hack-house/docs/stage-08-adversarial-review.md

Stage-08 adversarial review (SS5) — red-team of the filled lead paper

Status: DONE (self-adversarial pass over the SS3 numbers + the SS4-filled paper). This is an internal integrity red-team, not a new analysis. It runs ONLY on already-frozen artifacts (docs/stage-06-analysis.md, stage06-results.json, docs/stage-07-paper-draft.md); it computes no new statistic, touches no raw data, and does not edit the frozen prereg (SHA f22331a72e0d0ccf38b787e63acabbe9d666456ec76076787a6d545c3193425b).

Checks performed

1. Number fidelity (paper ⟷ results JSON). Every quantitative claim in the abstract, §1, §5, §5.4 table, and the exploratory note was matched against stage06-results.json. All agree to the reported precision:
   • RQ1-P1 AUC 0.4660, CI [0.4523, 0.4798]; RQ1-P2 ΔAUC +0.0113, CI [−0.0025, +0.0234], raw p 0.091, Holm-adj 0.456; RQ2-P1 ΔH −0.9587, CI [−1.0559, −0.8641]; RQ2-P3 ρ 0.0; exploratory bridge-fed-only ΔH −3.63; calibration linked 1.0000 / unlinked 0.5036; n = 75000 pairs (1500 linked), 30 paired runs, 3000 federated / 1500 single-house / 1500 bridge-fed circuits. PASS.
2. Holm arithmetic. Family = 7, report 4, ascending raw p → multipliers 7,6,5,4; adjusted p = 0,0,0.456,1.0 with monotone enforcement; only RQ1-P1 + RQ2-P1 survive @ α=.05. Conservative embedding (reported tests assigned the smallest ranks / largest multipliers) is stated and is the more conservative choice. PASS.
3. Spin / over-claim. RQ1-P1 is reported as "no measurable leak" (a below-chance rejection is explicitly NOT called a leak); RQ2-P1 is reported as an honest negative "with equal prominence" and is not re-framed as federation "helping"; §6 scopes all claims to the lab instrument/topology and disclaims internet-scale and stronger-adversary generality. No re-slicing, no post-hoc subgroups. PASS.
4. Blinding integrity. Header records §1–4/7 blind-authored and §5–6 filled ONCE post-seal from the single §6 pass; consistent with git history (SS4 fill follows SS3 seal). PASS.
5. Method-substitution. The RQ1 fast bootstraps are disclosed and asserted bit-for-bit equal to the frozen stats.bootstrap_ci (committed --verify, 1e-12). Point estimates, CI gates, and decisions are unchanged. PASS.

Defect found and corrected (1)

• Incorrect mechanism attribution for RQ1-P1's below-chance AUC. Both docs/stage-06-analysis.md and the SS4 paper originally attributed the marginally-below-chance AUC to "the bridge hop's padding stream flattening the linked-pair temporal profile." This is false for the RQ1-P1 arm: assembler.py sets padding_applied = (bridge == "on+padding"), so the bridge-on no-pad arm carries no cover stream. Corrected in both documents to state the below-chance offset is an unexplained pooled-correlator artifact on the as-instrumented no-pad traffic, explicitly not a padding effect. No number changed — this was a prose mechanism claim only; the point estimate, CI, gate decision, and Holm outcome are untouched.

Residual honest limitations (carried, not defects)

• RQ2-P3 funnelling is untestable as-instrumented (zero-variance concentration covariate); the mechanism behind the RQ2-P1 shrinkage is therefore not empirically resolved, only its magnitude. Disclosed in §5.3 and §7.
• The below-chance RQ1-P1 offset now has no claimed mechanism; this is the honest state and is reported as such rather than back-filled with a speculative cause.

Outcome: paper is internally consistent, number-faithful, spin-free, and blinding-honest after the one mechanism correction. Ready for operator review.