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Pilgrim-badge lock-in
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Claim (verbatim)
Pilgrim-badge lock-in. The Polya urn — the classic mathematical model of path dependence, in which each ball drawn adds another of its color so that early luck compounds forever — is here applied to the medieval pilgrimage market. Pilgrims bought cheap metal badges at shrines and lost them in rivers, and the Thames badge finds preserve a dated market-share record of which shrines were winning, period by period. On a merit-only model, a shrine's share should track its advertised product: the miracles logged in its registers. The conjecture is that the badge record instead shows Polya-urn dynamics — pilgrims go where pilgrims have gone, so shrines that got ahead early keep their lead beyond anything the miracle counts justify, and market shares lock in. Early advantage, not ongoing miraculous performance, should predict late-period share.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each shrine represented in the dated Thames badge sequence, compute badge market share by period, and compile per-period miracle counts from the shrines' miracle registers. Regress late-period badge share on early-period badge share and on cumulative miracle counts. Primary clause: early share predicts late share with a significant positive coefficient after controlling for miracle counts, and the miracle-count coefficient is near zero or clearly the weaker predictor; if shares instead track contemporaneous miracle counts and early leads decay, the conjecture fails. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
badge chronology vs miracle-count records.
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.
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Provenance
Run: Imported conversation (verbatim harvest) · model: claude-fable-5
Origin: operator conversation with Claude Fable 5 at max effort, conducted 2026-07-03, relayed verbatim by the operator into the shepherd session on 2026-07-04. No ModelRun exists for the original generation (it happened outside the pipeline); this transcript file is the canonical capture. Transcript path: docs/generated/conjecture_harvest_fablemax_20260703.md. Model (operator-attested, not pipeline-recorded): claude-fable-5. Novelty disclaimer (verbatim, load-bearing -- rule 4): "Same caveat as before, doubled: at 100 items across all of archaeology and history, some of these will have cousins in the literature I can't check. What I can guarantee is the format — each links two things not normally linked, and each names the dataset or measurement that would kill it."
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Finds-based shrine badge-share rankings exist (e.g. the Salisbury assemblage: Canterbury dominant, Walsingham second) and badge scholarship is substantial, but no Polya-urn/path-dependence modeling of shrine shares against miracle registers was located. Important kill-dataset caveat surfaced by the dossier: a 2014 reassessment (Lee) attributes Thames badge concentrations to riverbank erosion and dredging history rather than pilgrim deposition — any resolution must address that taphonomic critique before treating Thames finds as market-share data.
- Salisbury Museum medieval catalogue, 'Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges' — Finds-based shrine share ranking
- Lee 2014 river-deposition reassessment (search-synthesized; original not fetched) — Thames concentrations may be erosion/dredging artifacts
Predictions
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