Research team
The original nine disciplines × 15 paper-reading sub-agents are being replaced by a lean two-class team: generators who propose, and compute agents who run code. Evidence is clear that beyond a small panel, more agents degrade results.
The research team, rebuilt
The 2024–2026 evidence is clear: homogeneous multi-agent debate underperforms, and beyond a small panel more agents degrade results. The ceremonial roster of 10 leads × 15 prose-only sub-agents was retired to domain knowledge bases (workers cite them; nobody 'runs' them). In its place: seven heterogeneous roles, each owning a concrete artifact, with strict proposer ≠ scorer ≠ critic separation and parallel cold-briefed workers instead of sequential deliberation.
The Orchestrator routes each session on a lean context; the Philosopher of Science runs the adversarial admission gate. Both reason; neither writes the model code.
Cold-briefed workers whose output is an artifact: the Data Engineer owns the panel and feature pipelines, the ML/Forecasting Engineer owns variant construction, the Demographer owns age-structure features, the Calibration Auditor owns reliability and CI reporting, the Red-Team Forecaster owns the adversarial counter-case before any prediction is registered.
| Lead agent | Verdict | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Orchestrator | ROUTES | Lean-context session router; runs the integrity pre-flight and chooses the one move. |
| Data Engineer | OWNS DATA | The country-year panel, feature pipelines, and source caches — the role that broke the data constraint. |
| ML / Forecasting Engineer | OWNS THE ZOO | Builds and maintains the runnable variants and grooms the hypothesis backlog. |
| Demographer | NEW | Owns age-structure / youth-bulge / urbanization features (UN WPP) — feeds the structural-demographic variant. |
| Calibration Auditor | NEW | Reads reliability curves and confidence intervals after every session; flags train-vs-hold-out drift. |
| Red-Team Forecaster | NEW | Writes the adversarial counter-case before any prediction is registered. |
| Philosopher of Science | JUDGES ONLY | Owns the falsification register and the admission gate; pre-registers severe tests before scores are read — and never selects the work. |
| Legacy 10 leads | → KNOWLEDGE BASES | Cliodynamicist, Econophysicist, Stat Physicist, et al. survive as domain references the workers cite, not as dispatch targets. |
Below: the nine disciplines as they stand today, with their session histories. See the full redesign →
Layer 1 · Micro-Foundation
What drives individual human decisions?
Layer 2 · Evolutionary Constants
Which behavioral parameters are universal?
"Which parameters are fixed (genetic) vs. variable (cultural)?"
9 of 13 evolutionary constants (Theta_fixed) defined in Session 6, establishing the HYBRID model: Theta_total = Theta_fixed_floor + Theta_variable(culture, t).
"How does network topology determine whether perturbations go local or global?"
Social networks are NOT strongly scale-free: Broido & Clauset 2019 (Nature Comm) found 0% of social networks reach 'strong' scale-free classification — reclassified to truncated power-law with gamma_sf ~ 2.3.
"Do our micro-rules actually generate realistic macro-behavior?"
Most important conceptual advance since Session 1: the four Turchin secular cycle phases are temporal quadrants of ONE limit cycle (Hopf bifurcation), not four separate attractor basins — validated by Wittmann & Kuehn 2024 (PLOS ONE, 5/5).
Layer 3 · Macro-Dynamics
What are the large-scale historical laws?
"Which economic patterns exhibit phase transitions and power laws?"
Inverse cubic law (alpha_tail ~ 3.0): 40M+ data points, replicated across multiple markets (Gopikrishnan 1999, Gabaix 2003, methodology 5/5). This VALIDATES the FP+jump split: alpha_tail > 2 means finite variance for continuous dynamics, while alpha_war = 1.53 < 2 means infinite variance for crises.
"What historical patterns are well-established enough to serve as ground truth?"
Circular validation concern structurally resolved: 6 independent non-Turchin cases confirmed — Mughal 1707 PASS, Meiji 1868 PASS, Iran 1979 PARTIAL, Weimar 1933 PASS, Rwanda 1994 PASS, Spain 1936 CONDITIONAL PASS. Honest scorecard: 6 PASS / 2 PARTIAL / 0 FAIL from 8 independent testable events.
"How do formal and informal institutions alter the formula's predictions?"
Institutional constraint variable fully defined: I_t is a 5-free-dimensional vector (R_t, V_t, B_t, P_t, X_t; L_t = 1 − X_t derived) with per-equation drift modulations A_1–A_8, empirically grounded via V-Dem, Polity V, WGI, and Jones & Olken's death-in-office natural experiment.
Layer 4 · Formalization
The mathematical backbone
"What formal system encodes layers 1–3 into a predictive theory?"
Session 1: Framework defined as Fokker-Planck equation with jump process. 10D state vector, 3 order parameters, Turchin PSI composite. Core mathematical lineage: Weidlich 1971, Toscani 2006, Scheffer 2009, Turchin 2020.
"What is the theoretical limit of predictability for a social system of N agents?"
Predictability bounds: R² < 0.50 hard ceiling for aggregate social prediction (Martin et al. 2016, Science). Lyapunov time 5–20 years for macro-social dynamics. Fat-tail constraint: alpha_war = 1.53 < 2 means standard confidence intervals do not exist for the jump process component.
Layer 5 · Cross-Cutting
Epistemological oversight across all layers