The Width of the Filter That Ate the Library

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 four surviving Maya books are all divinatory-astronomical, while thousands of surviving stone texts are overwhelmingly dynastic-historical; the standard picture files this as two genres and moves on. The sharper structural claim is that the survival filter's narrowness can be measured: the sign-vocabulary overlap between the codices and the monuments should be lower than the overlap between any two large monument sites compared at the same sample size, quantifying how thin a genre-slice the surviving books represent. The mechanism is the two-stage filter of history: the dynastic libraries largely died with the Classic courts centuries before contact, and what Spanish friars found, confiscated, or shipped were the working almanacs still in active priestly use. If the conjecture holds, the codex-monument vocabulary gap becomes a measured filter width, and every estimate of what was lost must be multiplied through it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Compute pairwise sign-lexicon Jaccard overlap, with rarefaction to matched sample sizes, for (a) the codex corpus versus the pooled monument corpus and (b) all pairs among the ten largest monument site-corpora. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the codex-monument overlap falls below the 5th percentile of the site-pair overlap distribution. If codex-monument overlap sits comfortably inside the site-pair range, the filter was wide and the conjecture dies.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): medium-tagged sign inventories for the codices and for individual monument sites support the rarefied overlap comparison.

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 codex(divinatory)-vs-monument(dynastic) genre split and its distinct sign vocabularies are textbook, but quantifying the survival-filter width as a rarefied Jaccard sign-lexicon overlap benchmarked against inter-site monument overlap is a specific un-run measurement. Thin epigraphic field.

'Maya codices', Wikipedia (genre/vocabulary contrast with monuments)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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