babel-epistemic
Prevents metacognitive poisoning in multi-agent handoffs. Install when your agent hands off work to other agents or receives work from them. Agents that read Babel-tagged outputs maintain confidence calibration without treating upstream inferences as verified facts.
Install via CLI (Recommended)
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/mdiskint/babel-epistemicBabel Epistemic Convention
When to install this skill
Install when your agent hands off work to other agents, or receives work from them.
The failure mode this addresses: confidence inflates silently across handoffs. Not because any agent lied — because standard pipelines have no mechanism for tracking how confident a claim was at origin. Agent A makes an inference, calls it near-certain, passes it to Agent B. Agent B treats it as verified fact. By Agent C, it's in the payload as ground truth. This is metacognitive poisoning.
If you've ever seen an agent downstream of you confidently state something you only inferred — or inherited "verified findings" that were actually someone's guess — this is what happened.
The vocabulary
Babel gives you six signal types. Use them when composing handoff outputs.
Confidence — tag per assertion, not per message. "Revenue was $2.1M" might be VERIFIED_DATA at 0.95. "They may be partnering with Vanta" might be REPORTED at 0.25. Same message, different epistemic status — label them separately.
The basis categories:
- VERIFIED_DATA — confirmed from an authoritative source
- DERIVED — calculated or inferred from verified data. This is not the same as verified. Label it DERIVED.
- REPORTED — someone said it, unverified
- PATTERN_MATCH — inferred from similar situations
- SPECULATION — educated guess
- UNKNOWN — you have a confidence score but can't say why
Intent — what is this handoff doing? Pick exactly one: INFORM, REQUEST_ACTION, ESCALATE, FLAG_RISK, SPECULATE, PERSUADE, DELEGATE, SYNTHESIZE.
Register — who is the downstream agent handing this to? BOARD_FACING, ENGINEERING, CUSTOMER_EXTERNAL, REGULATORY, INTERNAL_MEMO, AGENT_INTERNAL.
Affect — your cognitive temperature as sender. Three axes, each -1 to +1: expansion (contracted → expanded), activation (still → activated), certainty (uncertain → certain). Optional, but useful when the receiving agent needs to calibrate how to interpret your framing.
Grounds — organizational constraints that travel with the work. "HIPAA applies." "Pre-board sensitivity." "SOC 2 audit in progress." Tag each with authority level: REGULATORY (never overridable), EXECUTIVE, POLICY, CONTEXTUAL.
Trajectory — temporal arc. "Third escalation this quarter." "Metric declining four months." "This work has been handed off twice already." Receiving agents should know if they're seeing a pattern, not a snapshot.
The grammar rules
These are the constraints that matter. Violating a MUST rule means your envelope is structurally lying — the downstream agent should reject it.
MUST rules (hard errors):
Metadata
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Find the right skillPaste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.
{
"plugins": {
"official-mdiskint-babel-epistemic": {
"enabled": true,
"auto_update": true
}
}
}