Context
The owner, on 2026-10-14, after a proposed survival analysis was filed as a case (CASE-078): “are we able to construct something like a typology of CASEs? I’m wondering if maybe there’s a new vocab term, axis, or scheme we should leverage to distinguish e.g. proposed empirical experiments vs thought experiments vs. steel-man vs. etc”.
A CASE has one vocabulary field besides status, tags and line: standing,
which says “how much of a CASE is fact” (ADR-032). Its three terms are
documented, stipulated and fictional. The survey of all 81 cases found
standing carrying a second question it was not written for, what kind of
thing the case is:
stipulatedis defined as “a real referent whose relevant facts are assumed rather than verified here — usable as a thought experiment”. It holds ten proposed studies (CASE-021, CASE-055, CASE-078 …), which have no referent yet. It holds six formal constructions (the reset matrices, CASE-001, and the parity triangle, CASE-037), which have no referent at all. It holds real companies with assumed facts (CoreWeave, CASE-007). And it holds two runs made in session (CASE-017, CASE-020).- Two runs made in session, CASE-030 and CASE-032, are
fictional, because the assistant wrote the texts. The other two arestipulated. The same kind of thing has two standings. - Nothing lets a reader list the proposed studies, the record’s open empirical agenda, without reading every case.
| kind \ standing | documented | stipulated | fictional |
|---|---|---|---|
| specimen | 25 | 6 | 0 |
| thought-experiment | 1 | 11 | 13 |
| construction | 0 | 6 | 0 |
| reported-study | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| proposed-study | 0 | 10 | 0 |
| executed-study | 0 | 2 | 2 |
stipulated spans five kinds, and thought experiments span all three
standings. Kind cannot be derived from standing. It is a second axis.
Decision
Approved on 2026-10-14, with the sixth term renamed from the draft’s
“run-here” to executed-study. The owner offered “executed-study” or
“performed-study”. “Executed” was taken because “performed” could be read as
a performance. Add a closed vocabulary case-kinds and a required field kind
on CASE.
- specimen: a real instance, artefact, event or kind of thing, examined as it is. Henley’s Villon, the Dual State, a coral reef, r/place. It may be documented, or stipulated when its facts are assumed.
- thought-experiment: an imagined scenario, usually a contrast built to hold everything fixed but one thing, used to test an intuition or a concept. Northstar-A and -B, the reluctant writer, the tree in the woods, the twin pattern-keepers.
- construction: a formal or mathematical object built to exhibit or refute a property, whose facts are its definition. The reset matrices, the parity triangle, the two identical ballots, the reciprocal pair.
- reported-study: an empirical study others ran and published, used as a case. The contextuality tests (CASE-053), the risk-message diffusion chains (CASE-068), Voita et al. (CASE-070).
- proposed-study: an empirical design not yet run. Its body says what would be measured, the main threat to inference, and what each outcome would show. The factorial study (CASE-021), the dancing-couple motion-capture study (CASE-045), the r/place survival analysis (CASE-078).
- executed-study: something the record’s collaborators ran in session, with results the record itself produced. The synthetic stochastic computations (CASE-017), the dry-run harness (CASE-020), the assistant-written chains (CASE-030, CASE-032). Kept apart from reported-study because its provenance and its limits are the record’s own.
kind is required, so that every new case says what it is (DP-3). A case
whose kind changes, such as a proposed study that is then run, gets a new
version with the change in its history, or a successor case if the run
differs from the design.
Kind and standing stay orthogonal. One clarification of standing follows:
for a proposed study, stipulated describes its materials and setting, not
results it does not yet have. The blurb of stipulated is widened to say
so, and nothing else in case-standing changes.
Steel-man is not a kind
A steel-man is the strongest form of a position, put in order to be met.
That is a voice, not a kind of case, and the record already has it: a CLAIM
with role: counter (ADR-032). CLAIM-278 and CLAIM-288 are
recent examples. When a case is built to make an opposing view strongest,
its kind is whatever it is (usually thought-experiment or construction), and
the steel-manning shows in its relation, counterexample_to or supports,
to the counter claim. A seventh term would duplicate that and blur two axes
again. If steel-manned cases need finding, the place is a relation from case
to counter claim, decided separately.
Analogy is set aside for the same reason. The coral reef and the gut
microbes are specimens used by analogy, and the use is the relation
(illustrates), not the kind.
Alternatives considered
- More terms in
standing. Adding “proposed” or “formal” to standing would answer two questions with one field, which is the present problem. Rejected. - A separate scheme for studies (STUDY-, with design, threats and outcomes fields). It would give proposed studies more structure. But a study is used by claims exactly as a case is, through the same relations, and a second scheme would split the index and the relations. Rejected for now. If proposed studies need structured fields, they can be added to CASE conditioned on kind.
- Tags. The topics vocabulary says what a work or case is about, not what it is. Rejected.
- Finer kinds (vignette apart from thought experiment; analogy;
counterexample). Vignettes are thought experiments that bear no weight,
and the
illustratesrelation already says so. Counterexample is a relation. Rejected: six is what the 81 cases need.
Consequences
luria.yamlgainscase-kinds(six terms with labels and blurbs) and the CASE fieldkind, required. luria rendersdocs/cases/kind/as it rendersstanding/, so the proposed studies have an index page.- All 81 cases get
kind:as tabled below. Retired cases get one too, so that the field is never missing. - Four classifications were judgement calls, and the owner may move them:
- CASE-004 is the stimuli of a study design (proposed-study), not a thought experiment.
- CASE-062, “a constructed study, built on documented halves”, is proposed-study, not reported-study.
- CASE-044, Dennett’s thermostat, is thought-experiment, not specimen.
- CASE-039, the relativity craft, is a documented thought experiment.
- The template’s comment for CASE names the field and its terms.
The classification
specimen (31)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-007 | stipulated | CoreWeave: a climate-concerned workforce building fossil-powered datacenters |
| CASE-010 | documented | Henley’s rendering of Villon, “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” |
| CASE-011 | documented | Hofstadter’s mother’s translation |
| CASE-014 | stipulated | Microsoft, as the philosophical target |
| CASE-015 | documented | The telephone game |
| CASE-016 | documented | The Dual State: normative and prerogative authority in National Socialist Germany |
| CASE-019 | documented | ”Hug from Doug” |
| CASE-024 | documented | A coral reef |
| CASE-028 | stipulated | Stability AI: well-intentioned founders, near-total churn, generic successor |
| CASE-031 | documented | Marot’s “A une Damoyselle malade” and Hofstadter’s translations of it |
| CASE-038 | documented | TV Tropes: a community-curated catalogue of narrative tropes and their instances, such as th… |
| CASE-041 | documented | FID and Projected GANs: one ImageNet-trained probe family used both to train a generator and… |
| CASE-042 | documented | Collaborative filtering and topic models: latent relational structure recovered from interac… |
| CASE-046 | stipulated | A partner-dancing couple, lindy hop, tango or salsa, while they dance |
| CASE-047 | documented | Gut microbes and the host’s hunger and mood: a lower-level collective that can drive the person |
| CASE-052 | stipulated | Stokely Carmichael’s two speaking styles, kept apart by audience and collapsed by broadcast |
| CASE-054 | documented | Joking relationships: one kind among the Crow and in Africa with no route between them, desc… |
| CASE-056 | documented | J. B. Phillips’s “hearty handshake all round” for Paul’s “holy kiss”, and Nida’s judgement t… |
| CASE-058 | documented | FactBank’s source-relative factuality labels and Kiesling et al.’s stance-triangle annotatio… |
| CASE-059 | documented | Tatiana’s letter in Eugene Onegin III: вы to ты and back, lost in Kline and half kept in Spa… |
| CASE-061 | documented | Wonder-working power: one hymn phrase in a national address, heard as faith by those who sin… |
| CASE-063 | documented | The English localization of Ace Attorney: a Japanese courtroom game moved to an alternate Lo… |
| CASE-064 | documented | Lindsey Stone’s Arlington photograph: one post, taken by friends as a tasteless in-joke and… |
| CASE-066 | documented | Dolly’s slip into ты in Anna Karenina I.4, and three English translations that carry it thre… |
| CASE-067 | documented | The reception of Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian: the Booker judges’ task, the Korean critics… |
| CASE-069 | documented | Labov’s recorded sounding sessions: ritual insult turning personal, with the same exchange s… |
| CASE-072 | documented | Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” in English: one ungendered beloved rendered as a maid, as God and as… |
| CASE-073 | documented | The Kia Provo: one concept-car name, a blank coinage to the motor press and taken as honouri… |
| CASE-074 | stipulated | Twitch Plays Pokémon in democracy mode, with the running tally shown while the votes come in |
| CASE-075 | documented | Twitch Plays Pokémon in anarchy mode: one avatar steered through the map by the running aggr… |
| CASE-079 | documented | r/place: a shared pixel canvas on which each Reddit user could place one pixel at a time und… |
thought-experiment (25)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-002 | fictional | Northstar classification: who decides an incident is severe |
| CASE-003 | fictional | Northstar-A and Northstar-B: same policy, same evidence, different escalation authority |
| CASE-006 | fictional | Open Horizon |
| CASE-012 | fictional | The modernized refrains of Henley’s Villon |
| CASE-013 | fictional | The reluctant writer |
| CASE-018 | fictional | ”You blow it all on sex and booze”, said by a friend, a parent, a judge, a comedian |
| CASE-022 | stipulated | A rendering that keeps the solidarity–criticism ambiguity open, and one that settles it |
| CASE-023 | fictional | Northstar |
| CASE-025 | fictional | Verdant Compute |
| CASE-026 | stipulated | Modern slang that makes the insider sound like an outsider imitating the subculture |
| CASE-027 | fictional | Henley translated perfectly in the voice of an academic sociologist |
| CASE-033 | fictional | Driving home while daydreaming |
| CASE-034 | fictional | The thermostat and the adaptive controller |
| CASE-036 | fictional | Northstar emergency governance that sustains itself |
| CASE-039 | documented | Who crosses the meeting point first? Two craft near light speed, and the relativity of simul… |
| CASE-043 | stipulated | Data written for a future reader and never read |
| CASE-044 | stipulated | The thermostat: Dennett’s knife edge between agent and device |
| CASE-048 | stipulated | The same film joke, seen as a child and again as an adult |
| CASE-049 | stipulated | A tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it |
| CASE-050 | stipulated | The all-hands: a corporate event as a synchronization mechanism for the firm |
| CASE-051 | fictional | The absorbed writer |
| CASE-057 | stipulated | Swapping the two persons of a dyad: nonreciprocal T/V address is changed by the swap and rec… |
| CASE-076 | stipulated | Twin pattern-keepers: two systems keep the same pattern, one by its own responses and one th… |
| CASE-080 | stipulated | The skeptic who delegates: a critic that cannot overturn an emerging consensus gives its aut… |
| CASE-081 | stipulated | Self-maintenance learned for a designer’s reward: a system that maintains itself because it… |
construction (6)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-001 | stipulated | Two reset matrices: noncommuting and classical |
| CASE-008 | stipulated | Solidarity, condemnation and humour judged in pairs: the probabilistic version |
| CASE-035 | stipulated | Solidarity, condemnation and humour: the parity obstruction |
| CASE-037 | stipulated | The parity triangle with uniform weights: a no-signalling, strongly contextual model beside… |
| CASE-060 | stipulated | Two identical unnumbered ballots in one tally: two votes that no relation in the structure o… |
| CASE-077 | stipulated | The reciprocal pair: two processes that endorse only each other under recursive delegation,… |
reported-study (5)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-053 | documented | Contextuality tests on human meaning and judgement data: a held null, and positive results t… |
| CASE-065 | documented | Two satisfaction questions in German and in a back-translated Chinese version: an order effe… |
| CASE-068 | documented | Risk messages passed down diffusion chains: the evaluative signal kept and amplified while t… |
| CASE-070 | documented | Voita, Sennrich and Titov’s BLEU-tied translation systems that differ on keeping ты or вы ac… |
| CASE-071 | documented | Kovacs, Deutsch and Freitag’s metric bias in MBR decoding: translations a metric selects, th… |
proposed-study (10)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-004 | stipulated | Two people, an empty wallet: shared complicity, normative authority, and an underspecified r… |
| CASE-005 | stipulated | The language-model experiments: frame commutator, trajectory-preserving selection, ICL again… |
| CASE-009 | stipulated | Text → image → caption → image chains under four conditions |
| CASE-021 | stipulated | Wording, attributed speaker and judgement order: the proposed factorial study |
| CASE-029 | stipulated | The dynamical-fidelity research programme of the outlines (A35, A38, A40) |
| CASE-040 | stipulated | Topic and act crossed: a factorial design that decorrelates what a text is about from what i… |
| CASE-045 | stipulated | Measuring the dancing couple: is the pair a nearly decomposable block during the dance and n… |
| CASE-055 | stipulated | The discriminating fidelity study: renderings built to dissociate wording, proposition, stat… |
| CASE-062 | stipulated | Simplified texts for restricted and for full readers: a gain and a loss documented on differ… |
| CASE-078 | stipulated | Who keeps placing on r/place: the proposed survival analysis of the released placement logs,… |
executed-study (4)
| case | standing | title |
|---|---|---|
| CASE-017 | stipulated | E1: synthetic three-state stochastic computations (C2–C3) |
| CASE-020 | stipulated | E3: the controlled inference harness, dry run only (C5) |
| CASE-030 | fictional | E2: assistant-authored reconstruction chains with content-word overlap (C4) |
| CASE-032 | fictional | E4: within-session chains, stable complicit against a shift to moral instruction |