Procedural rules for information offer conventions, not objective truth, for interpreting agents’ data.

Evidence

Norms about disclosure apply particularly to agents in information dissemination and interpretation roles, for example, journalists, accountants, or scientists. Procedural regulations embellish the norm. They touch issues such as standards of proof (corroboration, replication, or second opinions), sampling, randomization, surprise or spontaneity, control groups, statistical inference (or other assessments of validity, reliability, alternative interpretations, side effects), confidentiality or the proprietary nature of information, and the threshold (what is material, what can be omitted) and timing of disclosure. These rules for gathering and disseminating information do not generate objective truth, of course, but do provide a set of explicit conventions by which principals can interpret the data offered by agents. — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ideas about trust-in-epistemology, e.g. O’Neill’s work on trust and accountability in science and journalism. — connects to: Rules without concrete instances are meaningless hindrances — Burton, Steven J, An Introduction to Law and Legal…, 148; Procedural norms substitute for outcome-control when agent behavior is hard to specify.; Quantification always depends on contested conventions, not neutral measurement. — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 10
• ADDENDUM: Relates to how journalistic/scientific process norms act as verification infrastructure, echoing the trust-building mechanisms in the trees-as-infrastructure piece.

Related

• Procedural norms substitute for outcome-control when agent behavior is hard to specify. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Procedural norms substitute for outcome-control when agent behavior is hard to specify. #expands (0.80)
• Rules without concrete instances are meaningless hindrances #expands (0.75) — Burton, Steven J, An Introduction to Law and Legal…, 148