Lines of inquiry — A named line of the record’s own argument, so that a line can be set aside as a whole and what depends on it can be found. Retracting a line is a status change on its members, never a deletion (ADR-032).
Will-organization — what organizes practical efficacy in an agent, and how that organization becomes precarious.
21 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-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-014 v2 | Microsoft, as the philosophical target | The real corporation the first framing asked about. Committed to as a recurring touchstone (A205) and then silently dropped from the drafts; retired here by status rather than left as a promise nobody kept. | Deferred |
| CASE-016 | The Dual State: normative and prerogative authority in National Socialist Germany | Fraenkel’s analysis: ordinary legal norms kept governing large domains while a prerogative order held authority over whether they bound at all. Used for one structural point only. | 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-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-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-074 v2 | Twitch Plays Pokémon in democracy mode, with the running tally shown while the votes come in | The crowd of CASE-075 in democracy mode. Each move is the button that collects the most votes in a short window, and the running tally is shown while the votes arrive, so the current majority can sway the votes still coming. The owner judges it a better demonstration of a population with drift-diffusion decision dynamics than anarchy mode. Showing the tally adds feedback, and feedback moves the dynamics toward winner-take-all. | Active |
| CASE-075 | Twitch Plays Pokémon in anarchy mode: one avatar steered through the map by the running aggregate of a crowd’s inputs | In February 2014 a stream let everyone in its chat play one copy of Pokémon Red at once, with every typed button press executed in turn. The owner offers its navigation as a working approximation of an agent made of a population whose decisions follow drift-diffusion dynamics. The crowd’s direction reorganizes continuously and is not switched. The record holds no source for the case yet. | 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-112 v2 | Bistable authority with a tilt: in ẇ = μw − w³ + h, with w the balance of authority between two regimes and h a higher-order volition favouring one, for μ > 0 the operative regime changes only when |h| passes 2μ^{3/2}/(3√3), so a sincere and efficacious higher-order volition can move the balance without moving the regime, and which regime operates depends on the path of h | A8 §4 of the exchange of 2026-10-17, restated as A12’s Proposition 3 and kept in A15. The saddle-node threshold and the hysteresis are derived and rechecked here. A8: “It’s a countermodel showing why endorsement strength, effective governance, and behavioral transition can come apart.” A8’s “endorsement” is the reflective attitude, not the record’s TERM-053 sense, so h is called a higher-order volition. It models authority between regimes; it does not revive will as an attractor (TERM-003, Superseded). Fictional by construction. | Active |
| CASE-125 v2 | A hidden governance bit: an output that is fresh fair noise whatever a fixed hidden bit K is, until an intervention h makes the output read K, so the output alone is exactly informationally closed under ordinary operation and keeps nothing about the response to h | A16 §3–4 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, from A15 §2’s deterministic form, and A17’s Proposition 1. A fair hidden bit K, fixed in time; under ordinary operation the output Y is fresh fair noise; under the intervention h = 1 it reads K. The output is exactly closed, and with h = 1 drawn with probability ρ its deficiency for the response to h is ρ bits, no better than a constant. It is the first instance with parameters of CLAIM-122’s supervisory test, which the exchange of 2026-10-17 gave only in words. Fictional by construction; K is a mechanism parameter, not an agent’s governance. | Active |
| CASE-127 v2 | United 173 and Crew Resource Management: a crew whose concern about the fuel did not reach the captain as a demand to act, and the training that followed, which asked for participative captains and assertive crews | The owner’s case at U25 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: “the history underlying the evolution of Crew Resource Management”. A cockpit had the information and lacked the organization to make it govern. The reform changed the organization of authority, not its holder. Not shown: that CRM caused the later fall in accidents, which the case does not test. | 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-135 v2 | The Brookhollow Apartments fire, Wichita, 2023: a mayday after a stair roof collapses on two companies opens a second emergency inside a search for a trapped resident, and an independent review finds an unorganized rescue effort without finding that it changed the outcome | The owner’s class of case, a fireground mayday inside an escalating response organized under the National Incident Management System (U23 of the exchange of 2026-10-22); A23 and A24’s instance. It is the record’s first real multi-regime emergency, beside the fictional Northstar (CASE-023). It shows two regimes, rescue of a member and the original mission, needing to be held at once, and a review that recommends change. Not shown: that the department’s safety culture changed, or what the review’s recommendations were, since the report was not read. | Active |
| CASE-138 v2 | Challenger to Columbia: NASA corrected its launch decisions and its safety organization after 1986, and the Columbia board found in 2003 that related organizational failure mechanisms had recurred, while its lessons-learned system was little used in between | The owner’s case at U25 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: NASA’s mechanisms for documenting and learning from mistakes, with Challenger as the classic example. The record already reads the Columbia board’s account (THEORY-140, from LIT-734). This case files the history around it: a warning whose standing changed as it moved, a correction made in the rules, and a capacity not maintained. Not shown: why the correction decayed, which THEORY-140 explains and this case only displays. | 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 |
| CASE-188 | A proposed study: two agents keep the same long-term commitment and decide alike under ordinary conditions, one protecting it from irrelevant fluctuation while letting specified defeaters revise it, the other growing ever more efficient at enforcing it while evidence against it loses its way in; varying the environment, the legitimacy of the original commitment and what the evaluative mechanisms can see, to tell corrigible resolve from entrenchment without building the answer into the diagnostic or the score | Proposed by the owner at review of the filing of the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” (2026-10-31), as a successor to CASE-186 and kept separate from it so that study stays interpretable. It gives CLAIM-344’s distinction between resolve and mere persistence a counterfactual test. Not run; every parameter is left to a preregistration. | Active |
| CASE-191 | A construction of self-formation: an agent’s own frustration at two demands one shared output cannot meet drives production of a sensor and a differentiating channel that then maintain each other; past a threshold of discrepancy (D ≈ 0.645 at unit drive) the capacity forms, outlasts the conflict, meets later conflicts of the same class up to D ≈ 1.047 with no frustration, and is lost at damage 0.5; a capacity upheld from outside is told apart by knockouts afterwards, but one installed by an outside pulse and then self-maintained is told apart only by a knockout during formation | Built at the owner’s request (“build the CASE-189 extension”) to test CLAIM-532, the positive account of self-formation filed from U33 of the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage”. scratch/formal/self_formation.py. Fictional and stipulated: the sensor and channel are capacity variables present from the start, raised from zero, as CASE-189’s are. It bears out the claim’s first test (transfer within a class) and qualifies its second: a knockout of the producing process separates own formation from outside installation only if it is made during formation. After the fact the two are the same organization. | Active |