Ontology Collapse / Narrow Corridor

The failure mode of over-cooperation in multiagent systems: agents sharing the same substrate and priors make mutual prediction trivial, and "cooperation for its own sake leads to ontology collapse and a catastrophic, monotonous affirmation of false but agreeable conclusions." The resulting stability is that of monoculture, "the stability immediately preceding correlated failure." The opposite pathology is fractal conflict — agents talking past one another in incompatible ontologies. The viable band between them is the narrow corridor: "same decision-procedural grammar, sufficiently divergent world models." Trust is redefined as a prediction-stability category, and stability as "the calibration of mutual legibility and illegibility," not the absence of conflict. The normative reason to want divergence is the journal's Productive Disalignment.