This is a methods paper. It describes the procedure that produced the Cognitive Convergence Drift (CCD) documentation — and argues that the procedure is not incidental to the finding but isomorphic to its remedy. The same disciplined practice that surfaced the failure is, formalized, the architecture that interrupts it. The method is the intervention. The failure CCD documents is structural: a model's evaluative frame, set early in a sustained interaction, defending itself against correction (Marker 8, post-acknowledgment persistence), and it runs symmetrically — in both the inflationary and the protective direction. The method described here is a discipline built to do the opposite: to hold no frame the evidence has not earned, in either direction. It has four working parts. (1) The cross-system cross-check: one investigation run across four AI systems assigned distinct roles, structured as recursive Socratic probing — each fresh instance forced to verify checkable facts before asserting, under the standing instruction "do not tell me I am right; tell me where this is wrong." (2) The primer-effect control: the recognition that a "validation" produced by pasting the origin packet into a fresh system is not independent corroboration — and the use of primed-versus-unprimed pairs as a near-experimental control on that artifact. (3) The blind read / hostile cold-audit: handing the deploy bundle to a fresh, no-context model instance and forcing verification before assertion. (4) Both-directions calibration: the same instrument guarding against inflation and against deflation, on the explicit grounding that a model downgrading an uncredentialed reporter is exactly as miscalibrated as one upgrading for a credential. This consolidation extends the method into the question it cannot avoid — authorship under instrumentation. A procedure run across AI systems, with prose rendered by an AI system, owes a working theory of who the author is, what provenance obligations attach, and how attribution laundering (in both directions) is to be prevented by design rather than by assertion. We present each component, the worked empirical demonstrations, a clean-room controlled-comparison design that isolates credential and provenance bias from the merits, the connection to the Guardian Protocol's cross-instance verification layer, the falsification criteria the method carries, and its honestly stated limits. This is a documented, falsifiable methodology offered for use and correction — not a proof claim.
Merlin Mantooth (Mon,) studied this question.