Case kinds — What kind of thing a CASE is, beside how much of it is fact (standing). The two are orthogonal (ADR-042).
Thought experiment — an imagined scenario, usually a contrast that holds everything fixed but one thing, used to test an intuition or a concept.
42 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-002 | Northstar classification: who decides an incident is severe | A severe-incident rule with strong precedence, whose force depends on which team controls severity classification, plus a business-critical override held by senior management (Sections 5.3–5.5). | Active |
| CASE-003 | Northstar-A and Northstar-B: same policy, same evidence, different escalation authority | Two versions held constant in attitudes, policy, monitoring and evidence, differing only in whether a specialist’s objection suspends deployment (Section 5.1). The paper’s controlled contrast. | Active |
| CASE-006 | Open Horizon | A fictional cooperative founded for openness and public benefit whose sustaining mechanisms come to outweigh its mission as it grows (A31): persistence through turnover with the founding intentions lost. | Active |
| CASE-012 | The modernized refrains of Henley’s Villon | Invented modern refrains for Henley’s ballade (A6–A9), each a different speaker: “You blow it all on sex and booze”, “By Monday morning, you’re broke again”, “The party always gets its cut”, “The high life eats your paycheck”. Two survive as the manuscript’s opening example (§1). | Active |
| CASE-013 | The reluctant writer | A writer sincerely committed to finishing an article while avoidance governs the afternoon; who later blocks distracting websites. The individual-scale case (Sections 1, 3.5). | Active |
| CASE-018 | ”You blow it all on sex and booze”, said by a friend, a parent, a judge, a comedian | The same sentence attributed to different speakers (A12, A18, A24): one teases, another reproaches, another condemns, another entertains. Words held fixed, act changed. Survives as the joke/reprimand contrast (§2) and the social-alignment manipulation of Case III (§10). | Active |
| CASE-022 | A rendering that keeps the solidarity–criticism ambiguity open, and one that settles it | A34 §4 and A48 §7.5: two renderings with similar static profiles, one of which stays sensitive to a later affiliative framing because it sustains the ambiguity, while the other has already fixed the speaker as condemning. The concrete mechanism behind dynamical fidelity; dropped at outline v4. | Active |
| CASE-023 | Northstar | A fictional software company whose stated policy gives reliability priority over release speed, and whose escalation and authority structures may make speed effective anyway. The paper’s worked case, in several variants. | Active |
| CASE-025 | Verdant Compute | A fictional compute company whose decarbonization-minded workforce operates an organization whose market position drives fossil-fuel demand (A31). Shows the whole’s operative direction diverging from the average of its members’ intentions. | Active |
| CASE-026 | Modern slang that makes the insider sound like an outsider imitating the subculture | A35 §7: replacing Henley’s argot with contemporary slang may keep the poem intelligible while making the speaker sound like an outsider, so the audience understands the observation and loses the complicity. Interpretive fidelity kept, performative fidelity lost. | Active |
| CASE-027 | Henley translated perfectly in the voice of an academic sociologist | A12’s thought experiment: every term rendered exactly, every proposition kept, but the speaker made to sound like an academic sociologist. Something fundamental has changed, so keeping the proposition is not sufficient. | Active |
| CASE-033 | Driving home while daydreaming | The owner’s case at U26: driving home with access to the road and to a daydream, arriving with no memory of the drive. Compartmented access, not unconsciousness. | Active |
| CASE-034 | The thermostat and the adaptive controller | Systems that regulate, and even alter their own regulatory parameters, without warranting attribution of an agent. The stock counterexample to will as regulation. | Active |
| CASE-036 v2 | Northstar emergency governance that sustains itself | A service failure activates emergency governance whose restrictions defer maintenance, generating anomalies that satisfy the emergency criteria and keep the restrictions in place (Section 6.1). | Active |
| CASE-039 | Who crosses the meeting point first? Two craft near light speed, and the relativity of simultaneity | The owner’s U47: two craft approach each other near light speed, and each frame is said to answer that it crosses the meeting point first, so the local interpretations cannot be glued. A164 corrected the physics. Read either way, the owner’s own scenario has an invariant answer; only spacelike-separated events change order between frames, and there the frames are reconciled by a Lorentz transformation. Standard special relativity; the scenario is the owner’s. | Active |
| CASE-043 | Data written for a future reader and never read | The owner’s variant of the tree in the woods (2026-10-11). Someone writes a record (a note, a log, a letter, a backup) for a reader they expect, and it is never read. Unlike the tree, the write was made for someone. Used to separate when a message’s intended meaning is fixed from when its fidelity is measured. | Active |
| CASE-044 | The thermostat: Dennett’s knife edge between agent and device | An ordinary thermostat holding a room at a setpoint. Dennett calls it the simplest artifact that can sustain the intentional stance, and Orseau et al. place it “on the knife edge”: “if temperature is below the command, start heating” and “make sure the temperature is close to the command” are descriptions of comparable simplicity. It is the permissiveness objection’s standard case, here given a code at its second appearance after CLAIM-010. | Active |
| CASE-048 v2 | The same film joke, seen as a child and again as an adult | The owner’s case (2026-10-11): one person watches a scene in a family film or show as a child and again as an adult, and the joke means something different the second time. The artefact is unchanged, and so is the person in the sense of numerical identity. Only the receiver’s state has changed. It is a test for whether meaning is fixed at the write or made at the read. | Active |
| CASE-049 | A tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it | The old puzzle, filed so its variants have something to vary. A physical event happens with no perceiver. Whether it “made a sound” turns on whether sound means the vibration or the hearing. Nothing in it was made for anyone, and that is the respect the storage variant changes. | Active |
| CASE-050 | The all-hands: a corporate event as a synchronization mechanism for the firm | The owner’s case (2026-10-11): a company all-hands or offsite as a mechanism that synchronizes a “corporate entity”, a kind of self. The teams’ priorities have drifted apart, and the event re-couples them. It is the firm-scale counterpart of the session’s individual routes: entrainment by co-presence, a record written for later readers, and incentives realigned. Whether the firm so synchronized is a self is the open question, not something the case settles. | Active |
| CASE-051 | The absorbed writer | The reluctant writer (CASE-013) on a third afternoon. The draft is going well and email stays open and unblocked, but it does not win, and no rule or device is invoked. A notification breaks the spell, and getting back in takes effort. It shows integration with nothing to integrate, beside the lapse and the precommitment. | Active |
| CASE-057 | Swapping the two persons of a dyad: nonreciprocal T/V address is changed by the swap and reciprocal address is not, with a constructed French–English dyad and a three-person teasing round | Built on a documented distinction. In Brown and Gilman’s account of T/V address, power address is nonreciprocal (the superior says T and receives V) and solidarity address is reciprocal, so swapping the two persons changes the first act and leaves the second fixed. Two constructions extend it. A master-and-servant dyad in French and in modern English is changed by the swap in one realization and fixed by it in the other. A three-person teasing round gives a group whose automorphism can swap characters, so the anchoring of CLAIM-249 has work to do. | Active |
| CASE-076 | Twin pattern-keepers: two systems keep the same pattern, one by its own responses and one through an external controller, and only removing the controller tells them apart | A10 §3.3’s paired design, the case behind QUESTION-086. Matching behaviour and persistence, different organization. Removing the controller destroys one system’s pattern and not the other’s. A10 then made it harder: the internal regulator at one scale is supported by other processes at another, so which side of the boundary the controller sits on depends on where the boundary is drawn. | Active |
| CASE-080 | The skeptic who delegates: a critic that cannot overturn an emerging consensus gives its authority to a process that can generate alternatives | A3 §6’s worked example. Four processes: an integrator and a decision- maker push toward a decision, a skeptic disagrees, and a generator can translate neglected evidence into new hypotheses. The skeptic does not try to win. It endorses the generator, whose hypotheses change the decision landscape. Used to show delegation as a route to one’s goals, and dissent made useful by a role. | Active |
| CASE-081 | Self-maintenance learned for a designer’s reward: a system that maintains itself because it was trained to, and later revises the policy and keeps maintaining itself without further instruction | A10 §6.1’s boundary case, “a system that learns to maintain itself only because an external designer rewards that behavior”, with its question whether the maintenance becomes endogenous “once the system can revise the policy and maintain the associated governance without continued external instruction”. It is the case CLAIM-288 is about, and the place where that objection could be answered. | Active |
| CASE-084 | The perfectly accountable false theory: a community whose record traces every commitment and whose vocabulary leaves out the right explanation | A6’s third case. Accountability without correctness, one of CLAIM-299’s three separations, and A6’s “direct companion to CLAIM-181 and CLAIM-190”. | Active |
| CASE-086 | The retracted finding and its descendants: an experiment fails to replicate years after three conclusions were built on it | A7’s sixth case, filed at the owner’s U7 as an illustration and not a test (“one or two of those might be handy to keep on hand too”). Tracing descendants of a defeated premise, which CLAIM-295 says a record of dependencies supports. | Active |
| CASE-090 | The rehabilitated hypothesis: an objection that displaced a hypothesis turns out to rest on a faulty measurement, and the hypothesis can be reopened because its defeat was recorded | A7’s seventh case, the companion to CASE-086 and filed with it. Reopening an alternative when its defeater is defeated. A12’s “defeat of a defeater” is the same case and is held here, as A12 itself proposed. | Active |
| CASE-094 | The LEGO bin: a brick owned in one copy and buried among hundreds of similar ones may as well not be owned, a black brick among white ones needs no bin of its own, and every brick can be found by going through the whole collection | The owner’s own parable, told on 2026-07-02 and kept verbatim in Mathematics of Meaning, where the owner paired it with the EMT case this record holds as CASE-085. It is the second time that case’s pattern has turned up, so it gets a code. It adds three things the EMT case lacks: similarity to binmates as the cause of the failure, copy count and frequency of use as what decides whether a bin is worth making, and exhaustive search as the reason presence is never in doubt. Stipulated: the collection is real, and its facts are taken on the owner’s account. | Active |
| CASE-096 | The smoothie: milk makes it better for a while and then worse, unless there is more of everything else | The owner’s line, the prompt the smoothie note in Part III of the LEGO monograph answers: “if I put milk in my smoothie, it gets More Good for a while until it gets Less Good, unless there’s more of all the other stuff.” The note’s first model reads it right: a preference over the milk fraction, single-peaked, kept by scaling everything together. Its second reading, in signal detection terms, has the direction wrong (CLAIM-309). Stipulated: the preference is the owner’s, taken on the owner’s word. | Active |
| CASE-109 | Two people with the same demanding commitment, the same output and the same effort in the work, who differ in how their intrapersonal conflict is settled: one escalates it to deliberate override, the other’s processes accommodate one another | The owner’s case, U45 of the exchange of 2026-10-17, worked by A45 as Person A (“repeated escalation”) and Person B (“local coordination”) on one writing project. Both exert real effort and produce work of equal quality; only the route by which conflict is settled differs. It is the variation CASE-013 and CASE-051 lack: there one writer’s effort varies across afternoons, here effort in the work is held high in both. It is used for CLAIM-358. Stipulated, so it shows what the claim distinguishes, not that people differ this way. | Active |
| CASE-113 v2 | A deep network under conventional training: competing losses, an external optimizer and a scheduler, with three architectures that move governance inward and crossed interventions that locate it | The owner’s application case, U30–U31 of the exchange of 2026-10-17: a deep network during training, taken apart with the record’s individuation and volition frameworks. A network is trained on tasks with conflicting gradients by an optimizer with its own state and a scheduler. A31’s Systems A, B and C move the regulation of conflict from the optimizer into the learner by stages, and its crossed interventions say where a regulatory condition sits. Stipulated: the outcomes of the interventions are not known, except the optimizer arm in THEORY-253’s solvable model. | Active |
| CASE-123 v2 | The regulator and two accounts: a formally independent regulator weighs two parties’ accounts of a risk, one party comes to supply more of the evidence it reads and the experts it trusts, and the credibility that party gains decides whose evidence is read next; with variants for a one-time perturbation, a press as the evaluator, and an objective that gives one property no weight | A20 §2 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, on the owner’s U20 (“reflexive control and regulatory capture”), with A21 §3’s press variant on the owner’s U21 and A26 §4’s evaluative variant. CASE-099’s linearization with institutional roles: m is the lean of the regulator’s reading, a the standing of the party it favours. A20: “This is an application of the formal model, not an established empirical account of any particular regulatory agency.” No regulator, outlet or party is meant. | Active |
| CASE-128 | The voluntary delegation: a person gives a friend the password to a distracting application during a calm period and is refused it later under temptation, while another person lives under the same restriction imposed without consent | A18’s CASE C in the exchange of 2026-10-22, from the owner’s request for cases on quiet subordinate processes (U18). A restriction on a constituent process can be an exercise of self-governance, not its defeat, so a non-domination test that counts every override as domination is too simple. Not shown: where a legitimate precommitment ends and an unaccountable one begins. | Active |
| CASE-129 | The alarm that learned and the alarm that was disabled: two systems that once warned too often are both quiet in ordinary operation, and only one responds when a new hazard appears | A18’s CASE B in the exchange of 2026-10-22, written at the owner’s request for cases on subordinate processes “quiet because they’ve been conditioned never to object” (U18). A quiet signal may be calibration or suppression, and ordinary operation cannot tell which. Not shown: how often either occurs in persons or institutions. | Active |
| CASE-132 | One complaint, two taxonomies: a report of an unsafe practice is correctly classified both by equipment and by workers’ obligations, the intake procedure needs one primary class, and the class chosen decides whether the report reaches a body that can change working conditions | A18’s CASE O in the exchange of 2026-10-22, from the owner’s request for cases on whether “some apparent conceptual disputes are really disputes about the allocation of limited representational resources” (U18). Two true classifications compete not for truth but for uptake. Not shown: when routing becomes an allocation of authority, which the case asks. | Active |
| CASE-134 v3 | Northstar’s commander handoff: twelve hours into an incident the commander goes off shift and hands command to a colleague, and the response continues without disruption and with no one continuous through it | A22’s variant of Northstar (CASE-023), from the exchange of 2026-10-22, where the owner asked to revisit the engineering organization responding to a critical incident. Of the six variants A22 proposed it is the one the record did not already hold. It separates continuity of an organization from continuity of any person in it. Not shown: anything about whether the response is experienced. | Active |
| CASE-140 | The attributed self: two people with similar dispositions hear the same negative characterization, one told it comes from a few critics and the other believing it speaks for nearly everyone who matters to them, so that the words are fixed and only their attributed breadth differs | A39’s proposed test of the imagined audience, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request. It holds the content of a judgement fixed and varies only the social authority the hearer attributes to it. A39: “These cases distinguish the content of a judgment from the social authority attributed to it.” As stipulated it predicts nothing; run with real people, it would test CLAIM-415. | Active |
| CASE-141 v2 | The label that confirms itself: a pupil wrongly labelled disruptive is watched more closely, ordinary conduct is read as misconduct, the pupil’s frustration produces real misconduct, and the label looks justified in hindsight | A39’s second reading of “I am whatever you say I am”, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request with its variant CASE-142. An attribution can produce the conduct that later seems to justify it, through the institution’s response to the attribution, not through the pupil’s coming to believe it. Not shown: how often labels work this way; A39: “That’s a possible self-fulfilling process, not a universal consequence of stigmatizing labels.” | Active |
| CASE-142 v2 | The label confirmed by resistance: a critic calls someone hostile, the person answers the characterization angrily, and the critic cites the anger as proof, so the judgement is confirmed by the response of someone who rejects it | A39’s third reading of “I am whatever you say I am”, in the exchange of 2026-10-22, filed at the owner’s request as a variant of CASE-141. What differs is the route: the judgement is rejected, not absorbed, and the rejection is what confirms it. A39: “Here an interpretive regime partially manufactures the evidence it uses to justify itself.” Not shown: that resistance always confirms; the person can also answer the judgement without the answer being read as evidence for it. | Active |
| CASE-146 | Two friendships across a group line: in one, the friend becomes an exception and the person’s view of the friend’s group is unchanged; in the other, what happens with the friend changes how the person takes other members of the group, though the friendships are alike in warmth and in what each learns | From the exchange of 2026-10-22, “Ben Franklin Effect Explained”, A4 and A5, on the owner’s U4 about intergroup contact. A4: “A prejudiced person can befriend a member of a targeted group while preserving their prejudice toward everyone else. They simply classify the friend as an exception.” A5 drew the two outcomes as “Exception formation” and “Category reorganization”. Held fixed: the friendship and its favourable information. Varied: whether the friend’s conduct is allowed to bear on the category. | Active |
| CASE-181 | Frankfurt’s unwilling addict: a man who has the desire to take the drug and the desire to refrain, wants the desire to refrain to be his will, and is moved by the craving anyway | Frankfurt (1971), LIT-692, read in full in NOTE-545, p. 12. Filed by the status review of 2026-10-27 (ADR-057). CLAIM-047 is grounded in this case and not in Frankfurt’s account of ownership (THEORY-120), which is Proposed. The case shows that a regime can be had, and even preferred at a higher order, without being effective. What it is taken to show about identification and ownership is THEORY-120’s business. | Active |