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Dispersal hunts the painted
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Dispersal hunts the painted. That illustrated books survive preferentially is doctrine; the sharper, unestablished claim is that survival and integrity anticorrelate through the dealer's knife. Every painting is a separable asset, so the hazard of dismemberment grows with painting count, and the market leaves a dose-response signature: the manuscripts that survive most visibly are precisely the ones least likely to survive whole.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it): among Shahnama Project manuscripts produced before 1600, the fraction now recorded as dispersed — folios held in three or more collections — is at least three times higher for manuscripts with 40 or more paintings than for those with 15 or fewer. Secondary clause: within dispersed manuscripts, painted folios are traced to current locations at at least twice the rate of text-only folios, because paintings were extracted and saved while text leaves were discarded or scattered untracked.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Cambridge Shahnama Project, which reconstructs dispersed manuscripts folio by folio with painting counts and present locations.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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); 278-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_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Painting-driven dismemberment (Demotte splitting folios, tenfold value gains from dispersal, discarded text leaves) is documented doctrine in Shahnama studies; the dose-response quantification of dispersal probability against painting count is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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