Canon eats its siblings

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)

Canon eats its siblings. Connects the work-level structure of Greek survival to how school canons actually chose: not authors but set texts. If the curriculum replicated flagship works while letting the same author's remaining output starve — Euripides select versus alphabetic, seven plays of Aeschylus out of some ninety, one speech of a rhetor out of dozens — then inequality of witnesses within an author's oeuvre should rival or exceed inequality across authors: an anti-halo effect, with fame concentrated per title rather than per name.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For every author in Pinakes with at least 5 catalogued works, compute the Gini coefficient of witness counts within the oeuvre. Primary clause: the median within-author Gini is at least 0.6. Secondary: for at least half of the 100 best-attested authors, the single top work carries more witnesses than the rest of the oeuvre combined. The verdict follows the median-Gini clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the in-house Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts (21.5k works), grouped by author.

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

Quantitative work on witness distributions documents extreme concentration and canonicalization at the work level, and the set-text explanation (select plays, triads) is standard; but inequality has not been measured within authors' oeuvres, and the anti-halo formulation (within-author Gini rivaling cross-author inequality) is un-run on Pinakes.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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