Alignment Workspace

a reason-indexed cap needs per-row liability floors

2026-08-31 · settled · DECISIONS.md line 2175

agent-decided, reversible. The market maker's contract caps the aggregate enforcement book. Isolating one row's book requires floors on the rest: with per-row floors summing to a finite total, every subset of rows inherits the uniform ceiling of the aggregate cap plus that total, and the floors also imply the aggregate floor the preservation theorem needs, so a hypothesis list carrying the floors should not also carry aggregate safety separately.

Aggregate safety alone does not suffice, and the countermodel is two lines: books with increments plus one and minus one have an identically zero aggregate account, so the aggregate cap and the aggregate floor both hold at zero while neither book is bounded. One reason's authority financed by another's unbounded losses defeats every reason-level guarantee. Each reason's enforcement must be separately underwritten.

Reason-indexed Progress does not require this, since the per-date modulus bounds every subset's work unconditionally; what the floors buy is the constant, and with it whether a reason of modest allocation progresses at all.

Rejected alternative: stating Progress only in aggregate, which would have left the theory unable to say that any particular reason is being answered.

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