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The curriculum cliff
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).
Claim (verbatim)
The curriculum cliff. Connects the survival statistics of Greek literature to the Byzantine school as a replication machine: a work either entered the curriculum-and-anthology circuit, recopied every generation in every provincial classroom, or it depended on sporadic scholarly interest. Two regimes of reproduction should leave two humps rather than one smooth tail: witness counts are not one rich-get-richer process but a mixture, with a thinly populated gap between works kept alive by scholars (a handful of copies) and works kept alive by the school (scores to hundreds).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
On the distribution of witnesses-per-work across the roughly 21,500 works in Pinakes, primary clause: log witness counts for works with at least 2 witnesses reject unimodality (Hartigan dip test, p < 0.01), with an antimode falling between roughly 10 and 40 witnesses. Secondary: at least two thirds of the works above the antimode are school-circuit texts (Psalter and liturgy, grammar and rhetoric curricula, the tragic and comic triads, canonical church fathers). The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the in-house Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts (21.5k works).
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The school-canon-as-replication-machine account of Greek survival is standard, and recent quantitative work models witnesses-per-work distributions in this data as a single power-law-like rich-get-richer process; the mixture/bimodality claim (dip test, antimode at 10-40 witnesses) directly departs from that and has not been run.
- 'On the transmission of texts: written cultures as complex systems' (2025), witnesses-per-work distributions
- Kestemont et al., 'Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture', Science 375 (2022)
Predictions
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