Cunmu kills poets, not doctors

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Cunmu kills poets, not doctors. The Siku quanshu zongmu's two-tier structure — titles copied into the imperial library versus cunmu, listed but not transcribed — is a natural experiment on which genres lived by state canonization and which by private demand. Being left out of the imperial transcription mattered only where the empire was the marginal reader: minor authors' literary collections had no constituency but prestige culture, so cunmu relegation was a slow death sentence; medical, agricultural, and divinatory books had buyers who never cared what the Four Treasuries thought.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Sample cunmu titles from the zongmu in two strata — bieji (individual literary collections) and practical arts (medicine, agronomy, shushu) — and trace each in modern union catalogues of extant old editions. Primary clause (verdict follows it): the extant-today share of cunmu practical-arts titles exceeds the extant share of cunmu bieji by at least 20 percentage points. Secondary: among fully transcribed (zhulu) titles the between-genre survival gap is under 10 points — the catalogue tier interacts with genre, which a uniform-decay account cannot produce.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Siku quanshu zongmu (digitized, including on Kanripo) crossed with the published Zhongguo guji shanben shumu and the online Zhongguo guji zongmu union records.

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); 248-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.

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 instrument is textbook: the Siku quanshu zongmu's two-tier structure -- 3,461 titles copied into the imperial library (zhulu) versus 6,793 listed by title only (cunmu, 'extant but unchecked') -- is a standard object of Qing bibliographical study. Not located: the item's specific genre-by-tier survival interaction -- the extant-today share of cunmu practical-arts titles (medicine, agronomy, shushu) exceeding that of cunmu bieji by >=20 points while the same genre gap among zhulu titles stays under 10 points, traced through the Zhongguo guji shanben shumu / Zhongguo guji zongmu union records. A uniform-decay account cannot produce the interaction; the catalogue tier as a differential survival filter by genre is an unrun operationalization.

Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao -- the zhulu (copied) vs cunmu (listed only) two-tier structure, 3,461 + 6,793 works (overview) — The catalogue's two tiers; the genre-conditioned survival interaction is the unrun measurement
Zhongguo guji shanben shumu and the Zhongguo guji zongmu union catalogue of extant old editions — The kill dataset for tracing cunmu titles' survival by genre

Predictions

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