Qualification: Accurate decisions in an uncertain world: collective cognition increases true positives while decreasing false positives

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-307 · 2026-08-08

Wolf and colleagues qualify Kaal's exploratory result. In a human predator-detection experiment, participants first decided alone and then observed the choices of other group members. Mean true positives rose from 0.564 to 0.751. Mean false positives fell from 0.166 to 0.113. The source therefore provides independent evidence that group interaction can change the composition of decision errors. The correspondence remains narrow. Wolf and colleagues studied a quorum response under conditionally independent personal information. Their intervention improved both sides of discrimination. It did not leave net discrimination unchanged. The study also did not examine autonomous agents, over-approval, unanimity, or herding. It does not validate Kaal's design, execution, or reported effect sizes.

• The response is limited to the three evidence-bound passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
• External evidence level: complete public nine-page journal article with Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, and exact page-bound full-text evidence.
• Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
• Wolf and colleagues study human participants in a visual predator-detection task. They do not study autonomous agents or work-product validation pools.
• The intervention exposed participants to others' choices. It was not a structured deliberation with exchanged reasons.
• The source found higher true-positive rates and lower false-positive rates. It therefore improved discrimination rather than leaving net discrimination unchanged.
• The source did not measure over-approval, unanimity, herding, or Kaal's registered outcomes.
• The source does not validate Kaal's preregistration, design, execution, effect sizes, confidence intervals, or causal interpretation.
• Five inherited Semantic Scholar identities remained rate-limited. Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, DataCite, Europe PMC, PubMed, and web literature supplied the bounded fresh English, German, and Spanish review.

Accurate decisions in an uncertain world: collective cognition increases true positives while decreasing false positives

kaal:claim:7261018-009
Wulf A. Kaal, Empirical Evaluation of the Agentic Reputation Substrate: Deliberation, the Composition of Error, and the Registered Measurement of Agency Costs in a Controlled Multi-Model Cohort (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261018
Source PDF sha256: 1d6cbe544bd0055133f7cf8ff308be4fde955867bd8dc764992b8d516af15fa8

Evidence: complete public nine-page journal article with Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, and exact page-bound full-text evidence
Review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.94
Mapping ambiguous: false

ai-and-agentsconsensus-and-securityrisk-and-incentivesscholarly-growth-coveragescholarly-literaturecollective-cognitionquorum-decisionserror-composition

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-12:scholarly-growth-7261018-009-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Canonical markdown sha256: 61ddb8b9bc8bf368b4389422e712fb1fc047eef1775c620e08db527eb6632751
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-307.md | sha256sum