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Piecework prices its errors
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)
Piecework prices its errors. The Nara sutra-copying bureau ran a complete incentive scheme that survives as paperwork: scribes paid per sheet, proofreaders paid to catch faults, pay docked per uncaught error under a written deduction schedule. That is a speed-accuracy market, and it should have an interior optimum visible in the ledgers: across named scribes, output rate and fault rate positively correlated (the frontier), and the distribution of per-scribe fault rates compressed just below the threshold where the fines bite — eighth-century workers optimizing against a fee schedule, recoverable scribe by scribe from the payroll.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
From the copying-bureau ledgers (sheets assigned and completed per day, proofreaders' fault tallies per scribe), for scribes with at least 20 attested work-days: Primary clause (verdict follows it): the across-scribe rank correlation between mean daily sheet output and faults per 100 sheets is positive with rho at least 0.4. Secondary: the per-scribe fault-rate distribution shows excess mass just below the documented deduction threshold rather than a smooth right tail.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Shosoin documents (Shosoin monjo) as transcribed in Dai Nihon Komonjo and databased by the Shosoin Office and the National Institute of Japanese Literature — the sutra-scriptorium payroll and proofreading records form the core of the corpus.
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
Lowe's work on the Nara sutra-copying bureau documents the full incentive apparatus — per-sheet pay, proofreader checks, pay docked for uncaught errors — anticipating the scheme in detail; the across-scribe speed-accuracy frontier correlation and fine-threshold compression analysis on the ledgers is un-run.
Predictions
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