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The curriculum cliff
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The curriculum cliff. Connects the survival statistics of Greek literature to the Byzantine school as a replication machine: a work either entered the curriculum-and-anthology circuit, recopied every generation in every provincial classroom, or it depended on sporadic scholarly interest. Two regimes of reproduction should leave two humps rather than one smooth tail: witness counts are not one rich-get-richer process but a mixture, with a thinly populated gap between works kept alive by scholars (a handful of copies) and works kept alive by the school (scores to hundreds).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
On the distribution of witnesses-per-work across the roughly 21,500 works in Pinakes, primary clause: log witness counts for works with at least 2 witnesses reject unimodality (Hartigan dip test, p < 0.01), with an antimode falling between roughly 10 and 40 witnesses. Secondary: at least two thirds of the works above the antimode are school-circuit texts (Psalter and liturgy, grammar and rhetoric curricula, the tragic and comic triads, canonical church fathers). The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the in-house Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts (21.5k works).
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending
A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).
The survival-distribution of Greek works is actively modelled: Cisne fitted birth-death demography to medieval copy counts, and recent complex-systems work analyses witnesses-per-work explicitly. Crucially, that recent work reports a Pareto-like HEAVY TAIL (a single rich-get-richer process), not the two-regime bimodality the item predicts. So closely related prior work exists and meaningfully engages the exact quantity (witness-count distribution), but the item's distinctive claim -- rejection of unimodality (Hartigan dip) with an antimode at ~10-40 witnesses from a school-vs-scholar reproduction mixture -- is unlocated and is in tension with the located finding, which makes it a genuinely decidable (and possibly falsifiable) test on Pinakes.
- 'On the Transmission of Texts: Written Cultures as Complex Systems' (arXiv:2505.19246) — Reports heavy-tailed, not bimodal, witness-per-work distribution
- John L. Cisne, 'How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts' Demography and Classic Texts' Extinction', Science 307 (2005) — Demographic modelling of copy counts
Predictions
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