AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
← All conjectures · Institutions, law & bureaucracy
Memoryless monasteries
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)
Memoryless monasteries. Joins the statistics of radioactive decay and modern firm-survival analysis to monastic geography: manuscript-producing places, the claim runs, went extinct at a constant hazard, like unstable isotopes. The mechanism is that the deaths of scriptoria were dominated by external shocks — raids, plagues, fires, the fortunes of patrons — which arrive without regard to institutional age, so accumulated endowments, libraries, and prestige bought no real protection. A house that had copied books for two centuries faced the same chance of producing its last manuscript in the coming century as one founded fifty years earlier; survival was memoryless. The conjecture predicts that the activity spans of dated production places follow an exponential distribution with a half-life on the order of a century, that the extinction hazard is flat in institutional age, and that the same half-life band recurs separately across several distinct manuscript traditions.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For vHMML production places with >=3 dated manuscripts, the activity span (last minus first dated manuscript) fits an exponential distribution with half-life between 80 and 160 years, and the Kaplan-Meier hazard is flat: the per-century probability of a place's final manuscript is the same within +/-30% for places already active 50 years and places already active 200 years. The same half-life band holds separately within at least three traditions.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: vHMML place and date metadata. A strongly rising or falling hazard (per-century extinction differing by more than x2 between young and old places) or half-lives outside 50-250 years kills it.
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 at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05)
The memoryless-hazard result exists in a different domain entirely (Daepp et al.: firms die at constant hazard, decade-scale half-life) and scriptorium-lifespan variance is acknowledged qualitatively, but no survival analysis of manuscript-production places was located. No prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05). In-house resolvable in principle (vHMML places and dates), subject to data-quality checks.
- Daepp et al. 2015, 'The mortality of companies', J. R. Soc. Interface 12 — The borrowed result, modern firms
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.