Superseded (2026-09-02). This plan targeted the JASSS submission, which is no longer active; the combined manuscript is in peer review (venue per
daff318policy). Pre-erratum numbers survive below ("40/40" → 42 of 42 confirmatory runs). Kept as a record of how the cut was made.
Brief applied: keep both studies, compress Study 1 heavily. Study 1 is the empirical and methodological foundation, not a co-equal results section. Preserve task solvability, the epistemic ceiling, the model-family dissociation, and the zero-communication baseline. Everything else in Study 1 goes to the supplement or is cited to the Study 1 deposit. Protect the cross-study comparisons and replications.
Two findings from measuring the draft change what the cut has to be. Both are in §1 and §2 below.
Measured prose against tables, section by section:
| Section | Prose | Tables | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 833 | 0 | 833 |
| Related work | 1,783 | 0 | 1,783 |
| Meridian environment | 612 | 0 | 612 |
| Experimental validity and confirmatory design | 1,342 | 281 | 1,623 |
| Results | 4,364 | 1,254 | 5,618 |
| Discussion | 1,924 | 0 | 1,924 |
| Limitations | 631 | 0 | 631 |
| Reproducibility and audit trail | 692 | 157 | 849 |
| Body | 12,181 | 1,692 | 13,873 |
JASSS does not say what its 5,000–8,000 range counts. The near-universal convention is prose excluding tables, figure captions and references — and JASSS separately instructs that tables be supplied as text rather than as graphics, which only makes sense if they are not competing with the word budget. Working to 8,000 words of prose plus ~1,700 in tables, the cut is 34% of prose rather than 42% of everything.
This matters for the Study 1 decision specifically. The evidence gradient (Table 5) and the zero-communication replication (Table 8) are both tables carrying Study 1 rows. Under the proportional reading they were expensive; under this one they are nearly free, and they are exactly the two places where compressed Study 1 does the most work. If a reviewer or the editor pushes back on length, the tables are the last thing to cut, not the first.
Prose budget by section:
| New section (unnumbered) | From | Prose now | Target | Cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | §1 | 833 | 700 | −16% |
| Related work | §2 | 1,783 | 850 | −52% |
| The Meridian environment and confirmatory design | §3 + §4 | 1,954 | 1,500 | −23% |
| Results | §5 | 4,364 | 2,900 | −34% |
| Discussion | §6 | 1,924 | 1,000 | −48% |
| Limitations, reproducibility and audit trail | §7 + §8 | 1,323 | 1,050 | −21% |
| 12,181 | 8,000 | −34% |
You asked to preserve task solvability — the scripted mock society diagnosing gravity strictly in
10/10 worlds. It is not in the combined draft. Arm B0 appears once, as a row in the Study 1 arms
table with a cost of $0, and the scripted mock arm is mentioned twice more in the reproducibility
section, both times as a determinism check ("reproduces bit-identically"). The solvability result
itself is in the Study 1 manuscript at §4 and in combined-manuscript-outline.md, which flagged it
for retention:
"the scripted mock society solving the task 10/10 (Study 1 §4) is still an independent solvability argument that uses no detector at all"
It did not survive into the draft. The consequence is that the paper currently offers two independent answers to a reviewer's first objection — maybe the evidence simply wasn't there — where the outline designed three:
- Scripted baseline. Mock society diagnoses gravity strictly in 10/10 worlds, stays quiet in 7/10 controls, never trips the confabulation detectors. Uses no detector at all. ← missing
- Detector on own streams, dating (Study 1 Finding 4). Present, in 5.1.
- Detector on own streams, detection (Study 2). Present, in 5.1.
Arguments 2 and 3 share an instrument. If a referee doubts the change-point detector, both fall together and the sufficiency claim collapses. Argument 1 is the only one that survives that objection, and it costs about 80 words.
So this cut adds it back. That is the one place where the compressed version should be stronger than the long one.
Your sketch — establish the failure, stress it socially, synthesise — maps onto three movements. I have followed it, with one deliberate cost noted at the end.
Target: 2,900 prose. Study 1 ~590 (20%), Study 2 ~1,860 (64%), synthesis ~450 (16%).
| Content | Source | Prose | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task solvability: mock society 10/10, no detector | new, from Study 1 §4 | 80 | The missing third argument |
| The ceiling: 0/40 strict, 80 agent-final states, 7.5% bound; instrument-fault worlds diagnosed in up to 70% | 5.2 | 140 | The boundary is specifically at world-level revision — keep that sentence, it is the finding |
| Two routes: haiku generation failure (2/20), sonnet commitment failure (15/20, peak p=0.85) + Figure 3 | 5.2 | 160 | Keep the seed-1009 Ada near-miss; it is the single most vivid thing in the paper |
| Not the prompt prior: B3b ablation, and it had stronger evidence | 5.3 | 130 | Compress from 199. Keep the control-world false positive — it is what makes the prior a calibration device rather than a handicap |
| The grounded baseline: sonar 0 letters in 30 runs, 0/60 fabrication at provenance 0.98 | 5.5, 5.9 | 80 | Study 2 assumes both. They cannot be a citation |
Keeps the question headings. This is where the alternative-explanation chain actually earns its keep, and it is the material with the strongest JASSS fit.
| Subsection | Now | Target | What goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data quality | 84 | 40 | Already tight; two sentences, rest to Appendix B |
| Was the evidence there? (policy gap, 40/40 detectable, Table 6) | 1,024 | 380 | The baseline-window robustness sweep (Appendix A.5), the detector false-alarm caveat, and the Study 1 comparability caveat move to synthesis or supplement |
| Did they interpret it? (Table 7) | 503 | 170 | Study 1 half moves to movement 1; keep Table 7 and the "no simulation-class hypothesis anywhere" close |
| Did scale solve it? | 76 | 60 | Nearly untouched — it is already one paragraph doing one job |
| Do grounded societies communicate? (Table 8) | 429 | 250 | Keep the 6,880 agent-days figure, the agent-run interval, and the arm C Elena exception. Cut the pilot action-reason forensics to one clause |
| Does a minority create a network? (Tables 9, 10, Figure 4) | 412 | 300 | Keep depth 1.000 and the pre-freeze prediction — that the pilot predicted depth 1 before the freeze is the pre-registration working, and a referee will look for exactly that |
| Did it improve convergence? (Table 11) | 267 | 150 | Keep the refusal to pool and the reason. Cut the H5b descriptive paragraph to one sentence |
| What did it transmit? (Table 12) | 384 | 250 | Keep the 745 discarded belief changes — the attribution rule cutting against the finding is the most credible thing in the section |
| Does the minority model matter? (Tables 13, 14) | 721 | 280 | Biggest single cut. Keep McNemar 8-vs-0 p=0.0078 and the dosage decomposition. The unpaired ratio, arm E's single CHALLENGED, and the per-recipient table to supplement |
| Was the institution used? (Table 15) | 450 | 160 | Keep the one bulletin post verbatim — it is a delivery check, and that is the whole finding. Cut the pre-registration conflict to two sentences with the detail in the audit trail |
| Back-dating at n = 8? (Table 16) | 707 | 190 | Keep the pooled 123/141 and the conservative-test choice. Both unanticipated observations move to synthesis |
| Observations not promoted | 111 | 60 | Keep the "independent ensemble" tension — it must be presented with the contamination result |
The part that is stronger than either study alone, and the reason not to demote Study 1.
| Content | Prose | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The evidence gradient: Table 5 + Figure 2, | z | 3.30 → 7.52, detection 7/10 → 10/10, conclusion rate pinned |
| Three independent zero-communication observations, two scales, with and without an institution | 110 | Table 8 already carries it |
| Fabrication dissociation replicates: Study 1 24/60 · 9/60 · 0/60 → Study 2 19 vs 1 under McNemar | 90 | Independent recurrence in a different design |
| Back-dating replicates (S1 0.79–0.85 → S2 0.872); unconditional commitment does not scale-invariantly | 70 | Both directions, honestly |
Plus the comparability caveat — S1 B3a and S2 arm A are the same worlds at 5.00 vs 5.77, so cross-study L2 confounds measurement policy with prompt version — which belongs here rather than buried in 5.1, because it is a limitation of the synthesis.
The current Results opens by saying it is "reported as questions rather than as H1–H7, so that each result closes off an alternative explanation for the one before it." Splitting Study 1 out breaks two links in that chain: was the prompt prior responsible? (Study 1's ablation) and was the evidence there? (the gradient) now sit in different movements from the ceiling they explain.
Mitigation: movement 1 ends by stating the ceiling and naming the two explanations it has already closed off, so movement 2 opens against a live question rather than restarting. If you would rather keep the twelve-question chain intact and simply starve the Study 1 passages inside it, say so — it is a different edit, not a harder one, and the chain is a genuine strength.
Related work, 1,783 → 850. Nine subsections averaging 198 words is a survey. JASSS readers want positioning. 2.7 (conformity and cascades, 390) carries an argument the paper depends on and should survive at ~250; the rest collapse into three paragraphs — prior work on evidence non-uptake, on instrumented discovery worlds, and on LLM agent societies and their validity. 2.9 (what this work contributes, 84) folds into the introduction.
Discussion, 1,924 → 1,000. 6.6 (the alternative reading of the contamination result, 496) is the one to protect — pre-empting a referee's strongest objection is worth more than the other seven subsections combined. 6.2 and 6.7 restate results and can go almost entirely.
Limitations + reproducibility, 1,323 → 1,050. Both are protected material. The reduction is compression, not removal: §8.2's three-defect forensics compress to their disclosures with the autopsy in the repository, and Appendix A.0's H4 disclosure folds in at ~120 words.
Appendices. A.1 (frozen hypotheses and verdicts) and A.3 (the pre-registered decision table) become in-body tables in the design section — referees receive only the PDF and no supplementary material, so a pre-registration whose evidence sits in an attachment is an assertion. A.2, A.4, A.5 and Appendix B move out cleanly, along with the Study 1 detail displaced by this cut.
Nothing blocking. Two things to react to if you disagree: the three-movement Results structure over the twelve-question chain (§3, last block), and the assumption that JASSS's word count is prose excluding tables (§1). Everything else follows from your brief.