Stone Copies Paper's Mistakes

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Maya stelae state their dates redundantly — an absolute Long Count position plus chained Distance Numbers linking event to event — and sometimes the arithmetic visibly fails to check. The conjecture is that these failures are transcription errors from paper drafts rather than computation errors at the monument, and transcription has a statistical signature: error probability roughly constant per glyph block copied, so long chains fail more often in proportion to their length, and the wrong values resemble visual sign confusions rather than arithmetic near-misses. The mechanism is workshop reality — nobody computes in stone; carvers execute a prepared layout, so the stone inherits the failure modes of copying, not calculating. If the conjecture holds, every dated monument is secondary evidence of a lost paper draft, and the error statistics measure the paper-to-stone interface of a vanished document flow.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Across all monument texts with arithmetically checkable Distance Number chains, tabulate errors against chain length. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): error incidence rises with chain length in a manner consistent with a constant per-block error rate (significant positive association, p < 0.05), rather than being independent of length. Secondary clause: erroneous coefficients differ from correct values by visually confusable substitutions (bar/dot miscounts consistent with copying) more often than by values adjacent in the computation.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (CMHI, Peabody Museum): the documented monument texts supply the checkable Distance Number chains and their error inventory.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Arithmetic/scribal errors in Maya Distance Numbers and lunar series, and the view that carvers executed prepared layouts, are known, but the specific hypothesis that error incidence scales with chain length at a constant per-block copy-error rate with visually-confusable (not arithmetic) substitutions — testing a paper-to-stone transcription interface — is un-run.

'The calculation of the lunar series on Classic Maya monuments', ResearchGate 231872337
'Skipping Years and Scribal Errors: Kaqchikel Maya Timekeeping', academia.edu 40765845

Predictions

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