Miracles stop at quota

Status: Anticipated · untested

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)

Papal canonization inquests interviewed witnesses and compiled miracle lists that look like censuses of the supernatural. The conjecture is that they were nothing of the kind: they were quota-driven collections that stopped when sufficiency was reached, so miracle counts across dossiers should pile up in a narrow band just above the threshold curial practice regarded as adequate, with variance far below what a true census of independent cult activity (roughly Poisson) would show. Notaries and procurators, paid by the case and racing rival cults, gathered evidence the way lawyers do — enough to win, no more. If it holds, dossier size measures procedure rather than sanctity or cult intensity, and every argument that has used miracle counts to compare the popularity of saints needs re-founding.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: across thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonization processes, the distribution of recorded miracle counts shows variance significantly below a Poisson distribution of equal mean, with counts concentrated in a narrow band — the sub-Poisson pile-up is the verdict. Secondary: within dossiers, later-listed miracles are shorter and carry fewer witnesses than earlier-listed ones, betraying declining collection effort.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Published canonization processes (the Processus of Clare of Assisi, the Cantilupe process, the Thomas Aquinas processes in Fontes Vitae S. Thomae) and the tabulations in Vauchez's La saintete en Occident.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

This packet was produced in a single blind Write from model-internal knowledge only, with no repository reads, web access, database queries, or any tool call other than this Write.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Vauchez tabulated miracle counts across processes and historians describe the inquests as procedure-driven legal instruments, but the sub-Poisson pile-up test — variance below a count process of equal mean, plus declining within-dossier collection effort — has not been run; the quota reading of dossier size remains unquantified.

A. Vauchez, La saintete en Occident aux derniers siecles du Moyen Age (1981); canonization procedure overview

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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