Mirror Observerhood Lab V: Recursive Reliability Under Estimator Corruption

This release forms part of the Computational Observerhood Labs of Mirror Programme, Volume I: Observerhood. Lab V tests recursive reliability: what happens when a system’s first-order reliability estimate itself becomes unreliable. It follows Mirror Observerhood Labs I-IV, which established that self-model reliability can matter, that decomposition alone is insufficient, that reliability must be actionable and cost-sensitive, and that reliability-gated repair has a bounded positive threshold region. Across 39,200 deterministic episodes, four architectures are compared: a no-reliability baseline, a first-order reliability agent, a recursive reliability agent and an oracle upper bound. The recursive reliability…