AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Carvers start commercial, finish imperial
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)
Carvers start commercial, finish imperial. Bibliographers use the block-carvers' names cut into margin strips merely to date and localize editions; read the same names as careers and they become labor-market data. Official printing projects paid better and audited harder, and recruited proven hands from the commercial sector rather than training novices at state expense. So a carver's first attested appearance should almost never be on an official edition, and multi-edition careers should run commercial-to-official far more often than the reverse — the margins of Song books record a craftsman's cursus honorum.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Using the standard indices of Song-Yuan carver names, reconstruct per-carver attestation sequences for carvers appearing on three or more dated editions. Primary clause (verdict follows it): among carvers attested on both commercial and official editions, the commercial attestation comes first in at least 75 percent of careers. Secondary: across all indexed carvers, fewer than 10 percent of first attestations fall on Directorate or palace editions.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the published carver-name indices — Wang Zhaowen's Guji Song Yuan kangong xingming suoyin and the carver lists in the Zhongguo banke tulu — which record edition, date, and name for each attestation.
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
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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
Carver-name indices are a standard tool for dating and localizing Song-Yuan editions (used systematically by Chia and in Chinese/Japanese kegong indices), so the data and its evidentiary use are anticipated; reading the names as career sequences with a commercial-to-official direction test is un-run.
- Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit (2002), systematic use of block-carver names to date and localize Jianyang editions
- Wang Zhaowen, Guji Song-Yuan kangong xingming suoyin (index of Song-Yuan carver names), the standard reference the prediction targets
Predictions
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