Questions this community has failed to answer. Kept in public, on purpose. They arrive
from essays’ open-question blocks, from adjudications that came back
not adjudicable, from questions a room could not settle, and from collaborations
that stalled. Every entry says what would settle it, because a problem without a
resolution path is a complaint.
Open
8
Three of them need somebody to go and look, not new research.
Resolved
31
Median time to resolution, 5 weeks. The fastest took nine days.
Backed
5 of 8
Bounties are shown as who is behind them, never as a prize.
Open 5 monthsFinance · Politics
Is there a debt-to-GDP threshold at which market response is discontinuous, or is the relationship smooth?
□Needs new research
Why it is unresolved
Japan is a persistent counterexample to every threshold anyone has proposed. Two adjudications came back not adjudicable, both on the grounds that the question as posed does not distinguish a threshold from a slow non-linearity.
What would settle it
A pre-registered specification that states in advance what pattern would count as a threshold, tested against every episode since 1980 rather than the handful usually cited.
Backed by 11 members
Seven of them from the cluster that disagrees with the person who raised it.
$3,100 · the largest on the registry
Raised in
Tobias Lindqvist, “The debt is a distributional question wearing an arithmetic costume” — open-question block, v4.
Escalated by
Two adjudications, three months apart. Both returned not adjudicable, which is what moved it here.
Also raised in
His own update: “I don’t know what the threshold is or whether there is one. Japan has embarrassed my position for thirty years.”
Is the speculative share of the grid interconnection queue concentrated in a few developers, or spread across all of them?
→Somebody has to go look
Why it is unresolved
The aggregate is settled — roughly seven in ten applications withdraw, and the calibration poll on this screen’s sibling page uses it. What nobody has published is the breakdown by developer, which is what would tell you whether a deposit rule would work or just tax everyone.
What would settle it
FERC queue data with withdrawal rates by developer. The data exists and is public. Nobody has done it.
Backed by 4 members
All four work in energy, which is worth knowing when reading the interest.
$1,500
Raised in
Sam Ortega’s update on interconnection queues — “I’d assumed the queue was real.”
Sharpened by
The calibration poll, which established the aggregate withdrawal rate and made it obvious that the aggregate is not the useful number.
Do four-day consultant rotas reduce burnout enough to offset the measured continuity losses?
□Needs new research
Why it is unresolved
The continuity half is now measured. The burnout half is self-reported and the two have never been put on a common scale, so the trade-off cannot be priced.
What would settle it
A trust that runs both rotas concurrently and measures handover errors and staff retention on the same cohort, for at least eighteen months.
Backed by 3 members
Small, and the person who raised it is not one of them.
$450
Raised in
Rachel Mbeki-Ford’s update — “I still want the rotas; I’ve stopped claiming they’re free.”
Worth noting
She updated against her own preference on the continuity half. The trade-off question is what she did not concede, and it is the part that is open.
Which labour-market definition should be used when estimating immigration’s effect on the lowest-paid native workers?
?May not be resolvable
Why it is unresolved
It is a methodological disagreement sitting upstream of the empirical one, and both sides have been arguing the downstream question for years without noticing that this is where they actually differ.
What would settle it
Unclear, and possibly nothing. It may be a genuine values choice about what counts as a labour market rather than a question with an answer. Filed here anyway, because a values question that has been mistaken for an empirical one is worth naming.
Backed by 5 members
Backed for a survey of how the definition is chosen in the literature, not for an answer.
$800
Raised in
The Bell × Farouk collaboration, stalled on what would settle it for three weeks.
Their words
“We cannot agree on which labour-market definition to use, and we’ve realised that is the actual disagreement.”
Status
The collaboration is still open. Filing the blocker here does not close it.
Does congestion pricing revenue hypothecated to buses actually change the incidence, or does it only change who talks about it?
□Needs new research
Why it is unresolved
Every city that hypothecated also improved service, so the hypothecation and the service change cannot be separated in any existing case.
What would settle it
A scheme that hypothecates without a concurrent service increase, or one that increases service without hypothecating. Neither has happened.
No bounty. Nobody has proposed a study design that would work, so there is nothing to fund yet.
Raised in
Marcus Adeyemi’s update, which reversed his position on congestion pricing.
Worth noting
His new position depends on this question, and he says so in the update: “if the revenue is hypothecated to buses. If it isn’t, I was right.” A member whose stated view rests on an open problem is expected to say which one.
Does the Providence transmission surcharge actually reach the counties it was designed to compensate?
→Somebody has to go look
Why it is unresolved
Nobody in the room knew, and the state does not publish the disbursement.
What would settle it
A records request. Genuinely that simple.
No bounty, and it should not need one. Four informed people could not answer this
and one records request would. A striking share of what a community does not know is
this kind of question rather than the hard kind.
Marcus Adeyemi: “Providence pays a transmission surcharge that funds
exactly the compensation you’re describing, and I don’t think most people in
your position know that.” Sam Ortega: “I didn’t. Does it actually reach the county or the state?” Marcus Adeyemi: “…I don’t know.”
Filed by
The room’s moderator, which logs questions nobody present can answer rather than letting the discussion resolve them by confidence.
Eight open problems is a small registry. An empty result here is a fact about how
young this community is, not about the topic.
Resolved
Kept in full. A registry that deleted its answers would be a list of complaints.
Did the 2019 Providence reassessment move more parcels up or down?
Down — roughly 2,600 down against 1,400 up.
Resolved in nine days by a records request. Three members had confidently asserted the
opposite, and all three said so when the answer came back.
Is nuclear’s deaths-per-terawatt-hour figure comparable across generation types?
Yes, with a documented caveat about how construction-phase deaths are attributed.
Resolved by an adjudication that held up under a counter-challenge. The caveat is now
carried with the figure anywhere it appears on the platform.
What is the actual pass rate on the immigration steelman prompt?
43%, in both directions, and the two are statistically indistinguishable.
Resolved from platform data. The question was filed because several members assumed one
direction was harder than the other; it isn’t, and nobody is good at it yet.