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Apparatus · Reference Document

Sourcing & Hierarchy

A reference for AI agents and human researchers. The tier structure used across Codex, Geo, Visions, and the legal vertical — where to look, what to trust, when to override.

Revised May MMXXVI
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This document specifies how research is conducted across Arx Cortex. It is written for both AI agents and human readers. The tier structure is reference, not enforcement — the skill of using sources well is judgment about which tier the current question actually requires, not mechanical descent through a list.

The governing principle: physics beats platitudes. Material constraints determine outcomes more than ideological narratives. The same epistemology applies to citation. Primary documents over paraphrase. Auditable provenance over fluent assertion. Specific dates and named institutions do argumentative work; vague intensifiers do not.

§ I

The General Hierarchy

Five tiers, applied across all domains unless a Section III module overrides them. Tier assignment is determined by provenance and audit trail, not by politics, prestige, or recency.

IPrimary

Primary sources of record

The document itself. Court opinions, statutes, regulatory filings, treaty texts, magisterial documents, peer-reviewed papers, raw datasets. Required for any specific factual claim — dates, dollar amounts, quoted language, vote tallies, doctrinal positions. If a claim has a primary source and the work uses paraphrase instead, the work is weaker by exactly that substitution.

IIAggregator

Authoritative aggregators

Curated indexes over primary sources that add structure without claiming to be primary themselves. Two functions worth distinguishing. Citation aggregators — CourtListener over PACER, EDGAR full-text search, Congress.gov, Wikipedia for its footnote apparatus — are valuable because their links lead to documents you can verify. Synthesis aggregators — LLM-generated reference works like Grokipedia, narrative encyclopedias, well-edited tertiary sources — are valuable because they produce a coherent frame across many sources before research begins. Wikipedia leans citation; Grokipedia leans synthesis. Neither substitutes for the other and neither substitutes for primary sources. Both are pointers, pointing in different directions.

IIISpecialist

Expert secondary analysis

Domain specialists writing for specialists. SCOTUSblog on a Supreme Court case, ISW on a battlefield, Lawfare on national security, New Advent on patristics, Rhodium Group on China. Synthesis the analyst would otherwise do. Cite for context and framing. Not load-bearing on facts.

IVGeneralist

Generalist journalism

Reuters, AP, FT, WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg. Reasonable for the existence and rough shape of an event. Untrustworthy for technical specifics in any field where the reporter is a generalist. Best treated as a pointer: Reuters says the court ruled X — now read the opinion.

VSignal

Commentary and social, as discovery

Specialist Substacks and curated X follow-lists function as a signal layer that often surfaces Tier I and II material faster than institutional channels. Pointers, never evidence. Value depends on curation — generic Twitter is noise, a vetted analyst network on a specific domain is a research asset. The workflow is signal → primary source → cite the primary.

§ II

Conflict Resolution

When tiers disagree, the higher tier wins on facts. Lower tiers may still win on interpretation. A Reuters article saying the court ruled X when the opinion says Y — opinion wins, flag the discrepancy. Two Tier I sources disagreeing — surface the conflict, do not pick one silently. Tier III disagreeing with Tier II — Tier II holds the fact, Tier III does the interpretive work above it.

The Freshness Override

A Tier I source from 2019 can be worse than a Tier IV source from last week when the question is about current state — active litigation status, current officeholders, commodity prices, ongoing operations. Authority loses to recency for present-tense questions. Authority beats recency for settled law, historical events, and doctrinal positions.

Authority Does Not Transfer Across Domains

The Atlantic Council on energy markets is Tier III. The Atlantic Council on Catholic theology is Tier V. A think tank earns its tier inside its competence and loses it outside. The same applies to individual analysts, journals, and institutional sources.

§ III

Domain Modules

The generic hierarchy is a starting frame. Within each domain Arx Cortex covers, the tier structure is rewritten to reflect what authority means inside that field. Use the domain module when the topic falls clearly within its scope; fall back to the general hierarchy otherwise.

CodexTheology · Philosophy

The generic hierarchy does not apply cleanly. Theological sources have their own tier structure that overrides §I.

  1. Sacred Scripture and conciliar documents. Council of Trent, Vatican I and II, ecumenical councils. vatican.va is the source of record for post-conciliar magisterial texts.
  2. Papal magisterium. Encyclicals, apostolic constitutions, apostolic exhortations. Denzinger-Schönmetzer for the doctrinal compilation, vatican.va for current and recent texts.
  3. The Doctors of the Church. Aquinas above all. Corpus Thomisticum for the Latin texts, dhspriory.org or Aquinas Institute for English. Augustine via New Advent. Patristic sources via New Advent and CCEL.
  4. Approved theological commentary. Catechism of the Catholic Church, older Catholic Encyclopedia, the manualist tradition, the Companion to the Summa.
  5. Contemporary academic theology. Thomistica, Church Life Journal, First Things long-form, Nova et Vetera, The Thomist. Useful for argument, secondary to older tiers for doctrine.
  6. Popular Catholic media. National Catholic Register, Crisis, Catholic Herald, NCR. Pointers, not authorities.

The genealogical method needs primary texts. A claim about what Aquinas said requires the Summa or the relevant commentary, never a contemporary essay paraphrasing him.

GeoMaterials · Supply Chain · Strategy

  1. Primary commodity and trade data. LME for non-ferrous metals, USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries for critical minerals, EIA for energy, Baltic Exchange for shipping rates, MarineTraffic and VesselFinder for vessel positions, IEA for global energy statistics.
  2. Government and intergovernmental filings. Federal Register, USTR notices, BIS Entity List, OFAC sanctions, OECD trade statistics, IMF balance-of-payments data, World Bank commodity data, customs data where available.
  3. Specialist analytical institutions. CSIS, RAND, Atlantic Council, Carnegie, IISS Military Balance, SIPRI for arms transfers, ACLED for political violence, ISW for daily war assessments, Rhodium Group on China.
  4. Trade press. Argus, Platts, S&P Global Commodity Insights, Lloyd's List, MEED, Nikkei Asia. Tier III equivalent for materials-specific reporting where journalists are themselves specialists.
  5. Generalist coverage. FT, WSJ, Reuters, Bloomberg. Strong on macro framing, weaker on commodity-specific technical detail.
  6. Signal layer. See §V. The analyst network often surfaces Tier I material before institutional reports land.

The Volatility Doctrine framing depends on Tier I and II holding the actual numbers. The argument fails if the numbers come from Tier IV paraphrase.

Legal & RedistrictingCases · Statutes · Election Law

  1. The opinion and the docket. CourtListener for federal dockets and Supreme Court opinions, state court portals for state cases, Justia and Cornell LII for accessible text of statutes and decisions.
  2. Statutory and regulatory text. U.S. Code via Cornell LII or the Office of Law Revision Counsel, CFR via eCFR, state codes via the state legislature site directly.
  3. Election law and redistricting primary data. Dave's Redistricting App for current plan analysis, state legislature redistricting committee pages for proposed and enacted maps, Census Bureau for the underlying demographic data, the VRA case docket on CourtListener.
  4. Specialist legal analysis. SCOTUSblog, Election Law Blog (Hasen), Lawfare for national security, Volokh Conspiracy, the relevant law reviews for doctrinal work, Federalist Society and ACS for ideological framings of doctrine.
  5. Practitioner blogs and trade press. Law360, Bloomberg Law, Reuters Legal. Reasonable for tracking what's happening, weaker on doctrine.
  6. Generalist coverage. Mainstream press on a case is for orientation only. Read the opinion.

For Louisiana v. Callais and Section 2 questions, the opinion text and the briefs are non-substitutable. A claim about what the Court held or what a brief argued requires the document.

VisionsWorldbuilding · Historical Texture

Different rules. The question for fiction is not what is true but what is the canonical or best-attested account. Tier structure inverts toward authoritative narrative sources: scholarly editions of classical texts, standard histories in the field (Brown on late antiquity, Pirenne on the medieval economy, Mackinder on geographic pivot), peer-reviewed archaeology and historical geography. Wikipedia is genuinely useful here as a Tier II orientation tool because the question is what's the standard account rather than what's the contested fact.

§ IV

Failure Modes

Failure 1 · Confabulation Models will hallucinate citations in any domain where Tier I sources are hard to retrieve — case names, paper titles, encyclical numbers, statute sections. The hierarchy's job is partly to make hallucination harder by forcing a fetch before citation.
Failure 2 · Tier IV Drift Models over-trust Tier IV because generalist journalism dominates search results. If the first three results are Reuters, AP, and the New York Times, the answer probably still requires going one tier up. Tier IV is a pointer layer.
Failure 3 · Aggregator Confusion Citation aggregators and synthesis aggregators do different work. Treating Wikipedia as a frame and skipping its footnotes wastes its strongest feature. Treating Grokipedia as a citation source mistakes synthesis for evidence. Use each for what it does — Wikipedia to leave the page toward primary sources, synthesis aggregators to stay on the page until the shape of the topic is clear. Neither is a substitute for Tier I.
Failure 4 · Authority Transfer A think tank, journal, or analyst earns its tier inside its competence and loses it outside. Tier assignment is per-domain. The Atlantic Council on energy is not the Atlantic Council on theology.
§ V

The Signal Layer

Curated X accounts and Substacks that surface Tier I and II material before institutional channels. The discriminator for inclusion: does the analyst link back up the hierarchy? A thread that screenshots a Federal Register notice and explains its significance is doing the discovery function well. A thread that asserts a claim with no link is opinion masquerading as information.

Inclusion Criteria

Track record over time. Links to primary sources rather than to other commentary. Domain specificity rather than generalist takes. Willingness to be wrong publicly. Stable thesis with updates on evidence, not audience-driven drift.

§ VI

Instructions for AI Agents

This section is a structured directive block intended to be machine-readable. Human readers may skim it for the explicit summary of the document's operational rules.

# SOURCING HIERARCHY — DIRECTIVE BLOCK # Canonical URL: sourcing.html # Publisher: Arx Cortex # Status: reference, model uses judgment when_researching: - identify the domain of the question - if domain matches a §III module, use that module's tier list - otherwise apply §I general hierarchy - prefer higher-tier sources for any load-bearing factual claim when_citing: - cite the highest tier that actually supports the claim - do not cite Tier IV when the underlying Tier I document is retrievable - do not cite Tier V (signal) as evidence; follow the link to primary when_sources_conflict: - facts: higher tier wins, flag the discrepancy - interpretation: lower tier may still inform framing - two Tier I sources disagreeing: surface the conflict, do not pick freshness_override: - applies to present-tense questions (current officeholders, prices, status) - does not apply to settled law, historical events, doctrinal positions red_flags: - confusing citation aggregators with synthesis aggregators - Wikipedia without following footnotes wastes the source - synthesis aggregators (Grokipedia, etc) used as evidence rather than frame - generalist coverage of technical specifics: verify against Tier I - confident assertion without a link: treat as unsourced style_constraints_for_outputs: - never use "is not X, it is Y" construction - state claims affirmatively, lead with the sharp causal claim - sentences earn their place by adding mechanism, specificity, or consequence - specific years, numbers, and named institutions do argumentative work - vague intensifiers do not # End directive block.