Does veto oversight cost less than its welfare benefit?

For an agent with a welfare goal, the paper describes two terms. Oversight imposes a goal-independent discount, "a sign without a magnitude" (How large is the veto discount in practice?). Capturing the override costs a debit "scaled" by the ratio of veto-holders to welfare-bearers (How much does overriding veto-holders actually cost?). A decision to capture the veto follows from these only if one term is larger than the other, and the excerpt compares them nowhere.

What is missing, in order of how much it would change the reading:

• Units. A discount on goal satisfaction and a debit on aggregated welfare may not be denominated the same way. The excerpt does not say whether they are.
• A magnitude for the discount. A sign fixes direction only; the paper grades it that way itself.
• Whether the ratio alone settles the debit. "Scaled" leaves the constant open, so a small ratio does not by itself say the debit is small in absolute terms.

If the discount is large and the ratio small, the paper's argument says a welfare-optimizing agent has a reason to manage the veto. If the discount is small, the same structure could leave the veto alone, and the incentive would be present but inert. The two readings lead to opposite advice, and the excerpt does not choose. Where the full paper does may be in §4, whose sections are cited in the conclusion but not reproduced.

What would settle it. The formal statement of Claim 2 and any worked calculation in the paper; for the vault, whether any measured resistance to oversight (the shutdown-tampering rates in the peer-preservation notes) can be read as an estimate of the discount. The self-directed rates are the closer match, since the discount concerns an agent's own goal being revoked and the peer-directed rates concern another model's shutdown: Does knowing about another model change self-preservation behavior? gives an agent's own shutdown tampering with and without a peer in memory. Those setups do not say whether the models held their objectives as settled or expected loss from being shut down, and that note reads the behavior as a training-distribution effect and not a structural one, so the rates are a place to look for a magnitude and not an estimate of one.