referee-sim — the frame linter

Fact-checking and frame-checking are different audits. A verification pass confirms every sentence is true; this pass checks what a reader concludes. A document whose every claim is sourced can still mislead by assembly: the caveats live in the body while impressions form in the abstract; the comparison is honest but the baseline is one nobody uses; the theorem is real but the reader leaves believing it covers the case it excludes. That exact failure can survive multiple honesty passes and surface only when an outside expert finally reads the document — the expensive way to catch it, because by then the impression has already formed in the one reader whose report matters.

This is an audit of the IMPLICATURE — what each kind of reader walks away believing — run before anyone outside sees the document. Run your sentence-level style and honesty linter separately; the two passes catch disjoint failures, and neither substitutes for the other.

Procedure

1. Enumerate the audiences, explicitly and in writing

List every community that could plausibly write a report on this document. Sources for the list, in order:

• The introduction's "this matters to X, Y, and Z" sentence. That sentence is a contract; every community it names gets an audit row.
• Every community whose methods the document borrows. Using their machinery invokes their standards, whether or not the document ever addresses them.
• Every community whose results the document takes as input or uses as a comparison.
• The incumbent: whoever currently does the thing the document claims to do better, faster, or differently. This audience exists even when the introduction never mentions them — especially then.
• The practitioner who would act on the result, whose question is never "is it interesting" but "what breaks if I rely on this."
• The venue's general reader, who determines which claims must survive without the surrounding expertise.