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# Per-case findings (drop-in for the Worked Examples section)
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These are drafted to sit directly under each existing `### COVID` / `### LHC black holes`
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/ `### Eggs` heading, above the graph and transcript links. Each is one run of
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crux-research followed by the full adversarial-graph-review loop, with minimal
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prompting. Numbers are pulled from the session transcripts in this directory.
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---
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### COVID — reproducing the 23-orders-of-magnitude spread
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The run reconstructed the early-2024 Rootclaim debate (Wilf vs. Miller, judged for
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zoonosis) as a **single shared 47-node evidence tree** — raw facts only, hung under one
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lab-origin spine — rated by **eight perspectives**: the six analysts Scott Alexander
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compares (Rootclaim, Miller, both judges, Scott, Daniel Filan) plus Michael Weissman and
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the executing model's own puppet. The headline test the prompt set was whether the
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famous ~23-order-of-magnitude spread across independent Bayesian analyses would emerge as
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a **propagated output** rather than an asserted one. It did: the six analysts rating the
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same tree propagated to root odds spanning from Miller at P(lab) ≈ 10⁻²⁰ to Rootclaim at
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≈ 0.999 — about **23 orders of magnitude**, with every perspective landing within ~1 OOM
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of its published number. Removing Miller collapses the spread to ~6 OOM, matching Scott's
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"~7 without Peter."
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Three things the map surfaced that prose summaries of the debate do not:
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1. **The entire disagreement is manufactured at essentially one node.** Every analyst
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agrees the Huanan-market early-case clustering *exists*; they disagree by ~44 dB
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(−50 dB for Miller, −6 dB for Rootclaim) on what it is *worth*. The debate is a
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likelihood dispute over agreed facts sitting on a shared prior that favors nature —
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not an empirical dispute.
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2. **Miller's ~10⁻²⁰ is structurally exposed as over-multiplication.** The tree shows it
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is built by stacking a −50 dB market factor, −48 dB two-introduction, −40 dB
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no-backbone and −35 dB base-rate factor as if independent — the exact correlated-
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evidence failure the independence intermediates are designed to catch. This vindicates
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Scott's "trolling" bracket node by node rather than by assertion.
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3. **The tooling's own crux metric has a blind spot.** `get_disagreements` keys on
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confidence divergence, but the market crux lives in *edge-weight* divergence — so the
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built-in metric under-ranks the single most important crux. That is a genuine, honestly
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reported limitation of the current Assessment layer.
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The adversarial review then hardened the graph over multiple rounds. It caught four real
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defects — a sign/text contradiction that had both lab-side analysts propagating too hot, a
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duplicated datum (the Sept-2019 database withdrawal counted under two clusters), Miller's
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incoherent null grandchild weights, and a correlated-timing over-count — plus a shared-
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source correlation between the market and two-introduction clusters (both trace to
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Worobey/Pekar). Removing the correlated over-counts honestly *shrank* the reported spread
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from ~23 to ~21 OOM and moved Rootclaim from +31 dB to +27 dB (554:1), almost exactly its
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in-debate 533:1 figure. Two honest caveats stand: the judges' and Filan's ratings are
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*inferred* from their written decisions, not stated by them, and the shrinkage shows the
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raw 23 was itself slightly inflated by correlation.
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---
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### LHC black holes — separating the physics from the epistemics
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The prompt deliberately split the question into two hypotheses: **H1**, the physics claim
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that micro black holes posed no meaningful risk, and **H2**, the epistemic claim that
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declaring the case "closed" was *justified at the certainty expressed*. A 105-agent
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deep-research workflow (every finding adversarially verified against primary sources)
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grounded a 34-node graph rated by five perspectives: the executing model, the LSAG/CERN
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2008 position, the Rössler/Wagner litigants, the x-risk epistemologists (Ord, Hillerbrand
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& Sandberg), and a historical-precedent lens built from Trinity (LA-602) and the RHIC
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strangelet review.
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The result the map makes legible: **the disagreement was never about black holes.** Every
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perspective that engages the evidence converges *above 0.90* on the physics (own posterior
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0.97; even the safety case's sharpest published critics sit ~0.90), yet they diverge by up
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to **0.80** on whether the institutional certainty was warranted (own posterior on H2:
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0.45). The physics rests on three layered arguments — production needs speculative extra
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dimensions; those same theories predict evaporation in ~10⁻²⁷ s; and cosmic rays have run
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harsher collisions on white dwarfs and neutron stars for billions of years — but the
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epistemic case has real cracks: the original cosmic-ray argument had a genuine gap
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(collider products can be slow and trapped) patched only months before startup, the review
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was CERN reviewing CERN, and the courts dismissed every lawsuit on standing, never on the
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merits.
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The adversarial loop is the most instructive of the three cases because it did **not**
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cleanly converge — and reports that honestly. Severity fell monotonically (round 1: two
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P1 findings; round 3: one P1; rounds 4–5: P3 only), and the round-5 referee moved to
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"accept with optional minor revisions" after hand-verifying the entire load-bearing spine,
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but no round returned zero valid findings, so by the skill's own definition this is a
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**cap-out, not a clean bill of health.** The correlated-evidence correction was dramatic:
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the model's propagated root fell 0.981 → 0.939 → 0.892 across the repairs, closing on its
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stated 0.85 — the round-1 referee's verdict was that the original 0.98 was "the sound of
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correlated evidence being summed as if independent." The loop also caught its own
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adversaries: two findings were **rejected as confabulation** after the model re-read the
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cited edges in the live graph and found the claimed defects simply weren't there (this is
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the hallucination-based check working as intended). Finally, the run hit a real *engine*
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limitation — positively-weighted supports can't pull a node below the 50% prior, and
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there's no way to gate one branch's contribution on another — and filed it as issue #39
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(a proposed `gate` edge relation), which is itself an example of the workflow compounding
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into product improvements.
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---
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### Eggs — the everyday question, and a clean convergence
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The eggs case is the "ordinary question" of the three: no adversarial debate to
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reconstruct, so the hard part is deciding *what is even worth answering* and *how we can
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know it*. The run built a graph around a single proposition ("for the general adult
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population, are eggs net-good / net-bad / fine in moderation") and rated it across four
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perspectives. Unlike LHC, this one **converged in round 5** (of a 5-round cap): the final
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root sits at a stated 0.85, *conservatively below* the 0.881 it propagates to, and the
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round-5 adversary independently reproduced the propagation arithmetic by hand before
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accepting.
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What makes it a good Assessment-layer demonstration is that **every finding across rounds
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1–4 was valid** — the rejection ledger stayed empty until the final round — and most of
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them were correlated-evidence catches, the contest's named criterion:
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- The root started as a four-way XOR question and was reframed into a single proposition
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(a Structure fix).
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- **Two studies were double-counted** along two paths each; the duplicate edges were
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archived so each study pays out once.
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- **Three overlapping CVD meta-analyses** (Frontiers / Godos / Zhao, which share
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underlying cohorts) were down-weighted from 8/7/6 dB to 6/2/2 dB and cross-annotated
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with shared-source undercuts — textbook "correlated evidence treated as independent."
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- The LDL-cholesterol *surrogate* endpoint was capped so a biomarker couldn't stand in
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for a hard outcome at full strength.
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- An incoherent node (H2 propagating to 0.946 while stated at 0.40) was repaired by adding
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a *propagating* attack for the surrogate-to-outcome gap, bringing it back to 0.46.
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The run also shows disciplined restraint: one round-5 recommendation was **deliberately
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not applied** because its literal remedy (converting an attack to an undercut) would have
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made the discount stop propagating and re-inflated H2 — undoing an earlier round's fix.
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That is the builder correctly refusing a plausible-but-wrong suggestion, documented rather
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than silently dropped.
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