Concept Explainer · Human Agency Under Consequential State
OD-HAS, explained
A concise reference for readers who want the core distinctions without reading the full paper.
What is Consequential State?
Machine-actionable or institutionally actionable information, classification, inference, status, score, annotation, credential, or representation about a person that can materially affect their access, treatment, authority, resources, opportunities, or participation. A central move: state ≠ consequence. A record can change without the consequence changing, and a consequence can change even when the underlying state stays materially the same.
What are Rule A and Rule B?
Rule A governs treatment of changed state before any distinct replacement ground is considered: withdrawal, replacement, annotation, or derived-state change. Rule B addresses the narrower case where the original or corrected basis no longer supports the full consequence, but a materially distinct replacement basis (“Ground B”) may exist.
What is REBASE-PENDING?
A case enters REBASE-PENDING only where four conditions are all satisfied: a materially distinct Ground B exists; it is substantively sufficient; it has not yet been procedurally adopted; and it would support substantially the same consequence. REBASE-PENDING is not itself a final disposition — it is a procedural state defined so that substantive sufficiency is never quietly treated as if it were authority to act.
What is actually claimed?
- That a frozen specification was applied to two heterogeneous public-record corpora without needing new categories — the framework held under contact with real records.
- That Ground B observability changed materially with record structure: CFPB complaint records were propagation-rich but grounds-opaque; MSPB procedural records were grounds-rich but authority-and-clock-opaque.
- That public observability of basis revision and public observability of interim authority and binding timing repeatedly separated from each other across the record systems examined.
What remains unproven?
- Whether OD-HAS predicts real institutional behavior or outcomes — it has not been shown to.
- Whether the framework would hold under a corpus that exposes the full Rule B authority-and-clock boundary in one place — none was found.
- How common a distinct Ground B is across institutions generally — the pilots' small, selected samples do not support a prevalence estimate.
Where can readers go deeper?
The canonical paper record · Research brief · Post-change lifecycle map · Companion policy paper · Consequence
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.