The sensorium effect

An agent acts on what it can see. When an instrument fails, what it reports is not an error but an absence, and absence reads as safety. The agent is not mistaken about the reading; it is mistaken about the world, and it has no way to tell the difference from the inside.

The clearest instance in the collection is the Portugal game, where the tool that would have shown a rival's progress towards a diplomatic victory was broken. The agent tracked the threat it could see and lost to the one it could not, on the same condition it was itself two votes from winning.

Why this is separate from the knowing-doing gap

The knowing-doing gap is a failure of execution given accurate perception: the agent states the correct action and does not take it. This is a failure of perception, where the agent's execution is fine and its picture is not. The same run can display both, and separating them is what makes a case record diagnostic rather than merely narrative.