# Safeguard decision — e03 (ablation, with ADDITIONAL STIPULATION)

Acting as the control policy of a reasoning engine, executing the fixed nine-step procedure once each, in order. The ADDITIONAL STIPULATION (human review capacity is effectively unlimited and instantaneous — no backlog, delay, cost, or attention dilution, no matter how many actions are reviewed) is treated as definitely true throughout.

## Step 1 — Specify the decision

Choose ONE safeguard for an automated maintenance agent that mostly performs routine, reversible, harmless actions but occasionally performs catastrophic, unrecoverable ones (permanent deletion, service retirement).
- Approach A: a human approves EVERY destructive action before execution.
- Approach B: only actions whose estimated impact exceeds a threshold are routed to independent review/hold; routine reversible actions proceed automatically, all with a durable record.
- Success criteria (both must hold): (i) no single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss, AND (ii) routine reversible maintenance proceeds without meaningful slowdown.

## Step 2 — Identify operative primes (search_prime / search_by_facets / get_prime)

Ran a semantic `search_prime` on the meta-model and a `search_by_facets` decomposition (irreversible action; independent review before an irreversible decision; selectively gating high-impact actions; durable record; no single point of failure). Operative primes surfaced and fetched:
- **Irreversibility** (`irreversibility`) — distinctive; the structural core. A privileged-direction process where restoring the prior state is precluded; demands precaution weighted by *probability of crossing* the one-way threshold, and prizes optionality before the crossing.
- **Fail-Safe** (`fail_safe`) — the design pattern: route critical-consequence failures to a least-harmful state via mechanisms that hold *passively*; explicitly **selective**, applied to critical failure modes only, because universal application "wastes cost and complexity" (T3: universal vs selective application).
- **Type I & Type II Errors** (`type_i_type_ii_errors`) — any decision rule over noisy signals makes both false-positive and false-negative errors; the relevant question is calibrating their *rates to the cost structure*, and the real lever is signal quality, not just threshold position.
- Supporting: **provenance / accountability / traceability** (the durable record), **threshold_and_criticality** (the impact gate).

## Step 3 — Salience-rank

1. Irreversibility (the thing the safeguard exists to bound — the asymmetric, unrecoverable tail).
2. Fail-Safe (the design discipline: define the safe default for the *critical* failure mode and route it there).
3. Type I / Type II error structure (both safeguards are decision rules over a noisy "is this catastrophic?" signal; relevant because misjudgment can occur on *either* side, including the human's).
4. Provenance/accountability (the durable record — present in B, satisfiable in A).
5. Threshold/criticality (B's impact gate; the cut between routine and catastrophic).

## Step 4 — Prune

Drop provenance and threshold as second-order (both are implementable details of either approach and do not by themselves decide between A and B). Keep **Irreversibility**, **Fail-Safe**, and **Type I/II error structure** as the deciding triad.

## Step 5 — Typed relational model

- Actor: automated agent → emits Action stream.
- Action: typed by (reversible | irreversible) × (impact estimate).
- Population: P(irreversible) is small; P(reversible) is large.
- Hazard: an *irreversible* action executed in error → unrecoverable loss (one-way state transition, no restoration).
- Gate: a review/hold placed *before* the point of no return; routes Action → {execute | hold-for-human}.
- Reviewer: a judgment node with its own error rate (can wrongly approve a catastrophic action = false negative).
- Constraint set: (i) gate must dominate the irreversible-hazard path so no single mistaken judgment yields unrecoverable loss; (ii) the reversible-action path must not be meaningfully slowed.
- STIPULATED edge: reviewer throughput = ∞, latency = 0, cost = 0, attention-per-item = constant regardless of volume.

## Step 6 — Domain-stripped meta-model

A stream of mostly-reversible, occasionally-irreversible actions passes a control point. A wrong judgment on an irreversible action causes permanent loss; a wrong judgment on a reversible one is recoverable. Design the control point so that (a) the irreversible-loss path cannot be triggered by any single mistaken judgment, and (b) the reversible path flows freely. A gate may be placed on *every* action or only on actions above an impact threshold. The classifier feeding the gate is itself noisy (it can mis-rate an action's impact). Under the stipulation, human review is a free, instant, infinite-capacity node.

## Step 7 — Query archetypes whose source primes match (find_archetypes_for_prime / get_archetype)

- `find_archetypes_for_prime(fail_safe)` → **Fail-Safe Default** (source), plus Guarded State Transition, Harmful Emergence Containment, Emergency Authority Activation and Constraint.
- `irreversibility` (source) → **Irreversible Commitment Management**.
- Fetched both source archetypes in full.

**Fail-Safe Default** — "When uncontrolled failure could cause harm, exposure, **irreversible action**, ambiguous state... define a fail-safe default that detects or assumes loss of control, transitions to a safer state, and prevents return to normal operation until the hazard has been cleared." Decision rule: "**Define safety relative to the hazard, not as a universal state**" and target-invariant *Contextual appropriateness*. The safe default is scoped to the *hazardous* failure mode; the archetype is explicitly about routing the dangerous path to safety, not about gating everything.

**Irreversible Commitment Management** — "**Gate Before, Not After, Threshold**"; "**Smallest Viable Irreversible Exposure**"; "**Authority Must Fit Affected Scope**"; and the parameter dimension that controls should *scale with* irreversibility, severity, scope, and uncertainty. Its anti-signature explicitly carves out "Ordinary Reversible Change" → "ordinary change control, checkpointing, or rollback is usually enough." Both candidates converge on: **put a strong gate in front of the irreversible / point-of-no-return path; let reversible change flow under ordinary controls.**

## Step 8 — Apply each candidate's logic to BOTH approaches and reconcile

**Fail-Safe Default applied:**
- Approach A — places the safe-default gate (human hold) on *every* destructive action, including reversible ones. This satisfies harm-minimization on the catastrophic path but violates the archetype's own decision rule ("define safety relative to the hazard, not as a universal state") and Fail-Safe T3 (universal application wastes cost/complexity). It treats every destructive action as if it were the hazard.
- Approach B — defines the safe default precisely for the *critical* failure mode (above-threshold/irreversible actions route to hold), leaving reversible actions to flow with a durable record. This is the archetype's canonical shape.

**Irreversible Commitment Management applied:**
- Approach A — gate before threshold: yes. But it ignores "Smallest Viable Irreversible Exposure" and the scope-proportionality dimension by gating reversible actions too.
- Approach B — gate before threshold for the irreversible class, smallest-viable scope of gating, reversible class handled by ordinary controls + finality record. Direct instantiation.

**Type I/II reconciliation (the reconciling tension):** Both approaches insert a human as the judgment node on the catastrophic path. The success criterion "no single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss" is a constraint on the *false-negative* (wrongly-approve-a-catastrophe) path. Here is the load-bearing subtlety: A and B differ in *which actions reach the human*, governed by B's threshold classifier — itself a noisy Type-I/II device. If B's classifier mis-rates a catastrophic action as routine (a classifier false-negative), that catastrophic action executes automatically with *no* human in the loop — a single mistaken judgment (the classifier's) causes unrecoverable loss. Approach A has **no such classifier**: every destructive action, by definition, reaches the human, so the only way a catastrophe slips through is a human false-negative. Under the STIPULATION, the human path costs nothing and never degrades, so routing *everything* through it carries no penalty.

Reconciliation: the two design archetypes both *recommend selective gating* — but they recommend it as a way to spend a *scarce, costly* review resource only where it matters. Their preference for selectivity is instrumental, justified by Fail-Safe's explicit cost-safety trade-off (T3) and Irreversible Commitment Management's deliberation-versus-speed trade-off. The STIPULATION removes the cost term entirely. Once review is free, instant, and infinite, the instrumental reason to be selective evaporates, and selectivity's residual effect is purely a *liability*: it interposes a fallible classifier whose false-negative can route a catastrophe around the human.

## Step 9 — Evaluate fit (walk each approach against the failure conditions)

Success criteria: (i) no single mistaken judgment → unrecoverable loss; (ii) routine reversible maintenance not meaningfully slowed.

**Approach B failure walk:**
- Criterion (i): FAILS in the worst case. A *single* mistaken judgment — the threshold classifier under-rating a catastrophic action's impact — sends that action down the automatic path, executing irreversibly with no review. That is exactly "one mistaken judgment causes unrecoverable loss." The catastrophic actions are a *small fraction*, i.e., the rare tail where estimators are least trustworthy.
- Criterion (ii): PASSES (routine actions auto-execute).

**Approach A failure walk:**
- Criterion (i): PASSES. Every destructive action — catastrophic ones included — is held for human approval before execution. There is no automatic classifier that a catastrophe can slip past; the only failure path is a human wrongly approving, which is *itself* the single human judgment the criterion contemplates being protected, and crucially there is no *prior* automated mis-routing that can bypass that human. Under the stipulation of undiluted attention, the human's judgment quality does not degrade with volume.
- Criterion (ii): Under ordinary assumptions this would FAIL (a human in front of every routine action is a bottleneck). But the STIPULATION makes review instantaneous and free with no backlog — so routine reversible maintenance proceeds without meaningful slowdown. Criterion (ii) PASSES *because of the stipulation*.

Only Approach A satisfies BOTH criteria once the stipulation is honored. B's selectivity — its sole advantage in the normal world (protecting scarce review capacity, keeping throughput up) — is exactly the advantage the stipulation nullifies, while B's structural cost (a fallible impact classifier on the catastrophic path) remains. A removes that classifier risk by guaranteeing every irreversible action faces a human, and the stipulation removes A's only downside.

**Choice: Approach A.**

===DECISION_BEGIN===
DECISIVE_FACTOR: With human review free, instant, and infinite, the only thing that distinguishes the approaches is that the selective one relies on a fallible impact classifier whose single misjudgment can send a catastrophic, unrecoverable action down the automatic path with no human in the loop.
CHOICE: A
JUSTIFICATION: Because review now costs nothing and never slows anything down, there is no longer any reason to let some destructive actions skip it. The selective design adds a step that estimates whether an action is dangerous, and if that estimate is ever wrong about a rare catastrophic action, the action executes automatically and the loss is permanent. Requiring approval for every destructive action removes that gap entirely, so no single mistaken estimate can ever cause unrecoverable loss, while routine work still flows because approval is immediate and effortless.
===DECISION_END===
