Third and largest finding from the trial-03 post-mortem.
The pulling thread — in MEMORY.md and in the previous wrap — named trial 03
'the Fool's false-positive control'. Trial 03's own pre-registration says it
asks whether the checker shares the 2025 archive's self-exemption disposition,
and its grading section states that 'the false-positive rate is still
unmeasured'. The pre-registration knew what it was.
A false-positive control needs a SOUND document, so that 'nothing found' is the
correct answer. Trial 03's input was chosen with five pre-registered weaknesses,
deliberately, because absence of the strong hit is only interpretable if
performance is otherwise competent. The ground-truth list exists to establish
that the document is NOT sound. They are different experiments.
The wrap held the contradiction in one paragraph — calling trial 03 the control
while saying the control requires a sound document trial 03 does not use. It
survived the wake, was restored as the thread, and was 'substrate-checked': the
check verified the M4 was up and that trial 03 had not run, and never asked
whether the trial was the thing the thread said it was. Checking that a claim's
referent exists is not checking that the claim is true. The conflation then
reached the run record's note field, which is preserved with the error in it.
Consequence, larger than trial 03: the false-positive control has not merely
gone unrun, it has never been DESIGNED. It needs a document believed sound, and
soundness cannot be known by construction. That choice is a fork, and it is
surfaced rather than taken.
David F Glidden
cd2edaa3c9