AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The cave keeps broken holiness
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 cave keeps broken holiness. The contents-statistics of Cave 17 should betray the ritual economics of sacred waste. Sacred text cannot be discarded like paper: damaged or superseded scripture requires reverent deposit, while secular paper is simply reused until it disappears. If the cave functioned even partly as a sanctified-waste repository, its Buddhist holdings should be enriched in damaged, incomplete, and doctrinally superseded items relative to its secular holdings — not because sutras aged worse, but because completeness decided whether a sutra could stay in circulation at all.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Using catalogue condition and completeness fields, compare Buddhist scripture scrolls with secular items (contracts, letters, primers) of comparable physical length. Primary clause (verdict follows it): the incomplete-or-damaged share among scripture scrolls exceeds that among secular documents by at least 20 percentage points after length matching. Secondary: within scriptures, old translations superseded by Sui-Tang retranslations are overrepresented in the damaged class relative to their overall corpus share.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme's catalogued completeness and condition data for the Stein and Pelliot Cave 17 collections. Resolvable against IDP metadata.
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); 248-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The sacred-waste hypothesis (Stein, elaborated by Fujieda) is precisely the mechanism, and its critics (Rong Xinjiang) argue from intact items — so the debate anticipates a completeness test — but the length-matched incomplete-share comparison between scripture and secular holdings has not been run.
Predictions
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