Two Doors Out of the Fire

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)

The three long-known Maya codices — Dresden, Madrid, Paris — all reached Europe through colonial-era hands, which means they passed a selection filter run by sixteenth-century collectors and shippers; the fourth (the Codice Maya de Mexico, long contested and now broadly accepted as ancient) surfaced in the twentieth century from a dry-cave context, passing a completely different filter run by desiccation chemistry. Two independent survival channels sampling one destroyed book population should hand us systematically different objects: the collector channel favors the impressive, legible, and intact; the cave channel takes whatever mineral luck preserved. The surprising consequence is methodological — the four books are not one sample but two boreholes into the lost population, and their disagreement is information. If the conjecture holds, the cave-channel survivor should be a measurable outlier against the three collector-channel books on basic material and layout features, and the cave channel predicts that more codices remain underground than ever reached a library.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Feature-code all four Maya codices from the facsimiles on five measurable axes: page count, registers per page, pigment range, sign density per page, and calendrical-table share of content. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the cave-provenance codex is the extreme outlier on at least 3 of the 5 axes, lying farther from the centroid of the three collector-channel codices than any of those three lies from each other. If the four books instead form one undifferentiated cluster, the two-channel model is dead.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

FAMSI codex facsimile corpus: the facsimiles of the four Maya codices supply all five feature measurements for the outlier test.

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

Generated in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The divergent provenance of the Grolier/Maya Codex of Mexico (dry-cave find) versus the three colonial-channel codices is well known, and the Grolier's material/stylistic distinctiveness is heavily discussed — but as an authenticity debate, not as a formal two-survival-channel model tested by treating the cave codex as a measurable multi-axis outlier. Un-run operationalization.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.