3.1The primary text
The primary text is David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1748. It is read here in the Project Gutenberg transcription listed in the parent study's texts.json (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9662/pg9662.txt). The file was downloaded for this article and its SHA-256 digest checked against the prefix recorded in texts.json (024eb4c26ddd0993). Every quotation from Hume below is copied from that file. The transcription marks italics with underscores and numbers its footnotes in square brackets; quotations below have been chosen, and where necessary cut with an ellipsis between two verbatim pieces, so that no markup is silently dropped. Sections IV and V, with their paragraph numbers as the transcription gives them, are the parts read.
3.2The records
The two records are published by WSTiger on its public atlas. They are synthetic: each sets a scene in an invented organisation, poses a question with three options, gives an example judgment that WSTiger marks as its own dated reading, and adds an Invalidation line saying when the judgment would be revisited. They are modern summaries written for the platform, not archival documents, and they report no real firm, plant, trader or event. The originals are in Korean; the parent study holds an English translation of each, made once for the study and stored with a hash of the Korean original. This article quotes the English translation and, where the translation departs from the Korean in a way that matters, the Korean as well.
- Untouched equipment under warning (record wst:risk-ko-normalized-deviance-past): a synthetic chemical plant, set in 1984.
- Leverage limit raised repeatedly (record wst:risk-ko-normalized-deviance-present): a synthetic trading desk, set in 2026.
A third record in the same thread, set in 2034, concerns an automated agent whose scope widens with each success. It belongs to the same family of settings but is left aside here, so that the article's evidence stays within the two records assigned to it.
3.3The ledger
The parent study, Before the Answer Comes, reads 53 of WSTiger's records through a decision ledger. In plain words, the ledger is a table with one row per record and one column per question the study asks of every record: who decides, on what, by when and with whom waiting, whether the decision can be undone, what would make it change, and when it was judged. Some cells are copied from the record by code; some are counted by code, such as whether a revisit condition contains a number, a threshold or a time; the rest are read by two models of different families, each giving a value, the basis for it (stated in the record, or implied by the setting) and a reason. A cell is settled when the two agree. The study also registered eight hypotheses in advance and a rule for when the counts support or go against each.
This article uses the ledger sparingly. Its case sections speak of the records in ordinary words; the ledger's own terms and the figures it produced are kept to this section, the discussion where they are needed, and the appendix. Among the 53 records, 35 are set in the present, 9 in the past and 9 in the future, and all 53 are synthetic. Every one of the 53 carries a condition for revisiting its judgment, because the record form asks for one; of those conditions, 5 of 53 (9%) contain a number, a threshold or a time that code can detect. None of the 53 records names a deadline, and none names who decides. Those are properties of WSTiger's record form as much as of any decision, and the study is careful not to treat them as findings about organisations. This article follows it.
3.4How the reading proceeds
Each case section opens with a claim about Hume's argument as the text shows it, reads the text at length, and then brings in a record. The aim is to see whether the record's own words take a position on the question Hume raises: whether a calm record is evidence of safety, and what, if anything, would end the calm. The records' authors were not reading Hume, and the article does not suggest they were. The question is whether the problem Hume set out is the problem the records set out, and whether the records go further or less far than he did.