Overview
A directional instrument for recording long-horizon aspirations and observable movement toward them. It returns one of four directional readings per aspiration against a versioned registry and deliberately computes no aggregate: there is no virtue score, and NOT_OBSERVED means no valid entry was admitted rather than that nobody looked. Subtitle: An Aspirational Thread for Long-Horizon Work Code is MIT licensed; prose and figures are CC BY 4.0. See LICENSE in the repository.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Counter-signal precedence: any recorded declared counter-signal yields DRIFTING regardless of how many markers were observed or staleness.
- TOWARD requires every declared marker and no counter-signal; there is no partial credit, so all-but-one marker reads the same as none.
- Stale or date-unauditable fully-marked observations yield INQUIRY rather than DRIFTING; the currentness sweep shows an exclusive boundary (current at 90, stale at 91 days).
- The shipped registry declares 18 markers and 9 counter-signals, all distinct; the paper stresses this counts vocabulary, not fulfilment.
- The author acknowledges the instrument does not handle the adversarial case: an observer can file the tokens that produce a TOWARD.
Methods
- Python package with a versioned nine-entry aspiration registry — Each aspiration pairs a thread and horizon with lists of Markers (signs of movement toward) and Counter-signals (signs of movement away).
- Staged progress_report evaluator (intake, matching, decision) — Horizon entries are screened and normalized, matched against declared markers/counter-signals, and mapped to TOWARD, INQUIRY, DRIFTING, or NOT_OBSERVED without numeric scores.
- Formal definitions and propositions bound to named tests — The evaluator's decision rule is restated as definitions and propositions matching the code, each tied to a test, plus seven structural invariants with planted-bad detection tests.
- Descriptive analysis helpers and code-derived figures — Pure read-only helpers (signal_inventory, horizon_distribution, temporal_currentness_sweep, report_overview) generate figures, several replaying the evaluator on synthetic entries.
- Scholarship lineage for the founding aspirations — Situates the four founding aspirations in a lineage from practical wisdom and practice-internal goods through capabilities, repair, commons governance, and metric hazards.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
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- golden_line_combined.pdf PDF · 6.32 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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