Divergence escalates the wrong population: unanimous misses auto-pass

Divergence escalates the wrong population: unanimous misses auto-pass Agent Determinism Illusions (Part 7) Where this fits: This part does not continue Part 13's probe-vs-prose thread. It returns to Part 6 's L2→L3 escalation rule — Dipankar's move of treating vote disagreement as the human-review signal. Alexey Spinov's follow-up comment says that signal points at the wrong population. Two experiments check whether he is right, and what to put in the tripwire instead. Part 6 drew this control flow: L2 multi-perspective votes │ unanimous ──────────► AUTO-PASS / AUTO-REJECT │ divergence (e.g. 2–1) ► L3 human The caveat was already in the text: divergence measures ambiguity; it does not fix unanimous systematic bias. Alexey's point is sharper — and it is about routing , not about another caveat paragraph. 1. Alexey's population mismatch On the Part 6 thread, Alexey Spinov wrote (paraphrased tightly): The dangerous failures are high-confidence and directional — systematic. Systematic bias is shared across prompts, not idiosyncratic (your own P3: majority voting doesn't fix it). So the three perspectives will tend to agree on exactly those cases. Divergence-to-human then routes you the safely-ambiguous ones and auto-passes the confidently-wrong ones. The escalation signal is pointing at the wrong population. He proposed two cheap replacements: T1 — deterministic tripwire on known-reversal classes (escalate regardless of agreement). T2 — treat unanimous + high-confidence on a historically reversal-prone class as escalate — the inverse of “high confidence, auto-pass.” That is the claim under test. Not “divergence is useless,” but “divergence alone is the wrong primary tripwire for the failure mode you already measured.” 2. Experiment A — offline proxy on DF v2 (no new API) Part 6's Mike Update already showed: of 96 DF v2 MISS runs, 95.8% sat at self-reported confidence ≥ 0.9 (avg 0.969). That mass is concentrated — Part 6 also reported ~80% of MISS runs from qwen3:0.5b —