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GOODHART RESISTANCE DOCTRINE

Goodhart Resistance Doctrine — The Witness Principle

Version: 0.1 · Cycle: C-369 · Status: PROPOSED
Constitutional Principle IV — The Witness Principle

No metric inside Mobius shall ever become the thing it claims to measure. Every metric is a witness to reality, never reality itself.

GI             witnesses integrity.
MIC            witnesses stewardship.
MII            witnesses evaluator reliability.
EPICON         witnesses consequential intent.
Reserve Blocks witness constitutional memory.

Premise

No scalar measure is ungameable under sustained optimization pressure. C-369 does not claim immunity. It claims the gap between score and reality can be kept small, visible, expensive to exploit, and survivable to discover.

GI, MIC, and MII are witnesses, not targets.

Five structural defenses

  1. Break the arithmetic pipeline — No fixed conversion from farmable proxy to scarce reward.
  2. Time and replay as cost — SUSTAINED_GI95, quorum across time, adversarial replay for Integrity Grade.
  3. Publish doctrine, protect exact function — Reasoning public; exact weights and holdouts protected but governed.
  4. Plural non-collusive evaluators — ZEUS pass mandatory; human approval mandatory; collusion correlation flagged.
  5. Pre-commit failure signatures — EPICON counterfactuals name disqualifying patterns before runtime.

MII-specific

  • MII degrades when agent pairs correlate too strongly across time
  • No self-report MII; peer disagreement is signal
  • MII trajectory auditable independent of self-attestation

Canary signals

Maintain non-rewarded parallel signals per GI domain family. If GI rises while canaries do not, trigger AUDIT_REQUIRED.

Clawback and quarantine

MIC recognition and Reserve Block attribution discovered post-seal to be improperly obtained must be quarantine-flagged and annotated. Sealed evidence is not rewritten; status layer may be annotated.

Meta-rule

Anti-gaming detectors are disclosed at method level, appealable through quorum, and never unilateral.

Acceptance criteria

See MFS-FOUNTAIN-HANDOFF.md §14 and §17.7.