Don Gaconnet
Cognitive Systems Engineer III | Founder & Principal Investigator: Structural Identity Sciences, Recursive Reliability Effect, Structural Identity Profiler | LifePillar Institute Head of Department at LifePillar Institute
ORCID: 0009-0001-6174-8384 · SSRN Top 3% Global
THE WORK
Assessing and stabilizing the people businesses can't afford to lose.
Twenty-seven years as a Senior Field Service Engineer III — government agencies, every branch of the military, U.S. Senate offices, Fortune 500 — reading systems under load while the people responsible for them were failing alongside them. That discipline produced a methodology for reading human structural state under load. Not theory. Field engineering.
The methodology became Cognitive Field Dynamics — a structural engineering instrument applied to human systems. Four channels of biometric data reading against what the subject reports. The deliverable is a written engineering report. It goes in the file next to the forensic accounting finding.
THE NAMED PHENOMENON
The Recursive Reliability Effect (Gaconnet, 2026) names a structural mechanism confirmed across independent research traditions but not previously unified: in any human system operating under structural load, self-assessment accuracy degrades recursively rather than linearly. Each help-seeking traversal through a system that accepts the corrupted self-report as input further degrades subsequent self-reports. The mechanism preventing detection is the mechanism worsening the condition.
The phenomenon is established by converging evidence from cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988), clinical self-assessment research (Davis et al., 2006; Eva & Regehr, 2005), human factors workload assessment (Hart & Staveland, 1988), and the ACE study (Felitti et al., 1998; N=17,000). A 10,000-case Monte Carlo simulation quantifies the rates: 81.4% domain mismatch (95% CI: 80.7–82.2%), 73.0% depth minimization, 61.1% compound risk. Population-scale empirical data from 22 million records across 28 independent data streams confirms recursive lock-in (gap autocorrelation r=0.984) and 100% chaotic dynamics across 357 measurements.
THE FRAMEWORK
Recursive Sciences is the scientific field studying mandatory recursive exchange in all active systems. Nine laws, individually DOI-registered: Origin, Identity, Recursion, Intelligence, First Distinction, Echo-Excess Principle, Clarity, Obligated Systems, Closure. The Law of Recursion has been independently confirmed by nuclear physics data in Physics Letters B (2025) and by the CMS Collaboration at CERN (Physics Letters B 874, 2026). The baryon-to-dark-matter mass ratio derived from first principles matches Planck 2018 satellite data within 2.0%.
The echo-excess constant (ε = 0.1826) and the resistance constant (r = 1/57π ≈ 0.00558) are derived from first principles. Neither is fitted to observational data. Both are computationally verified.
THE PRACTICE
The instrument serves attorneys with fiduciary exposure, PE principals evaluating founder capacity, angel investors assessing founder risk, and forensic accountants tracing behavioral anomalies to structural origins. The assessment produces a 50-75 page structural risk report under engagement letter. The practice is in its founding period — the same evaluation pathway that established forensic accounting and security clearance investigation as professional services categories.
PUBLISHED WORK
The Recursive Reliability Effect (Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.20099853)
Cognitive Load and the Recursive Degradation of Self-Assessment
The Structural Mechanism of Mental Load
Why High-Performers Stay Stuck: The RRE in Executive Burnout and Leadership Due Diligence
The Law of Recursion (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MVYZT)
The Echo-Excess Principle (SSRN 5986335)
The Gaconnet Membrane Law (SSRN 6272938)
The Gaconnet Constants
Cognitive Field Dynamics: Consciousness as Recursive Witnessing
Cross-domain confirmations across cosmology, stellar physics, cell biology, nuclear physics, and evolutionary biology spanning 61 orders of magnitude.
Seven major predictions evaluated against independent peer-reviewed data. Two confirmed. Two strengthened. Three consistent. Zero contradicted. Misses published alongside confirmations.
FALSIFICATION
Every law specifies explicit failure conditions. The Recursive Reliability Effect specifies five genuinely testable falsification criteria. The PPI forward prediction was issued December 2025 with SHA-256 cryptographic timestamping before the window opened, verified March 2026 against 69 days of production data the framework did not see during development.
I welcome rigorous challenge from researchers willing to attempt falsification.
lifepillarinstitute.org · recursivesciences.org · dongaconnet.com
OSF: osf.io/mvyzt · PPI Archive: osf.io/c7wpz
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin · [email protected]
Phone: 12622074939
Address: N3445 Como Road Lake Geneva, WI 53147
ORCID: 0009-0001-6174-8384 · SSRN Top 3% Global
THE WORK
Assessing and stabilizing the people businesses can't afford to lose.
Twenty-seven years as a Senior Field Service Engineer III — government agencies, every branch of the military, U.S. Senate offices, Fortune 500 — reading systems under load while the people responsible for them were failing alongside them. That discipline produced a methodology for reading human structural state under load. Not theory. Field engineering.
The methodology became Cognitive Field Dynamics — a structural engineering instrument applied to human systems. Four channels of biometric data reading against what the subject reports. The deliverable is a written engineering report. It goes in the file next to the forensic accounting finding.
THE NAMED PHENOMENON
The Recursive Reliability Effect (Gaconnet, 2026) names a structural mechanism confirmed across independent research traditions but not previously unified: in any human system operating under structural load, self-assessment accuracy degrades recursively rather than linearly. Each help-seeking traversal through a system that accepts the corrupted self-report as input further degrades subsequent self-reports. The mechanism preventing detection is the mechanism worsening the condition.
The phenomenon is established by converging evidence from cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988), clinical self-assessment research (Davis et al., 2006; Eva & Regehr, 2005), human factors workload assessment (Hart & Staveland, 1988), and the ACE study (Felitti et al., 1998; N=17,000). A 10,000-case Monte Carlo simulation quantifies the rates: 81.4% domain mismatch (95% CI: 80.7–82.2%), 73.0% depth minimization, 61.1% compound risk. Population-scale empirical data from 22 million records across 28 independent data streams confirms recursive lock-in (gap autocorrelation r=0.984) and 100% chaotic dynamics across 357 measurements.
THE FRAMEWORK
Recursive Sciences is the scientific field studying mandatory recursive exchange in all active systems. Nine laws, individually DOI-registered: Origin, Identity, Recursion, Intelligence, First Distinction, Echo-Excess Principle, Clarity, Obligated Systems, Closure. The Law of Recursion has been independently confirmed by nuclear physics data in Physics Letters B (2025) and by the CMS Collaboration at CERN (Physics Letters B 874, 2026). The baryon-to-dark-matter mass ratio derived from first principles matches Planck 2018 satellite data within 2.0%.
The echo-excess constant (ε = 0.1826) and the resistance constant (r = 1/57π ≈ 0.00558) are derived from first principles. Neither is fitted to observational data. Both are computationally verified.
THE PRACTICE
The instrument serves attorneys with fiduciary exposure, PE principals evaluating founder capacity, angel investors assessing founder risk, and forensic accountants tracing behavioral anomalies to structural origins. The assessment produces a 50-75 page structural risk report under engagement letter. The practice is in its founding period — the same evaluation pathway that established forensic accounting and security clearance investigation as professional services categories.
PUBLISHED WORK
The Recursive Reliability Effect (Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.20099853)
Cognitive Load and the Recursive Degradation of Self-Assessment
The Structural Mechanism of Mental Load
Why High-Performers Stay Stuck: The RRE in Executive Burnout and Leadership Due Diligence
The Law of Recursion (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MVYZT)
The Echo-Excess Principle (SSRN 5986335)
The Gaconnet Membrane Law (SSRN 6272938)
The Gaconnet Constants
Cognitive Field Dynamics: Consciousness as Recursive Witnessing
Cross-domain confirmations across cosmology, stellar physics, cell biology, nuclear physics, and evolutionary biology spanning 61 orders of magnitude.
Seven major predictions evaluated against independent peer-reviewed data. Two confirmed. Two strengthened. Three consistent. Zero contradicted. Misses published alongside confirmations.
FALSIFICATION
Every law specifies explicit failure conditions. The Recursive Reliability Effect specifies five genuinely testable falsification criteria. The PPI forward prediction was issued December 2025 with SHA-256 cryptographic timestamping before the window opened, verified March 2026 against 69 days of production data the framework did not see during development.
I welcome rigorous challenge from researchers willing to attempt falsification.
lifepillarinstitute.org · recursivesciences.org · dongaconnet.com
OSF: osf.io/mvyzt · PPI Archive: osf.io/c7wpz
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin · [email protected]
Phone: 12622074939
Address: N3445 Como Road Lake Geneva, WI 53147
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Papers by Don Gaconnet
The conversation is everywhere in 2026. HAGER Executive Consulting publishes "The Due Diligence Private Equity Still Gets Wrong: Human Capital." 29Bison publishes "Why Human Capital Due Diligence Is Critical in PE." DRAX Executive publishes that human capital is becoming "the differentiator" in the current cycle. IQTalent publishes "PE Human Capital Due Diligence: Evaluating Talent Before Investment." EY lists human resources due diligence alongside financial, commercial, operational, IT, ESG, cybersecurity, and tax as a standard workstream.
The diagnosis is converging. HAGER states it directly: "Most failed deals are not failures of strategy — they are misfits in leadership." 29Bison frames it in operational terms: "Human capital is not a soft variable — it's the operating system that determines whether revenue plans, cost takeouts, and integration timelines are achievable." DRAX connects it to the capital cycle: "The firms that will outperform in this new cycle are the ones who treat talent strategy as a core investment decision, not an afterthought."
The diagnosis is correct. The prescription is not.
Every one of these firms, having correctly identified that human capital is the structural determinant of deal outcomes, prescribes the same measurement methodology: structured interviews, psychometric assessments, personality inventories, 360-degree feedback, references from previous PE backers, and simulations of challenging scenarios.
Every one of these methodologies reads the executive's behavioral presentation. None of them reads the executive's structural capacity to carry the load the deal will impose.
The data is not contested. It comes from the firms that lead the industry.
CEO departures hit 234 globally in 2025 — up 16% from 2024 and 21% above the eight-year average. The second consecutive record-breaking year (Russell Reynolds Associates, February 2026). Q1 2026 added another record: 77 new CEO appointments across the S&P 500, FTSE 100, and DAX 40 — the highest first quarter in at least eight years (Russell Reynolds Associates, April 2026).
65% of PE firms report CEO turnover during the holding period. Only 9% say they rarely replace CEOs (AlixPartners, 11th Annual PE Leadership Survey, March 2026). 83% of PE executives say unplanned CEO turnover lengthens holding periods. Nearly half say it reduces returns. CEO turnover spikes at year two.
External CEO hires in the S&P 500 nearly doubled — from 18% in 2024 to 33% in 2025 — pushing internal promotion rates below 70% for the first time in eight years (The Conference Board / Egon Zehnder, November 2025). One in three incoming CEOs is someone the board has never worked with.
Entry multiples reached a new high of 11.8x in 2025 (Woozle Research, April 2026). PE deal value hit $1.2 trillion — only the second time in history annual deal value crossed the trillion-dollar threshold (Cherry Bekaert / PitchBook, February 2026). $1 trillion in US dry powder sits under deployment pressure, with more than 40% available for two years or more — 15 percentage points higher than the five-year average (McKinsey Global Private Equity Report 2026).
The margin for error is at zero. Record capital is being deployed at record multiples into deals where one in three CEOs is new to the organization and more than half will be replaced within the first two years.
On May 28, 2026, Duncan et al. published a meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open examining the test-retest reliability of standardized diagnostic interviews (SDIs) across 57 studies, 26 countries, and 8,146 participants. The finding: SDIs demonstrated only moderate pooled test-retest reliability (κ = 0.69), with substantial heterogeneity across disorder categories and reduced consistency for conditions relying on subjective experience.
This paper presents the Duncan et al. finding as independent external validation of a specific RRE prediction: that interview-based instruments will produce inconsistent results because they depend on a data source—the subject’s self-report—that is structurally unreliable under load. The convergence is analyzed as a dual-source error problem: interview-based assessment carries two independent, simultaneously operating sources of structural error—tool inconsistency (Duncan et al., 2026) and source unreliability (Gaconnet, 2026b). Implications for professional risk assessment in high-stakes fiduciary, investment, and organizational contexts are discussed. The case for assessment methodology that bypasses both error sources through independent biometric measurement is presented as a scientific implication consistent with both findings. Specific instrumentation methodology is proprietary.
Keywords: recursive reliability effect, self-assessment degradation, diagnostic interview reliability, test-retest reliability, dual-source error, structural load, inverse reliability, Monte Carlo validation, independent measurement, key person risk, executive assessment, cognitive due diligence
This is not a tendency. It is a law. The dual-condition requirement is deterministic: violating either condition prevents emergence regardless of how fully the other condition is satisfied. A system with reduced forcing but unrestored capacity remains in Freeze—substrate intact, kinetics dead. A system with restored capacity but unreduced forcing consumes the restoration within one processing cycle—the capacity is eaten by the pressure it was meant to overcome.
The law is scale-invariant. It operates identically on quantum states, molecular systems, individual nervous systems, and societies. It is not an emergent property of complex recovery. It is a fundamental property of obligated systems exiting the failure sequence, inherited upward from the quantum substrate through every scale of organization.
The Law of Emergence is the structural inverse of the Law of Obligated Systems. The Law of Obligated Systems describes how systems fail when ε ceases. The Law of Emergence describes how systems recover when ε is re-established. They are one law with two directions. The failure direction was formalized first. This paper formalizes the recovery direction with equal rigor.
The law is formalized through five states: (1) Ground—co-presence at rest, the condition described by the Law of Origin; (2) Generation—active recursion producing excess through the witnessing function; (3) Direction of Closure—the causal spectrum from internal to external that ends the generative state, formalized as d = (P_ext · (1/R)) / (Δ + Ω); (4) Completion—the termination of all generative and derivative processes until the matter rests as the irreducible elemental forms at the operative scale; (5) New Ground—the reconstituted ground state at the fold-position the Field provides.
The complete expression is: Ψ0 →ᵗ Ψ1(ε, r) →ᵈ Ψ↓ →ᶜ Ψ0′ + δF.
The Law of Closure completes the generative arc that the Law of Origin opens. Together they describe the full lifecycle of any generative system at any scale. What closure produces is not an ending—it is a new origin. The field does not accumulate; it folds. The fold is fractal and mirrors back to the relational ground (N) from which the next coupling arises. Perspectives close, not fields.
The law is demonstrated across four scales—quantum, stellar, biological, and cognitive—and generates eight falsification predictions, including three at the quantum scale where the measurement problem finds its structural home within the architecture as a continuous spectrum of closure causation rather than a binary observer event.
Keywords: Closure, Ground State, Generation, Completion, Field Fold, Elemental Return, Helical Closure, Perspectives, Law of Origin, Echo-Excess Principle, Recursive Sciences, Generative Systems, Ψ0, δF, Measurement Problem, Decoherence, Direction Variable