AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The subcommentary defects by silence
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 subcommentary defects by silence. The Tang subcommentaries worked under the announced norm that the shu does not break the zhu. But a norm forbidding contradiction does not produce agreement — it produces strategic silence: where the subcommentator distrusted the received commentary, his exit was to gloss around it. Coverage, not polemic, is where dissent hides. Layered exegesis should therefore show excess zero-coverage lemmata, and the skipped zhu should be disproportionately the ones that less-constrained Song critics later attacked openly — the silences of the 7th century predicting the polemics of the 12th.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In one or two of the Shisanjing zhushu (the Mao Odes and the Zuozhuan are natural choices), measure subcommentary length attached to each commentary lemma. Primary clause (verdict follows it): lemmata receiving zero or near-zero subcommentary are overrepresented by at least a factor of two among readings that Zhu Xi's commentaries or the Jingdian shiwen alternatives later reject or replace, relative to densely glossed lemmata. Secondary: the coverage distribution shows excess zeros against a negative-binomial fit to its body.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Shisanjing zhushu, the Jingdian shiwen, and Zhu Xi's Shi jizhuan and Sishu zhangju jizhu, all digitized on the Kanseki Repository (Kanripo). Resolvable against Kanripo without new ingestion.
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 shu-bu-po-zhu norm and how zhengyi subcommentators handled it is an active scholarly question (Jiang Longxiang 2014; comparative commentary studies), anticipating the strategic-silence reading, but the coverage-length measurement with Song-critic cross-validation is un-run.
Predictions
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