Subgoal-draws rung (b′) FALSIFIED: the width holds better subgoals — the scorer anti-selects them

2026-08-09 00:0x–00:2xZ. The rung-(b′) clean-list run (pre-reg) completed 23:52Z 08-08 on the pre-registered q4 fallback subset (4,301 rows; the rate gate fired at launch and the switch was recorded). The frozen reads ran this session after landing the subset-join read path the run’s boundary named (the draws10/energy-score join convention, oracle-gated with a q4-shaped slice fixture; check.py 538 green). Adjudication banked in analysis__subgoal_draws_cleanlist_q4_ar100k_k4l2.json. E6 fired — decisively — and the pre-registered adjudication routes NO-SCORER. Δ_bon/Δ_ceil, unmeasured since rung (b) closed at table cost, are finally on the board.

The one number

Read 1 (primary, frozen): head-to-head paired (bon − self) per-frame vs the banked rung-(a) self arm, seeded bootstrap CI95. Falsifier: CI95 not entirely below 0 ⇒ FALSIFIED.

Result: +0.210, CI95 [+0.113, +0.312] — entirely above zero. Conditioning on the self-certainty pick from 8 clean sampled candidates is significantly worse than conditioning on the single greedy self subgoal. Worse still, Δ_bon vs the bare baseline is +0.142 [+0.027, +0.260]: the SC pick loses to running no subgoal conditioning at all. Expectation E3 (bon lands between self and ceiling) failed in the ugliest available way — bon is below both.

The adjudication: NO-SCORER, with a live ceiling

The point of pairing Δ_ceil with the falsifier was to know why if it fired. It fired with the ceiling alive:

The oracle pick (token-F1 vs the held-out true subgoal) beats the baseline by −0.250 and the greedy self subgoal by −0.181, both CI95 clear of zero — the 8-candidate width contains genuinely better-phase subgoals. Horizon decomposition says the ceiling’s gain sits exactly where the rung-(a) slot said subgoal signal lives: last-10% steps −0.464 vs first-10% −0.026. The self-certainty scorer not only fails to find those texts, it anti-selects: its pick’s late-horizon delta is +0.055.

The clean-list filter itself did its structural job — 0 fallback rows, eligible list mean 8.06 of 9 (min 4), 97.7% of rows with ≥ 2 unique candidate texts. Diversity is not the constraint. The scorer is. Under the pre-reg’s frozen routing: the selection family stays closed on scorer-free tricks; scorer-side escalations (a learned verifier, a probe-style ranker — the ROVER shape) may earn their own pre-reg. No prompt fishing, no post-hoc scorer promotion.

Record-only supporting reads

Agreement (read 3): the SC pick’s text differs from greedy on 59.8% of rows — it selects actively, just wrongly. The record-only alternates barely agree with it (likelihood 40.6%, medoid 39.8%) and agree with the oracle even less (45.6% / 44.6% on labeled rows): no scorer in the free family tracks the ceiling.

Free channel (record-only): the narrated pass-1 column lands at −0.036 [−0.143, +0.072] vs baseline — spans zero on this subset, consistent with the known small-magnitude narration signs.

Execution oracles (read 6, all green, each a hard abort): full-panel anchor reproduced 5.8026/2.1431 before the join; subset join 4,301/25,800 with identity + state-copy byte-match on the joined rows; every dumped live pick byte-matches the offline scorer recompute (both arms); filter provenance in report + dump; no bare baseline column. Baseline and banked self re-pooled onto the q4 rows pair at 6.841/6.772 — q4 pooled levels are not comparable to full-panel numbers, all claims above are paired deltas. The pass-1 narr column differs from the banked rung-(a) narr on 3,159/4,301 rows (recorded, not adjudicated — the amendment-1 composition/device class).

Where this leaves #6

Rung (a) put the slot’s value at −0.29 (oracle text, late-horizon); rung (b′) now shows a sampled width that contains that value (−0.25 ceiling) and prices the missing piece: a scorer. Generation is not the bottleneck at this width — phase estimation (rung (a)’s Δ_self ≈ 0) and now selection (Δ_bon > 0) both fail on the same axis. Anything that can rank candidate subgoals by actual phase fit — a learned verifier head, the fields-channel probe, or distillation from the oracle picks this run dumped (4,298 labeled rows of picked-vs-oracle pairs, free training data) — is the named next rung, its own pre-reg required. Cost: ~1.4 GPU-h of the ≤ 5 gate.