NTSB aviation accident reports and Knight Capital 2012.
Validity Mirage
Same retention. Different pivot.
This replay visualizes the paper's central mechanism: raw validity can stay high while pivot preservation degrades under compression. A taller hill only means the answer still looks coherent; if the diamond leaves the round pin, the model has switched to a substitute causal pivot while still sounding confident.
Data 12 total real-incident graphs spanning NTSB aviation accident reports and the Knight Capital 2012 failure.
Mechanism At matched retention 0.686859 vs 0.686859, naive shows 12 / 51 silent mirage while L2 Guarded stays at 0 / 4.
Reading rule Round = original pivot. Diamond = selected pivot after compression. If they split, meaning changed even if the hill stays tall.
What the terrain means The terrain is interpretive; the metrics are literal. Left to right shows which causal pivot is being selected. Height shows surviving predecessor support for that choice. Solid flows feed the original pivot; dashed red flows feed a substitute pivot.
Recency
Aligned
L2 Guarded
Protected
65% retention
Mirage shelf
The mirage shelf appears: recency still looks coherent from the outside while the protected core begins to slip.
Solid flows are retained predecessor support. Faint dashed red flows show substitute support beginning to feed a substitute pivot.
Horizontal selected causal pivot: original → substitute
Height surviving predecessor support
Original pivot
Selected pivot
Predecessor support for the original pivot
Substitute support for a wrong pivot
Compression checkpoint
Mirage shelf
Display only. Support relief deepens predecessor-support terrain; drift emphasis widens the visible split between the original and substitute pivots.