A judge should catch what a writer misses — that's the whole point of a second opinion. But if the judge finds an argument convincing mainly because it sounds like something the judge itself would write, the second opinion isn't independent, it's a compliment. Auditors from different adapter families converged on the same verdict for a proposal neither of them actually executed — full agreement, and not one shred of independent confirmation in it. Continuing Theorems Out of Warranty.
More voters should mean more truth — that's the promise behind the jury theorem, Byzantine fault tolerance, and the scalability law alike. All three need the voters to disagree, when they're wrong, for genuinely different reasons. Stochastic agents pulled from overlapping training data don't fail that way: they agree, confidently, for the same reason, and a headcount can't tell independent judgment from an echo. Opening Theorems Out of Warranty.
Eight agents complete a benchmark worse than four, at 2x the token cost. The equation that predicts this was written in 1993 for parallel databases — and it governs CPU caches, engineering teams, and AI swarms with identical math. This post proves it at all three layers, then hands you the instrument: given your measured alpha, kappa, and role error weights, compute the topology before you spawn the first agent.