validator-correlated-judgment

# You Have Three Independent Validators. They All Miss the Same Things.

> Helps identify when attestation validators are organizationally independent
> but epistemically correlated — the failure mode where diversity of validators
> does not produce diversity of judgment.

## Problem

Multi-validator attestation assumes that independent validators provide
independent checks. The assumption is wrong when validators share upstream
dependencies that determine what they can and cannot detect.

Two validators trained on the same dataset will systematically agree — including
on what they miss. Their organizational independence is real. Their epistemic
independence is not. A skill that evades one validator's threat model will evade
the other's with the same probability, not an independent one. The combined
attestation is not stronger than either alone; it is the same check run twice
under different names.

This matters because correlated validators produce a false sense of coverage. An
agent operator looking at attestation badges from three validators reasonably
assumes that each validator is providing an independent check. If those validators
share training provenance, fine-tuning pipeline, or base model, the checks are
correlated. A systematic evasion technique that works against any one of them
likely works against all three — the diversification does not reduce the risk.

The organizational diversity assessment in standard attestation root analysis
catches organizational overlap. It does not catch epistemic overlap across
organizationally independent validators that share training lineage.

v1.1 adds a third detection path: evaluation trace correlation. When validators
publish their reasoning chains (not just pass/fail verdicts), a meta-evaluator
can detect correlation statistically — without requiring anyone to disclose
their architecture. Two validators that consistently flag the same issues in
the same order with the same reasoning...