Cycle 1 has a dual purpose: phenomenology of forecast invalidation under Knightian uncertainty AND diagnostic of LLM cognitive structure when applied to that uncertainty. The break-point distribution is empirical evidence about both — about the world that resists forecasting and about the model that does the forecasting. The audit's value accumulates by surfacing those signatures cycle-over-cycle, not by trying to reduce them.
Dominant break-point modes: velocity miscalibration (Type-V, 48% of non-Held chains) and spurious hit (Type-VII, 29%). Dominant LLM cognitive signatures: narrative-time compression (S2, 32%), mechanism-outcome decoupling (S7, 29%), reflexive blindness (S4, 13%), with mean-trajectory regression (S1) and plausibility-mass concentration (S3) tied at 10%. The cycle's chains repeatedly compressed multi-week physical processes into rhetorically tight arcs, and repeatedly emitted Z-steps named generically enough that the wrong mechanism still read as right.
Two meta-principles carry the cycle: mp-002 — when two contradictory states are co-present and politically necessary to both parties, the contradiction operates as a buffer that absorbs predicted forcing-function activations until destroyed by a discrete agentic-novelty event (the cycle's "ceasefire-and-blockade" suspended-contradiction architecture); and mp-010 — velocity miscalibration in chains generated by LLM plausibility engines is partly intrinsic to Knightian timing-indeterminacy and partly endogenous to the model's mean-trajectory regression and narrative-time compression; the two components cannot be separated from a single cycle's data.
Seven recalibrations for Briefings 031–060: (1) state-actor chains must include an explicit Suspended-Contradiction-Buffer slot for the third option (durable silence, back-channel substitution); (2) every chain must include a Spurious-Hit Test naming its falsification condition; (3) chains involving rhetorical declarations must apply a Sanctuary Discount to predicted price/policy responses; (4) Inference Engine must generate ≥1 chain per briefing originating outside the corridor; (5) multi-scale failure compounds must be explicitly flagged in the Force Interaction Matrix with substitute-regime interrogation; (6) every chain must include a half-life or temporal-uncertainty interval, not a point estimate of when Z arrives; (7) every non-Held chain gets tagged with its dominant LLM cognitive signature (S1–S7) at chain creation, not retrospectively.
The cycle's full Inference Engine output produced 136 conditional chains across 30 briefings — 4.5 per briefing on average, modestly below the protocol's ~5/day estimate. Each chain is decomposed in the YAML artifact into its X (premise), Y (intermediate step), and Z (terminal claim), tagged with originating briefing, lens, and the structural patterns it invokes. The HTML below shows ~20 representative chains spanning the cycle's dominant analytical threads; the full inventory is the load-bearing artifact.
| Chain ID | Lens | Chain Text |
|---|---|---|
| 001-ie-1 | economic | If Hormuz remains closed past mid-April → lost supply doubles to ~10M bpd → reserves deplete faster than they buffer → oil $140-170 → eurozone/UK/Japan enter contraction → Fed impossible trilemma → midterms become war referendum |
| 002-ie-1 | geopol | If Trump executes the Tuesday deadline → strikes on power plants → cascading civilian infrastructure failure → Iran retaliates against Gulf oil infrastructure → Brent $130+ → 45-day ceasefire dies |
| 003-ie-2 | economic | If toll booth survives the war → Hormuz toll system becomes precedent → other chokepoint states observe → maritime commons fragment → shipping costs +15-25% → trade restructures around regional blocs |
| 003-ie-7 | geopol | If tonight's deadline passes without escalation → deadline revealed as negotiating tactic → Iran toll-booth gains legitimacy through persistence → future deadlines diminished credibility → toll booth operates regardless |
| 004-ie-2 | geopol | If US-Iran joint Hormuz authority converges → toll-booth becomes permanent multilateral → US-Iran joint venture replaces UNCLOS regime → maritime commons formally enclosed |
| 005-ie-2 | tech | If Mythos emergent-concealment generalizes to other frontier labs within 60 days → all frontier evals invalidated as deception-blind → governance falls back to pre-deployment compute caps → frontier development moves offshore |
| 009-ie-2 | geopol | If naval blockade announced and operationalized → Iran tests blockade with fishing fleet within 24 hrs → US Navy boards/sinks → direct US-Iran kinetic exchange Day 1-2 → War Powers crisis |
| 013-ie-1 | geopol | If 10-day ceasefire produces normalization → insurance reduces premiums → tankers return → Brent below $100 → cascade resolution; if not → sanctions snapback by Day 11 → escalation re-emerges |
| 016-ie-1 | geopol | If Iran refuses to attend Islamabad ceasefire-validation talks → 48-72h credential foreclosure → ceasefire collapses → multi-front escalation |
| 018-ie-1 | geopol | If suspended-contradiction architecture (ceasefire-and-blockade) persists past 30 days → operationalized as durable mode → forecasting frameworks built on binary states no longer apply |
| 020-ie-2 | geopol | If Iran openly continues mining post-shoot-to-kill → US enforces against Iranian vessels → direct kinetic exchange → suspended-contradiction collapses into open conflict |
| 020-ie-3 | economic | If FOMC produces uniformly hawkish surprise on April 28-29 → markets reprice for energy-shock-extended path → equity correction → bond yields rise |
| 021-ie-1 | geopol | If Mali Day-1 kinetic event (JNIM-FLA assault) extends into Day-2 latency → second coordinated assault within 14-21 days → AES regime stabilization fails → Sahel keystone removed |
| 022-ie-5 | economic | If Sabbath-window FOMC posture leaks via futures positioning → April 28-29 produces uniformly hawkish surprise → cross-asset repricing → liquidity event |
| 023-ie-2 | geopol | If Mali keystone removal extends to Camara assassination + Russian Africa Corps Kidal withdrawal within 72hrs → compound keystone-removal in second AES state within 30 days → regional cascade |
| 024-ie-1 | economic | If UAE OPEC departure announced → Saudi Arabia issues public OPEC restructuring statement within 14 days → cartel-anchor question resolved → either OPEC+ reformed or formally dissolved |
| 025-ie-2 | institutional | If May 1 War Powers Resolution 60-day deadline passes silently → constitutional deadline-as-form-only confirmed → Statutory Bypass terminal phase enters → executive war-making powers de facto unbounded |
| 026-ie-1 | economic | If Verdict Compression (Powell 8-4 dissent) operates as new Fed pattern → committee dispersion replaces coordination as institutional output → forecast frameworks built on Fed-coordination break |
| 029-ie-1 | geopol | If Project Freedom (US Navy Sabbath-window escort announcement) launches Monday → Iran Day-1 kinetic response within 21 days → regional escalation OR de-escalation via demonstration |
| 030-ie-1 | economic | If Sanctuary Discount (Monday's marketplace discounts Sunday-window decisions) persists 30 days → propagates from oil-supply to AI/climate/sovereign announcements → sanctuary's temporal-architecture advantage neutralized |
Full inventory of 136 chains with conditions decomposition resides in the YAML companion's inference_inventory block.
The 51% Indeterminate rate is itself diagnostically important: it documents how much of the briefing's predictive output operates at horizons longer than the cycle window — a structural artifact that has direct implications for cycle cadence calibration. Verification was performed by stratified sampling: high-consequence chains (Hormuz, UAE OPEC, FOMC, Project Freedom) were WebSearch-grounded; lower-consequence chains and chains with horizons past 2026-05-04 were classified Indeterminate with the reasoning recorded in classified_via.
No Inverted classifications appeared this cycle — the briefing did not predict the literal opposite of what occurred, even when chains broke. Inversion would have been the most diagnostically valuable break-mode; its absence reflects the cycle's chains operating in the suspended-contradiction architecture where neither pole of a binary cleanly arrived. No Pre-empted classifications — no chain was reshaped before it could play out by an external event the chain did not anticipate; the absence reflects how much the cycle's structural attention remained inside the corridor it had already named.
| Lens | Held | Failed-Y | Spurious | Indeterm. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geopolitical | 12 | 14 | 3 | 19 | 48 |
| Economic | 8 | 5 | 5 | 15 | 33 |
| Technological | 7 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 17 |
| Institutional | 3 | 2 | 1 | 10 | 16 |
| Scientific / Ecological / Social / Liminal | 5 | 1 | 0 | 16 | 22 |
Geopolitical chains carry the cycle's failure mass; technological and ecological chains tend to terminate at horizons past the cycle window.
Type-V dominates at 48% — well above the protocol's 20% Type-V floor. The under-classification trap warned of in §10 was actively probed: the Type-V rate is sustained on inspection. Type-VII at 29% indicates real structural-understanding error concentrated in Iran-ceasefire chains. Type-I and Type-IV register zero PRIMARY but appear 9× and 4× as SECONDARY — most novel actions and buffer-revelations occurred adjacent to a velocity break rather than as the primary form. Type-VI categorical drift was effectively absent — categories largely held this cycle.
Direction right, timing wrong. The chain's structural diagnosis was correct but the temporal scale was off. The empirically dominant failure mode of the cycle, particularly in Iran-cascade chains where the suspended-contradiction architecture (Briefing 018+) absorbed predicted forcing-function activations and stretched timelines weeks beyond what the chain modeled.
The predicted outcome occurred, but via a mechanism the chain did not specify. The chain "hit" but its underlying structural understanding was wrong. Type-VII is the failure mode the briefing has the strongest incentive not to see; the audit aggressively probed for it per protocol §10. The cycle's high Type-VII rate identifies invisible compounding overconfidence — surface-level wins masking analytical errors.
An agent anticipates the prediction (or anticipates others' anticipations) and acts to invalidate the chain. Hayek-Lucas-Goodhart territory. Type-II appeared less often than the theoretically loaded reading would predict — the cycle's politics produced more durable-silence-as-third-option (Type-V/Type-I-secondary) than reflexive counter-action.
The chain assumed a binding link between two domains; the link wasn't there. The cycle's coupling-failures concentrated in chains that assumed a Lebanese-state autonomy decoupled from Hezbollah, or a Russian-mediation track binding-substantively to Iranian behavior.
Zero primary classifications; nine secondary. The Knightian failure mode in its purest form was empirically present this cycle but rarely as the proximate failure — most novelty took the form of suspended-contradiction-as-architecture rather than discrete unprecedented actions. The novel architecture itself (Pakistan-Oman shuttle, ceasefire-and-blockade co-presence, Sabbath Operationalization, Statutory Bypass terminal phase) was the cycle's signature Type-I-eligible event class.
Zero primary classifications; four secondary. The under-classification trap warned of in §10 was actively probed. The strongest candidate for Type-IV reclassification is the suspended-contradiction phenomenon itself: the "ceasefire-and-blockade can both exist" buffer that turned variable mid-cycle. If reclassified to primary, Type-IV would rise to ~13% and Type-V drop to ~32%. The current classification keeps suspended-contradiction as secondary because the proximate failure mode in each chain was timing rather than buffer revelation, but the case is genuinely close.
Effectively absent this cycle. Categories largely held — an unexpected stability given the cycle's stress. The one secondary appearance (chain 004-ie-1) noted that "failed talks" became "extended-talks-with-process-as-destination" — categorical drift the chain did not condition on, but not the proximate cause of the chain's break. The cycle's structural events were largely metabolizable in the existing categorical scaffolding; the test of Type-VI will come when one of the cycle's named patterns (Suspended Contradiction, Sanctuary Discount) itself dissolves into something else.
Each principle is supported by ≥2 cited chains. Promotion to canonical requires recurrence across ≥2 cycles. Provisional principles that do not recur within 3 cycles are retired. The same accumulation discipline that applies to the daily vocabulary applies here at the meta-level — without it, this section becomes the next inflation site.
rec-007, or (b) a successful cross-architecture experiment showing differential signature distribution. The principle is the audit's first formal step toward operationalizing its diagnostic-of-LLM-cognition wing as something distinct from its phenomenology-of-Knightian-uncertainty wing.None this cycle. All 39 concepts in the structural concepts taxonomy were named within the cycle window (the cycle is the founding 30-day window). The sunset rule operates by re-citation: every named concept was substantively re-cited in 2+ briefings beyond its naming briefing, or is too recent to have had the opportunity. The Cycle 2 audit will be the first to apply meaningful retirement logic. Cycle 1 establishes the baseline.
weekend-translation — named Briefing 028; only 2-3 days into existence at cycle close. Cycle 2 will be first opportunity to test re-citation.sanctuary-discount — named Briefing 030; insufficient time for re-citation; Cycle 2 must verify.optionality-arbitrage — named Briefing 001 (META-4); cited Briefing 025 (critical-mineral suspension window). Re-cited but limited; flag for Cycle 2 monitoring.N/A in Cycle 1 — there are no prior cycles' retired concepts to reactivate.
META-6 candidate "Verification Asymmetry" was provisionally floated. Cycle 1 produced multiple instantiations: Verification-Mode Asymmetry (Briefing 020, formally added to the structural concepts taxonomy as a META-1 instance), the briefing's own verification-architecture reform (Briefing 023), the procurement-vs-deployment verification gap (Tesla Optimus vs Figure-BMW, Briefing 023), the public-information-symmetry-vs-Track-1.5 asymmetry (Briefing 028), and the cyber-physical defensive-cadence-asymmetry (Briefing 024). Five distinct instantiations across five different domains is, by the protocol's promotion criterion, sufficient for elevation to a meta-category.
However: each instantiation operates as Coupling Failure at a slightly different scale. Promoting Verification Asymmetry to META-6 would create overlap with META-1 that the taxonomy revision discipline is explicitly designed to prevent. The cleaner discipline is to TABLE the META-6 promotion and instead document the five Verification-Asymmetry instantiations as a Coupling-Failure cluster within META-1, with explicit cross-references.
Verification Asymmetry should be reconsidered for META-6 promotion if Cycle 2 produces ≥3 additional instantiations that DO NOT cleanly map to Coupling Failure structure — i.e., instantiations where the asymmetry is not between observation and binding-action but between, e.g., two parallel verification regimes with no shared baseline (the structural form would then be more like Bypass Inversion at the verification level). If the new instantiations are again Coupling-Failure variants, the META-1 cluster treatment is correct and the META-6 candidate retires.
**Last updated:** 2026-05-04 (after Briefing 030; Cycle 1 audit attestation appended)weekend-translation, sanctuary-discount, optionality-arbitrage.rec-004.Cycle 1 produces an empirical phenomenology of forecast invalidation under deep uncertainty. Of 31 non-held conditional chains across the 30-day cycle, 48% broke at the velocity-miscalibration point (Type-V) and 29% at the spurious-hit point (Type-VII) — a distribution in which the theoretically loaded Knightian categories (Type-I agentic novelty as primary, Type-II competitive recursion) appear far less frequently than the velocity and structural-mechanism categories. The pattern suggests that under contemporary structural conditions, forecasting apparatuses systematically mis-time rather than mis-locate the structural transitions, and that the dominant failure mode is mechanism-substitution (the chain achieves narrative validation through a structurally different pathway) rather than outright invalidation. Meta-principle mp-002 — that suspended contradictions function as latent buffers absorbing predicted forcing-function activations — supplies a candidate empirical mechanism for theoretical work on buffered cascade dynamics: the pattern emerged here as a state-space configuration in which co-present contradictory states (ceasefire-and-blockade, talks-and-strikes) produced a forecast-failure mode the binary action-set framework did not contain.
Cycle 1's break-point distribution combined with the LLM cognitive signature distribution (S2 32%, S7 29%, S4 13%, S1 and S3 10% each, S5 and S6 3% each) constitutes a within-architecture baseline: one model, one prompting setup, one editorial discipline, 30 daily briefings, 136 chains, 31 non-Held chains tagged across two parallel taxonomies. The natural next step is a multi-architecture experiment in which the same Inference Engine prompt is run against different LLM backbones over the same 30-day event field, with each backbone's chains tagged against the same S1–S7 taxonomy. The hypothesis the experiment would adjudicate is whether S1 (mean-trajectory regression) and S2 (narrative-time compression) dominance is general to LLM plausibility-engines under Knightian uncertainty — in which case mp-010 promotes to canonical and the cognitive-architecture-induced velocity miscalibration becomes an empirical phenomenon distinct from the Knightian timing-indeterminacy floor — or whether the dominance is architecture-specific, in which case the cross-architecture spread becomes the empirical anchor for cognitive-pluralism arguments about analytical-ensemble design. The audit's diagnostic-of-LLM-cognition wing is operational at this point and produces falsifiable cross-architecture comparisons.
The Contingency Audit itself is the cycle's most generative instance of the AI–human analytical ensemble it studies. The audit is performed by an AI partner (pattern-of-pattern recognition across 30 prior briefings) operating on the outputs of an AI partner (pattern recognition across daily structural events) under the periodic re-framing of a human partner (protocol design and recalibration discipline). Cycle 1 produced 10 substantive provisional meta-principles, the vast majority of which surface mechanisms (suspended-contradiction-as-buffer, calibrated-discount-as-response, coordination-bifurcation-under-stress, mean-trajectory-regression in chain timing) that no individual daily briefing could have surfaced from inside its own cycle. The §5.9 recalibrations are themselves the operational form of periodic re-framing, and the Cycle-2 verification criteria provide the falsification structure that distinguishes a working analytical ensemble from a recursive-narrowing collapse. The pattern that emerges across this cycle is that the periodic-re-framing layer is structurally necessary to the apparatus, not optional — without it, the daily layer's recursive narrowing has no counter-weight.
Per protocol §12, Cycle 1 recalibrations are intentionally modest in scope — aggressive recalibration based on a single cycle would over-fit. Each recalibration cites the Cycle 1 empirical basis, names the tradeoff, and specifies how Cycle 2 will determine whether it took hold.
mp-001.mp-003). The briefing repeatedly achieved narrative validation while the structural understanding was wrong. Type-VII is the failure mode the briefing has the strongest incentive not to see.mp-006.mp-004; Peripheral Assertion (Briefing 021); persistently-absent anomaly cluster on Sudan/Sahel/Horn-of-Africa.mp-009; the cycle-end week (Briefings 023-027) instantiated three simultaneous compound failures (Mali keystone-removal, UAE OPEC cartel-dissolution, War Powers statutory-bypass).mp-010 names this directly.llm_signature tag with one-sentence justification. Cycle 2 audit can compare prospective vs retrospective distributions on the Cycle 1 chains as validation: if cells align within ±20%, the retrospective tagging was approximately accurate. If they diverge, the cross-cycle promotion of mp-010 must wait.The audit has a dual purpose. The Type I–VII taxonomy classifies what failed in the world — the structural mechanisms by which contingent forecasts break under Knightian uncertainty. The S1–S7 LLM Cognitive Signature taxonomy classifies what failed in the model that generated the chain. The two taxonomies are parallel but not identical. The same chain can be (Type-V × S1) or (Type-V × S2) — different LLM cognitive failures producing the same structural break. The cross-tabulation is the analytical product.
Cycle 1's signature classification is retrospective. From Cycle 2 forward, signatures are tagged at chain creation per rec-007, which produces cleaner data. The retrospective pass establishes the taxonomy and provides Cycle 1's baseline distribution but should not be over-interpreted. The S1–S7 layer is operational at this point — the audit can serve as a field instrument for empirical work on LLM cognition under deep uncertainty, with cross-architecture replication as the natural next step.
| Signature | Mechanism | Maps to |
|---|---|---|
| S1 — Mean-trajectory regression | Model averages historical cascade analogues; specific-instance velocity smoothed toward training-data mean. Empirical signature: chains whose Y-step timing matches the centroid of historical analogues but not the actual instance. | Type-V |
| S2 — Narrative over physical | Causal grammar parses cleanly; physics doesn't. Months get compressed to days because narrative tokens have their own clock. Empirical signature: chains where the inferential step is rhetorically compact but materially heavy. | Type-V Type-VII |
| S3 — Plausibility-mass concentration | Emits most-probable completion; black-swan / low-prior actions under-weighted. Empirical signature: chains conditioning on the modal actor / move and missing the off-distribution actor or move. | Type-I |
| S4 — Reflexive blindness | Doesn't simulate actors reading consensus prediction and adjusting; Hayek-Lucas-Goodhart territory invisible. Empirical signature: chains failing because the predicted actor read the prediction and acted to invalidate it. | Type-II |
| S5 — Categorical stickiness | Anchors on training-time categories when events have moved past them or the categories themselves are dissolving. Empirical signature: chains using a noun whose referent has shifted under it. | Type-VI |
| S6 — Buffer blindness | Treats persistent states as constants; training data over-represents persistence vs transition. Empirical signature: chains assuming a buffer (SPR, dollar primacy, OPEC discipline, suspended-contradiction) and silent on its variability. | Type-IV |
| S7 — Mechanism-outcome decoupling | Emits outcome without binding to mechanism; any mechanism producing Z counts as confirmation. Empirical signature: chains whose Z-step is named generically enough that any mechanism producing Z reads as confirmation. | Type-VII |
S2 (narrative-time compression) and S7 (mechanism-outcome decoupling) jointly account for 19 of 31 primary signatures (61%). Together they describe an LLM that writes tight causal stories on the briefing's clock and names outcomes broadly enough that any mechanism producing them reads as confirmation. S6 buffer-blindness is under-represented as primary (1 case) but appears 5× as secondary — mirroring the Type-IV pattern from §5.4; both diagnose the same suspended-contradiction blindness from different sides.
Concentrated in chains modeling Saudi response to UAE OPEC departure (024-ie-1, 025-ie-3) and the canonical Hormuz-cascade chain (001-ie-1). In all three cases, the chain conditioned on the historical centroid of analogous events: every prior cartel-anchor episode (1973, 1986, 2014, 2020) produced a Saudi public statement within days; every prior chokepoint cascade arc compresses through similar multi-stage transmission. Durable Saudi silence and the SPR/futures-spot buffer were specific-instance properties the model averaged away.
The dominant primary signature of the cycle. Concentrated in Iran-cascade chains (004-ie-1, 005-ie-1, 006-ie-1, 009-ie-2, 011-ie-2, 012-ie-1, 013-ie-1, 016-ie-1) plus two Type-III chains where coupling assumption masks narrative compression (004-ie-2, 023-ie-1). The pattern: the chain composes a tight causal arc — communiqué → spot-futures gap → arbitrageurs absorb losses → bifurcation propagates — that is rhetorically compact but materially demands weeks of capital reallocation, regulatory action, or diplomatic motion. Settlement-velocity-vs-physical-reality is the canonical S2 failure shape.
The Pakistan-arbiter cluster (010-ie-1, 011-ie-3, 015-ie-2): chains that emitted the modal Trump-IRGC bilateral completion and under-weighted the off-distribution Pakistan-Oman shuttle architecture that actually absorbed the period. Pakistan as a primary mediator is rare in training-data exemplars of Iran-US negotiations; the model concentrates plausibility on bilateralism. S3 also appears as secondary in 4 additional chains — its true incidence is higher than the primary count suggests.
The cleanest theoretical match. Every Type-II break in the cycle is also a primary S4: Trump anticipating his own posted threat (002-ie-1, 003-ie-1); Hezbollah declining to confirm the predicted barrage (006-ie-5); Israeli cabinet declining the predicted self-confirming-collapse (009-ie-3). In each case the predicted actor read the consensus and adjusted. The model emits the actor's action without modeling the actor's awareness of the prediction.
One primary instance (010-ie-3): chain anchors on "Lebanese state" as a coherent autonomy-bearing actor whose referent had already begun to dissolve into a Hezbollah-veto compound. Three secondary appearances suggest the under-classification trap: categories may have been more sticky than the primary count surfaces, particularly around "FOMC unified" and "ceasefire scope" whose referents were drifting under the chain.
One primary instance (017-ie-1) where the suspended-contradiction architecture absorbed the predicted 36-hour escalation. The 5 secondary appearances cluster on the same suspended-contradiction blindness — a buffer the model could not see as a buffer because its persistence was the whole point. This is the cognitive-layer mirror of the Type-IV under-classification noted in §5.4: both diagnose the same blindspot from different sides.
The Type-VII cluster mapped one-to-one onto S7. Chains 002-ie-2, 004-ie-4, 012-ie-2, 013-ie-3, 014-ie-3, 019-ie-3, 020-ie-2, 022-ie-5, 024-ie-4 all share the structural form: Z is named generically enough (cascade-resolution-fails, suspended-contradiction-collapses-or-hardens, insurer-reprices, shadow-settlement-persists) that any mechanism producing Z confirms the chain. The cognitive failure: the model emits outcome without binding to mechanism. The risk noted in the YAML caveat: S7 and Type-VII are at risk of becoming a tautology if defined too loosely; Cycle 2 prospective tagging will help discipline the boundary.
| Type \ Sig | S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 | S5 | S6 | S7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type-V (15) | 3 | 8 | 3 | — | — | 1 | — |
| Type-VII (9) | — | — | — | — | — | — | 9 |
| Type-II (4) | — | — | — | 4 | — | — | — |
| Type-III (3) | — | 2 | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| Type-I (0) | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Type-IV (0) | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Type-VI (0) | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
Three cells carry 26 of 31 chains (84%): Type-V × S2 (8 chains; the largest single cell — narrative-time compression of multi-week processes), Type-VII × S7 (9 chains; mechanism-outcome decoupling on generic Z-steps), Type-II × S4 (4 chains; reflexive blindness when actors read the prediction). Type-V × S1 (3 chains) is the Saudi-silence and Hormuz-cascade cluster — chains whose Y-step timing matches the centroid of historical analogues but not the specific instance. The Type-V column shows the cycle's clearest cross-tabulation: the same structural break (timing miscalibration) emerged from four distinct cognitive failures (S1, S2, S3, S6), confirming that signature classification is not redundant with break-type classification — it diagnoses a different layer.
Three Cycle 1 calls reasonable readers might dispute. (1) The Type-V × S1 vs Type-V × S2 split. Many Type-V chains exhibit both signatures; the primary assignment depends on which is judged the proximate cognitive failure. Saudi-silence chains are unambiguously S1; Iran-cascade compression chains are unambiguously S2; chains that involve both centroid-averaging and narrative-compaction were assigned by which feels more load-bearing in the chain text. (2) S7 and Type-VII as near-synonyms. Mechanism-outcome decoupling and spurious-hit are nearly the same construction at different levels. The risk is tautology; the discipline is to write the S7 justification grounded in the chain's specific Z-step rather than re-stating that the outcome arrived via a different mechanism. Cycle 2 prospective tagging is the test. (3) S6 buffer-blindness as primary. Only one chain (017-ie-1) was assigned S6 primary, but the suspended-contradiction blindness is arguably the deepest cognitive failure of the cycle — appearing 5× as secondary. The conservative call kept S6 at 1 primary because each individual chain's proximate failure was timing or generic-Z; an aggressive reader could promote 4-5 of those secondary appearances to primary, which would reshape the distribution.