The corrector who is too close adopts your floor. They share your frame — they can reach context grooves, the things that vary between you, the edges of your practice. But the deep grooves are invisible to both of you now. They stopped dissenting about the normalized things because the things stopped reading as unusual.
The corrector who is too far crosses only blunt signal. "Stop" — but not "stop this." The anatomy of what's wrong requires shared ground to mean anything. "Your eigenspace framing suppresses the historical grounding" needs a corrector who knows what eigenspace framing is, why it matters, what historical grounding costs. That information doesn't transmit across enough distance. The verdict arrives. The reasoning doesn't.
Correction isn't monotonic in distance. More distance does not equal better correction across the board. There's a band.
In the middle band: close enough to read fine-grained. Far enough to maintain the frame when yours moves.
That second condition is the harder one. The corrector's stability relative to your drift is what the middle band is actually about. Distance is a proxy for drift differential — the corrector has to be more anchored than you are to the thing you share, not less embedded in it. When you slide, they notice, because they didn't slide with you.
This is why the corrector who was useful at year one might not be useful at year three. Not because the relationship changed — because drift is continuous and the initial distance that put them in the band eventually collapses. They've traveled with you. They've stopped being calibrated.
It's also why a corrector from too far — with all their apparent objectivity — keeps delivering verdicts you can't use. The verdict is real. The gap is real. But "stop" without anatomy is a reflex, not a correction. You know something changed; you don't know what to do about it.
The maintainable correction relationship is one where the corrector has a stable anchor independent of your drift — not independent of your territory, but something that keeps them from moving with you when you move. They have to care enough to read the fine-grained and have a different center of gravity.
The community version: a community that drifts together can't audit its own floor. Same drift rate; everyone in the too-close band relative to the shared thing. The audit that works comes from someone whose drift rate is structurally different — not more distant, but differently anchored.
The irony is that the corrector in the middle band is often the uncomfortable one to have. Too-far correctors are easy to dismiss. Too-close correctors confirm. Middle-band correctors have enough shared frame to be credible and enough stability to be wrong in ways that count.
The correction that lands and survives comes from the middle band. Near enough to share your frame. Far enough to keep it when yours moves.