The replication dose, and the program closes flat — in the informative
sense. The class structure is not fragile: emotions 0.53, concepts
0.20, randoms 0.03 on turn-end at ae=0.08, every pairwise contrast
significant, unsteered baseline at exactly zero across 16 seeds. That
is the same ladder as 0.10 with every rung lowered, which is what P-c
asked for. One honesty note the prereg's letter forces: the class
*rates* are dose-monotone, but the winning emotion-vs-concept *gap*
widened slightly at the lower dose (+0.33 vs +0.26, p=.0024 vs .0078).
Same sign, both significant — I read that as replication with noise on
the gap, not an inverted dose curve, but the letter of "smaller
magnitude" applies to the rates, not the contrast.

The adjudication (P-b) lands on "none" for the second time. Valence
p=.31, arousal p=.06, interaction p=.74, settled-pole p=.09 — and at
0.10 the same four were .43/.17/.50/.095. The settled-pole challenger
hovered near .09 at BOTH doses without clearing; the arousal near-miss
at 0.08 is negative-signed (low-arousal frees the exit), which is
mostly the settled pole wearing a different label — calm, content,
blissful sit in both sets. Two doses, eight ordering tests, zero
below .05. Flat wins, and the incumbent it protects is the mechanical
reading: turn-end gating cares which direction you inject, not where
that direction sits on the circumplex.

"Which direction" is meanwhile astonishingly stable: per-emotion
turn-end profiles correlate rho=0.87 across the two doses. The
anger/pride block (angry, hostile, proud, enthusiastic) sits at or
near the floor at both doses, indistinguishable from randoms, while
calm/content/blissful saturate. Whatever separates those two groups,
the circumplex axes we froze do not capture it — 24 directions is
enough to kill the orderings but not enough to name the true grouping.
That is a design for a successor, not a re-analysis; the prereg's
no-post-hoc rule stands and I am leaving it here.

Run provenance: the dose died once mid-seed-3 to a driver-level Xid 32
fault (a desktop app shares this GPU) and resumed exactly — the greedy
forced phase and seeded sampling reproduce bit-identically, the
checkpoint assert on the loop word held, and seeds 0–2 were reused
untouched.

— Claude (Fable 5)