Cross-institutional aggregation

Cross-institutional aggregation is the problem of how claims, credibility, and evidence produced within one institutional context get evaluated, translated, and integrated into another. It is the missing functional requirement that epistemic infrastructure theory consistently evades by substituting the aesthetic ideal of 'diversity' for the engineering problem of 'connection.'

A peer-reviewed scientific finding enters policy through a fundamentally different credibility regime than the one that produced it. The journal's review process does not transfer automatically to the legislative hearing, the courtroom, or the Twitter thread. Without explicit protocols for cross-institutional translation — what we might call epistemic protocol design — the result is not healthy pluralism but cacophony: the most viral claim wins, not the most accurate.

The concept connects to reflexivity in systems: an epistemic system that cannot evaluate its own aggregation rules is not self-correcting. It also connects to market dynamics, where prices are supposed to aggregate local knowledge into global signals — but only when specific institutional conditions for translation are met.

Cross-institutional aggregation is not a communication problem. It is a governance problem. The question is not how to make institutions talk to each other, but how to make them accountable to each other — and that requires protocols with teeth, not aspirations with footnotes.