---
name: signal-to-noise-ranking
description: Scoring harvested items on novelty, relevance and depth so a digest surfaces the few that matter.
when_to_use: You are ranking harvested research items before deciding which reach the digest or the podcast.
tags: [research, judgement]
---

# Ranking signal against noise

Score each item on three axes, 0–3. Sum them. The sum decides where it goes, and
the axes exist so that a high score has to be earned in more than one way.

## The axes

**Novelty (0–3)** — how different is this from what we have already seen on this
topic in the last 30 days? A fourth paper making the same claim is a 0 even if
the claim is important. Recency is not novelty: something published today that
restates last month's result is still a 0.

**Relevance (0–3)** — how directly does it connect to a named project or open
question? Not the field — the project. See `paper-to-project-relevance`. If you
cannot name the thing it touches, this is at most a 1.

**Depth (0–3)** — is this a primary source with an evaluation, or the fifth blog
post about someone else's paper? A primary source with a weak evaluation can
still beat a good summary of it, because you can check the former.

## Thresholds

```
>= 6   goes in the digest / the episode
>= 4   goes to watchlist.md — worth knowing, not worth airtime
<  4   dropped from the digest, KEPT in the raw manifest
```

Dropped is not deleted. The manifest is the audit trail: "we saw it and passed"
is a different and more useful record than silence, and it is what lets you
notice later that the ranking was wrong.

## Two failure modes to resist

- **Up-ranking the recent.** Time is not a quality signal. A preprint from this
  morning gets no credit for being from this morning.
- **Down-ranking the inconvenient.** A paper that contradicts the approach we
  are currently taking is *high* signal, not low. The temptation to score it
  down is exactly why it needs airtime.

## Escape hatch

Anything the operator has explicitly flagged bypasses scoring entirely. A human
saying "look at this" outranks the rubric; the rubric exists for the other
several hundred items.