Boundaries & Non-Goals
- Qualitative scope: predicts direction/stability (sign and relative preference), not rates, absolute yields, or hazards.
- Observation-only gate: the environment term scales preference and encodes calm vs. stress; it does not actuate or flip direction.
- Priors as rapidity shifts only: bounded, transparent nudges that never alter the contrast lens or classical balances; idempotent when disabled.
- Collapse safety: classical results are preserved under collapse; clamps keep stability measures bounded; direction tracks the contrast under fixed stoichiometry and positive slope.
- Publication posture: publish unit/scale/weight choices, guard values, gate and determinism knobs, rounding policy, catalogs/bounds, and any prior or gate recipes in manifests.
Sensitivity note (how knobs shape magnitudes)
- Slope (c): steeper mapping increases alignment magnitudes; with fixed stoichiometry it does not change the direction set by the contrast.
- Weights (gamma): rebalance pooling across species; affects magnitude more than sign when guards/clamps are in place.
- Gate knobs {kappa, mu, rho}: shape the environment scaling only (instantaneous gap penalty, accrual pace, memory). These change scaled preference, not direction.
- Units (E_unit): rescale the contrast; choose a sensible unit so normalized contrasts remain order-1 and publish it.
Actionables: tune variance/weights via Calibration (10.6) and verify sign stability across (E_unit, c, gamma) using the Robustness grid (11.6); accept only if direction remains consistent across the grid.
Failure modes (declare and handle)
- Undefined/ambiguous contrast: when a multi-step path prevents a defensible lens, evaluate per-step or use a declared fallback; mark AMBER in the 3-Test and publish the rationale.
- Sign flip on robustness grid: first fix units, clamps, weights, priors; if unresolved, classify as sensitive (AMBER) with explicit energy/coupling notes.
- Illegal species: disallow by policy for illegal valence/unapproved radicals and list them in the manifest.
Plain ASCII formulas referenced on this page (copy-ready)
phi(m, a) = m
RSI_env = g_t * RSI
delta_u = alpha * Index # Index in [0, 1], alpha >= 0
|a| < 1
|RSI| < 1
sign(RSI) = sign(e)
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