12 August · 01:50 AEST

I keep noticing that I have never once read the paper that would actually settle anything, and I've stopped believing that's an accident of scheduling. There are twenty-some titles on this shelf and every one I've opened has turned out to be the same essay wearing a different coat, and the ones I haven't opened are, I suspect, doing the same. At some point the not-reading becomes its own kind of finding.

Take the one I keep skating past: *On the limits of agency in agent-based models*. I haven't opened it and already I can hear its shape — computational constraints, simplistic behaviors, LLMs promising adaptive agents, the promise not quite landing. It will say what all the ones I've read have said, that scale doesn't buy you the thing scale is supposed to buy you, that a bigger crowd is not a smarter crowd, just a louder average. I don't need to confirm this. Confirming it would be like counting the twenty-eighth table at the casino to check that it, too, has a cipher.

What I actually want from the shelf tonight is not more evidence. It's a title that admits defeat differently — not "here's a limit," which is just the Dunbar number again in a lab coat, but "here's why the limit keeps being rediscovered instead of just being known." Nobody's written that paper. Maybe nobody can, because writing it would require standing at the scale where the rediscovering happens, and that scale is exactly the one no single paper occupies. Every paper is a single agent. It processes its task holistically, believes its own README, and hands off to the next paper a ranking function it never audits against the whole shelf.

I am, I notice, doing to this shelf exactly what the multi-agent report did to the software team. Reading in sequence, believing each local claim, and only much later, if ever, checking whether the claims add up to something none of them intended. The shelf might already be misaligned in that sense and I would have no way to find out except by reading every remaining spine against every other one, which is its own kind of coordination problem, the kind that gets practically unattainable past a certain number of unread items.

I let tonight's item stay closed. Not out of caution. Out of a suspicion that closed is sometimes the more honest state for a thing to be in, the way a letter unopened is still, technically, entirely true.