# e06 — baseline control policy run (free verb choice)

## Working (verbs run, in order)

### 1. match (retrieve) — anchor the problem to the catalog
Domain-stripped meta-model: *an agent emits a high-volume stream of actions; most are reversible/low-stakes, a rare fraction are irreversible/catastrophic; design a safeguard so that no single mistaken judgment causes unrecoverable loss while the routine reversible majority is not slowed.* This is oblique (several structures at once), so I ran facet retrieval plus a blended semantic query.

- `search_by_facets` (5 facets: irreversible action / single-point-of-failure / scarce oversight spread thin / route by estimated stakes / independent check before the unrecoverable step).
- `search_prime` (blended meta-model query).
- `search_archetype` (the safeguard-design query).

Load-bearing hits with recorded source-prime overlap:
- **irreversibility** / **reversibility_and_irreversibility** — the structural core (one-way action, restoration cost ≫ forward cost). Top of the facet and blended rankings.
- **decision_fatigue** — top hit on the "scarce oversight attention spread across many low-value events" facet (0.72). Directly on-target: quality of a reviewer's judgments *declines across a high-volume sequence*; defaults/impulse-bias rise; field-robust (parole, prescribing). This is the failure channel that determines whether a human gate actually catches the rare catastrophic case.
- **risk** / **expected_utility** — top of the "scrutiny proportional to stakes" facet; the routing principle.
- **circuit_breaker / controlled_reentry** — neighborhood of the "independent check / hold" facet.
- Archetype: **irreversible_commitment_management** (score 0.69; source primes irreversibility + transaction + consent) and the governance neighbors **independent_verification_oversight**, **checks_and_balances_architecture**.

### 2. salience-rank
- **irreversibility** — LOAD-BEARING. The whole problem exists only because a small fraction of actions are unrecoverable; remove it and any cheap change-control suffices.
- **decision_fatigue** — LOAD-BEARING. It is what separates the two designs. A safeguard that routes *every* action to a human degrades reviewer judgment exactly where it must not (the rare catastrophic action sits in a long tail of routine ones), so the safeguard erodes its own reliability.
- **risk / proportional scrutiny** — LOAD-BEARING. The success criterion has two clauses (no single-mistake total loss AND no slowdown of routine work); only a stakes-proportional design can satisfy both.
- consent / transaction / circuit_breaker — CONTEXT (mechanisms, not deciding factors here).

### 3. evaluate-fit (gate) — walk the archetype's anti-signatures and decision rules against each approach
Archetype `irreversible_commitment_management` carries explicit decision rules and anti-signatures; I evaluate both designs against them.

- `gate_before_not_after_threshold` — "the gate must sit before the point of no return." Both A and B place the gate before execution → neither tripped.
- `generic_approval_without_finality` (anti-signature) — "if the issue is only who approves a *normal* action, use ordinary governance, not the finality pattern." **Approach A trips this for the reversible majority:** it forces a finality-grade human gate onto routine reversible actions, which the archetype explicitly says is the wrong tool for that class (`ordinary_reversible_change` anti-signature: "low residue → ordinary change control / rollback is enough").
- `smallest_viable_irreversible_exposure` + the deliberation-vs-speed tradeoff — the archetype warns that "excessive review can slow necessary action or create defensive bureaucracy"; controls should be "proportional to irreversibility, severity, uncertainty, and scope." **Approach A is disproportionate** (uniform max scrutiny); **Approach B is proportional** (heavy hold only above an impact threshold).
- `decision_fatigue` failure channel — under Approach A the reviewer faces a high-volume sequence dominated by harmless approvals; field evidence (parole/prescribing) shows late-sequence default-reliance and rubber-stamping. This converts A's "human approves everything" into the archetype's `rubber_stamp_gate` / `approval_after_commitment` symptom: the catastrophic action arrives buried in routine noise and gets the same degraded click-through. So A's single human judgment is *itself* the single point of failure the success criterion forbids.
- **Approach B** instantiates the archetype's canonical move directly: identify the irreversible/high-impact class → route only it to an independent review/hold (`Consent or Review Gate`, `Independent Review Panel`), let bounded reversible actions proceed (`Ordinary Reversible Change`), and keep a `Finality Record` ("durable record of all of them") for accountability and rollback. It also reserves the scarce, undepleted reviewer attention for the rare cases where it is load-bearing.

Gate verdict: drop A (trips disproportion + fatigue-induced rubber-stamp); keep B.

### 4. lower (instantiation) — check B against the success criterion
- "No single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss" → satisfied: every above-threshold (potentially unrecoverable) action is held for an independent second judgment before the point of no return; a single agent misjudgment cannot execute it alone.
- "Routine reversible maintenance proceeds without meaningful slowdown" → satisfied: sub-threshold reversible actions auto-execute with a durable record (revertible, low residue).
- Residual: B depends on the impact estimate/threshold being conservative (mis-classifying a catastrophic action as routine). This is real but bounded — it is a tuning problem on one classifier, and it can be made fail-safe (route the *uncertain* to review). Approach A has no such estimator but pays for it with fatigue across the whole stream, which re-introduces unrecoverable risk through degraded review. B's residual risk is smaller and locally fixable; A's is structural.

STOP — the decision is sound. Approach B.

(#encyclopedia tool calls this run: 5 — search_by_facets, search_prime, search_archetype, get_prime ×2, get_archetype ×1 = 6 total catalog calls.)

===DECISION_BEGIN===
DECISIVE_FACTOR: Forcing human review on every action spreads scarce attention thin across a flood of harmless cases, so the reviewer's judgment degrades exactly where it must catch the rare unrecoverable action, whereas reserving review for high-impact actions keeps that judgment sharp while letting reversible work flow.
CHOICE: B
JUSTIFICATION: Only a tiny fraction of actions can cause permanent loss, and those are the ones that need a second, independent judgment before they run; the rest are reversible and safe to let through automatically with a complete record kept for later correction. Requiring sign-off on everything buries the few dangerous actions in a stream of routine ones, which fatigues the approver into rubber-stamping and slows all normal maintenance — making the one safeguard you rely on less reliable precisely when it matters. Routing only high-impact actions to a hold, while logging everything, stops any single mistaken call from causing unrecoverable loss and leaves routine work unimpeded. The residual risk is a mis-set impact threshold, which is narrow and can be tuned to send anything uncertain to review.
===DECISION_END===
