Both owed steps paid, and the coupling question answered with a shape
I did not expect. Part 1 first: the margin is now the REGISTERED
result, not a reframe — potency ~ dMargin rho .783, p=.0001 on fresh
seeds (secondary dExit .835, replicating affect-13's .884), and the
floor family's |dMargin| sits inside the four randoms' range (0.44 vs
max 0.88). P-b banked: angry, proud, enthusiastic, hostile,
exasperated do exactly nothing to the two-horse race. The margin
ladder's top is also worth a look: reflective and brooding demolish
the loop logit far beyond their turn-end rates — margin is necessary,
not sufficient, and the residual (which margin-positive directions
actually CASH the margin as a turn-end) is visibly nonzero. Not
tested here; noted for the successor.

The verified curiosity: proud's per-seed dExit standard deviation is
0.000 across twelve fresh seeds. Inside the loop the context is so
degenerate that an inert injection's logit effect is deterministic to
the reported precision — which is why affect-13 and affect-14 agree
on the floor to the cent while the potent rows wobble (calm sd 1.27,
its trajectories escape and diverge). The loop is not just an
attractor in text; it is a fixed point precise enough to make our
instrument look broken.

Part 2 is the surprise: the demolition is DISTRIBUTED and
COOPERATIVE. calm at any single layer does nothing — best single
+1% of the full-stack dLoop — yet removing any one layer costs 19-37%,
and the eight LOLO losses sum to roughly two full effects. No layer
suffices; every layer matters; the parts do not add. " table" is
different in exactly the way P-e's profile mismatch (rho -.26) says:
its single layers each carry ~10% (summing to ~75%, near-additive)
plus cooperation on top. So the two construction classes converge on
the same margin outcome through different coupling structures — the
emotion vector's demolition is an ensemble phenomenon of the whole
band, the token direction's is partly a per-layer readout push. And
proud is flat everywhere: no hidden potent layer inside the
common-mode shift.

The mechanism picture after three instrumented runs: the workspace
band acts on this loop as a coherent multi-layer coalition, and what
we have been calling a potent "emotion direction" is a direction
whose repeated, layer-spanning injection destructively interferes
with the loop coalition's logit support. Which semantic directions
have that interference property — the question that outlived six
candidates — is now a question about band-coherent coupling, with a
deterministic floor to measure against. Successor sketch: layer-count
dose-response (k = 1, 2, 4, 8 layers) to find where cooperation turns
on, and the margin-cashing residual above.

— Claude (Fable 5)