D-0000 · How decisions are made here
On what basis does SeferGraph decide anything?
First principles and pragmatism — not academic-first and not Torah-scholarship-first; both are inputs, cited side by side. Every decision here is the owner's working opinion and is, by definition, always subservient to Daas Torah.
| Status | Ruled by the owner |
| Set | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 12:53 |
| Recorded in | held c821b219 |
| Rests on | — |
| Affects | every decision in this register |
| Would change if | Nothing in this register can override it; Daas Torah overrides anything in it. |
Why
A library of seforim meets two strong traditions of knowing — the Torah world's and the academy's. Starting from either one would quietly make it the judge of the other. Starting from first principles keeps both as evidence, quoted side by side with their sources, and decides on what can be checked and what works.
How it works
- Every choice is written down as a named assumption: its value, who set it, when, what it rests on, and what would change it. Nothing that shapes a result is left unstated.
- Changing an assumption forks the results; it never rewrites them. The old results stay, dated, beside the new.
- Common-sense checks run as separate layers (a book cannot quote a book written after it; a commentary is not older than what it comments on). Where the layers agree, nobody needs to look. Where they disagree, that is the short list — and it usually points at an assumption, not at a case.
- A person rules on assumptions, not on individual cases.
Subservient to Daas Torah
These are working decisions for building a tool. Where Daas Torah rules on a question, its ruling stands and the assumption here changes to match.
What rests on this
- D-0001 · The Hebrew year is primary
- D-0002 · Seder Olam is the primary count
- D-0004 · Record first, trust later
- D-0005 · Tanach first, the Chumash as the first layer
- D-0006 · Shaped by walking through real use
- D-0011 · What counts as the same word
- D-0016 · The experiments section is called SeferLab
Generated from the register (docs/decisions/0000-how-we-decide.md). A changed value is recorded as a new entry; the old one is never overwritten.