Reality Audit Integration in Commons Sentience Sandbox Stage 3

Stage 3 extends the Reality Audit project from validation and controls into calibrated experimental comparison. In this stage, the project moved beyond basic sanity checks and read-only verification toward a more mature question: which audit metrics deserve to be trusted, under what conditions, and with what limitations. According to the latest implementation report, Stage 3 concluded with 267/267 tests passing, calibrated campaign execution, ablation studies, a metric-calibration layer, governance interpretation, a findings extractor, Stage 5 figures and reports, and a replication bundle containing 27 files. The major empirical result of this phase is not that the project has “proven” a simulation claim, but that it has substantially improved its ability to distinguish between trustworthy, comparative-only, and confounded metrics within the sandbox. This stage is scientifically important because it addresses a central methodological problem: a measurement framework is only useful if its outputs can be interpreted. Earlier stages established the audit layer, validation scenarios, read-only probe controls, and semantic mapping between continuous-state and room-graph concepts. Stage 3 adds the next layer of rigor by asking which findings survive calibration, which metrics are altered by probe mode, bandwidth, or encoding choices, and which short-horizon results remain too weak to support strong conclusions. 1. Purpose of Stage 3 The purpose of Stage 3 was to convert the Reality Audit framework from a validated instrumentation platform into a more interpretable research instrument. Specifically, Stage 3 aimed to: 1. classify metrics by trust level and interpretability, 2. run calibrated campaign comparisons, 3. perform ablation studies to identify what actually drives metric shifts, 4. evaluate governance effects at the tested horizon, 5. extract the strongest currently supported findings, 6. and package the project into a more reproducible, publication-oriented form. Stage 3 therefore represents a transition from “does the system run?” to “which outputs of the system can be responsibly believed?”