# PARS Code of Conduct

## Our Commitment

The **PARS — Poole Adaptive Reasoning Stack** community exists to explore, test, improve, challenge, and apply evidence-bounded reasoning and verification methods.

We are committed to providing a welcoming, professional, and productive environment for everyone who participates, regardless of experience level, background, identity, profession, technical perspective, or opinion about PARS itself.

Participation in this community does **not** require agreement with PARS, its architecture, its claims, or its creator.

Constructive disagreement is welcome.

Evidence that challenges an existing claim is welcome.

Failed experiments are welcome.

Good-faith criticism is welcome.

Personal attacks are not.

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## Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to a healthy PARS community include:

- Treating other participants with respect.
- Critiquing ideas, claims, experiments, implementations, and evidence rather than attacking people.
- Asking questions in good faith.
- Clearly distinguishing facts, observations, assumptions, hypotheses, interpretations, and speculation.
- Providing evidence or reproducible details when making strong technical claims.
- Acknowledging uncertainty when evidence is incomplete.
- Correcting mistakes when better evidence becomes available.
- Sharing negative or failed experimental results when they are relevant.
- Giving appropriate credit for ideas, code, research, experiments, and contributions.
- Helping newcomers understand PARS without expecting them to already know its terminology or architecture.
- Being open to competing explanations and alternative approaches.
- Respecting reasonable disagreement about methodology, interpretation, architecture, and research direction.

Examples of unacceptable behavior include:

- Harassment, intimidation, threats, or sustained personal hostility.
- Personal insults or attacks directed at contributors, maintainers, researchers, or community members.
- Discrimination or derogatory comments based on protected or personal characteristics.
- Sexual harassment or unwanted sexual attention.
- Deliberately disrupting discussions, issues, pull requests, or experiments.
- Repeatedly posting inflammatory material with no substantive connection to the project.
- Publishing another person's private information without permission.
- Impersonating another person or misrepresenting their statements.
- Knowingly fabricating experimental results, evidence, citations, hashes, provenance, benchmark outcomes, or reproduction claims.
- Presenting another person's work as your own.
- Deliberately manipulating evidence while representing it as an honest PARS experiment.
- Using technical disagreement as a justification for abuse or harassment.
- Retaliating against someone for reporting a legitimate concern.

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## Rigorous Disagreement Is Allowed

PARS is a research-oriented project.

Technical disagreement is therefore expected and encouraged.

Participants may challenge:

- PARS architecture;
- experimental methodology;
- benchmark design;
- verification procedures;
- evidence classifications;
- provenance claims;
- reasoning methods;
- implementation decisions;
- documentation;
- published conclusions;
- the usefulness of PARS itself.

Statements such as:

> “I do not think this evidence supports the claim.”

> “This benchmark appears to have a confounding variable.”

> “I reproduced the experiment and obtained a different result.”

> “I think this mechanism is unnecessary.”

> “Here is a counterexample.”

are legitimate forms of participation.

Disagreement becomes unacceptable when it is transformed into harassment, personal degradation, threats, deliberate disruption, or repeated bad-faith conduct.

**Attack the claim. Attack the experiment. Attack the assumptions. Do not attack the person.**

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## Evidence Integrity

Because PARS places unusual emphasis on verification, provenance, falsification, and bounded claims, evidence integrity is especially important to this community.

When publishing experiments or results, contributors should make a reasonable effort to distinguish:

- **Observed** — directly witnessed or measured.
- **Inferred** — concluded from available evidence.
- **Verified** — supported by an appropriate verification procedure.
- **Unverified** — not yet independently or adequately established.
- **Unknown** — evidence is insufficient to determine the result.

Mistakes are not misconduct.

Experiments fail.

Measurements can be wrong.

Interpretations can change.

Finding and correcting those errors is part of research.

Deliberately manufacturing or altering evidence while representing it as genuine, however, is incompatible with participation in the project.

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## AI-Generated Contributions

AI-assisted and AI-generated contributions are welcome.

Contributors remain responsible for what they submit.

The use of an AI system does not remove the expectation that contributors:

- review their contribution;
- avoid knowingly false claims;
- disclose important uncertainty when appropriate;
- respect licenses and attribution requirements;
- avoid fabricated citations or experimental evidence;
- verify acceptance-critical claims when verification is reasonably possible.

AI output should not be treated as evidence merely because a model produced it.

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## Research and Safety

PARS may be used to investigate difficult technical problems.

Contributors should exercise reasonable care when sharing material involving:

- security vulnerabilities;
- dangerous operational procedures;
- private or sensitive information;
- credentials or access tokens;
- malicious code;
- personally identifiable information;
- systems they do not own or have permission to test.

Do not post secrets, private credentials, access tokens, personal data, or other material that should not be public.

Security vulnerabilities should be reported through any security reporting process documented by the repository rather than publicly disclosed when disclosure could create unnecessary risk.

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## Scope

This Code of Conduct applies to participation in official PARS community spaces, including:

- GitHub Discussions;
- Issues;
- Pull Requests;
- code review;
- repository comments;
- project-maintained communication channels;
- project events or collaborative activities;
- other spaces where an individual is clearly representing the PARS project.

It may also apply when conduct outside these spaces directly and materially affects the safety or functioning of the PARS community.

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## Maintainer Responsibilities

Project maintainers are responsible for interpreting and enforcing this Code of Conduct in a fair and proportionate manner.

Maintainers may take actions including:

1. Providing an informal reminder.
2. Requesting that specific behavior stop.
3. Editing or removing inappropriate content where platform capabilities allow.
4. Locking or limiting a discussion.
5. Rejecting or closing contributions.
6. Issuing a formal warning.
7. Temporarily restricting participation.
8. Permanently banning an individual from project-controlled community spaces.

Enforcement should focus on behavior rather than technical opinions.

A contributor should not be penalized merely for:

- disagreeing with a maintainer;
- criticizing PARS;
- publishing a failed reproduction;
- presenting evidence against a project claim;
- proposing a competing architecture;
- questioning an experiment;
- challenging the creator's conclusions.

No contributor, including the project's creator or maintainers, is exempt from the behavioral expectations of this Code of Conduct.

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## Reporting

If you experience or observe behavior that violates this Code of Conduct, please report it privately to the project maintainers whenever possible.

For matters that can safely be discussed publicly, you may also bring the issue to a maintainer's attention through the appropriate GitHub channel.

When making a report, include whatever information is reasonably available, such as:

- where the incident occurred;
- what happened;
- relevant links or screenshots;
- whether the behavior is ongoing;
- any additional context that may help evaluate the situation.

Reports should be handled with appropriate discretion.

Knowingly false reports made for the purpose of harassment or retaliation may themselves violate this Code of Conduct.

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## Enforcement Principles

When evaluating a report, maintainers should consider:

- severity;
- intent;
- impact;
- whether the conduct is repeated;
- whether previous warnings were issued;
- whether the participant corrected their behavior;
- risks to affected community members;
- risks to the integrity of the project.

Enforcement should be proportionate to the conduct.

The objective is to preserve a community where difficult ideas can be examined seriously without requiring participants to tolerate abuse.

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## A Community Built Around Falsifiability

PARS is built around the idea that conclusions should survive contact with evidence.

The community should work the same way.

We should be able to disagree strongly, challenge important claims, identify failures, overturn assumptions, and change our minds without turning disagreement into hostility.

The strongest contribution to PARS may sometimes be proof that something in PARS is wrong.

That contribution deserves to be evaluated on its evidence.

**Be rigorous. Be skeptical. Be constructive. Respect the people doing the work.**
