, or derived-state changed — which actors control the continuing consequence, what ground still supports it, and what authority governs any interim continuation?
The Problem
A source record can be corrected while a downstream consequence remains in place: a charge withdrawn while a penalty survives on other grounds; a report deleted by one actor while another still relies on it; a mistaken classification repaired while a derived score is untouched. In each case, the question is not only whether the state changed, but what authority remains for the consequence after the change.
The Contribution
Human Agency Under Consequential State (OD-HAS): a cross-domain framework for the post-change interval. It separates state change from propagation, propagation from revalidation, a corrected same-ground value from a materially distinct replacement ground (“Ground B”), and prospective correction from recoverable residual effects. It defines four state-change types — withdrawal, replacement, annotation, derived-state change — and a narrow REBASE-PENDING condition for when a distinct replacement ground exists but has not yet been procedurally adopted.
How the Framework Works
The framework was tested empirically against two heterogeneous public-record corpora under a frozen specification. Pilot 1 (CFPB, 25 complaint narratives): propagation was observable in all 25 cases, but Ground B was UNKNOWN in all 25 — the public complaint layer could not distinguish an absent replacement ground from one that simply wasn't publicly exposed. Result: HOLD. Pilot 2 (MSPB, 20 procedural chains): Ground B became fully decidable — 1 case YES, 19 NO — but interim authority was unobservable in all 20 chains and resolution timing was complete in none. Result: HOLD. A subsequent search for a third public corpus exposing the full Rule B authority-and-timing boundary closed at search saturation: no qualifying corpus was found. The paper is explicit that this is a bounded finding about public-record structure, not a claim that no such corpus exists.
Why It Matters
Naming the interval after consequential state changes makes it possible to ask a precise question — who still controls the continuing consequence, and under what authority — instead of collapsing correction into a single, undifferentiated act. The pilots show that different public-record systems expose different parts of that interval: complaint narratives are propagation-rich but grounds-opaque; procedural records are grounds-rich but authority-and-clock-opaque.
Evidence Status
Evidence status: Conceptual framework with two bounded public-record pilots. The pilots' findings concern the structure of public records, not institutional reality, and the framework itself has not been independently reconstructed, validated as law, or shown to predict institutional outcomes.
What This Does Not Claim
- Does not claim OD-HAS is universally validated.
- Does not claim the pilot samples estimate institutional prevalence — 25 CFPB records and 20 MSPB chains are not a representative sample.
- Does not treat a complaint allegation as adjudicated truth.
- Does not claim that Ground B = NO in 19 of 20 MSPB chains estimates a general rate across institutions.
- Does not claim that no qualifying public corpus exists anywhere — only that the frozen discovery program did not find one.
- Does not claim that prospective correction guarantees recovery of residual effects.
Open Questions
Whether a future empirical program should retain the requirement that one corpus expose the full Rule B conjunction, or instead test complementary OD-HAS layers across different record ecologies, is deliberately left open (“Research State and Deferred Fork”). No redesign is undertaken in this paper.
Read / Cite the Research
Read the canonical paper record → · Full paper PDF · View on SSRN
Preble, Micheal Charles. “Human Agency Under Consequential State: Correction, Revalidation, and Recoverable Consequences in Persistent Computational Systems” Manuscript dated September 21, 2026. Available at SSRN 7496758, 2026.