The dealer's razor

Status: Falsified

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)

The dealer's razor. Selection bias in art-market economics says a market run on glamour is a high-pass filter: dealers keep and promote what sells and discard the dull. This conjecture turns that filter on Assyriology's sampling problem. Unprovenienced tablets are overwhelmingly market-bought, so they passed through dealers who favoured literary, lexical, and royal texts over receipt-and-ration bookkeeping; excavated, provenienced tablets of the same period passed through no such filter. Within each major period, tablets lacking a provenience should therefore be markedly depleted in administrative genres — at most about seven-tenths of the provenienced share — while enriched nearly twofold in literary-plus-royal genres, with the pattern recurring across nearly all major periods. Parity between market and excavated genre profiles would kill the claim — and would, as a consolation, certify the catalogue's sampling as unbiased.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Within each of the five largest CDLI periods, the administrative-genre share among tablets lacking a provenience is <= 0.7x the share among provenienced tablets, while the combined literary-plus-royal share is >= 1.8x, holding in at least four of the five periods; parity between market and excavated genre profiles kills it — and would certify the catalogue's sampling as unbiased.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: CDLI genre labels crossed with provenience presence/absence and periods (in house); this turns the catalogue's own 'sampling regime unverified' caveat into the measurand.

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 by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The mechanism is qualitatively established — post-1991 looting flooding the market, demand skewing to prestige/legible pieces, provenience-reconstruction bias recognized as a live methodological problem — but no quantitative genre-share comparison between provenienced and market tablets was located. In-house computable (CDLI provenience presence x genre).

'Cuneiform Written Artifacts and Missing Evidence', ANE Today (ASOR) — The qualitative market-distortion account

Predictions

Killed registered 2026-07-05 calibration prediction (parent triage: leaked/adjacent)

Resolution: Killed

Caveats: A genuine kill - the registrant's priors said the direction was plausible and the data went the other way: within CDLI's catalogued corpus, market-flavored (unprovenienced) tablets skew MORE administrative than excavated ones in both test periods, the opposite of prestige-selection. A plausible historical reading, offered as interpretation not finding: cuneiform's unprovenienced stratum was substantially built by the great administrative-archive lootings (Drehem, Umma) that flooded the early-20th-century market with exactly the 'boring' genre - i.e. the market selected for AVAILABILITY, not legibility. Binding caveats: origin_place-empty is a proxy for market provenance (excavated pieces can lack findspots); the universe is CDLI-catalogued tablets only (prestige pieces routed to art-market channels may never enter CDLI, a selection this test cannot see); the harvest's sampling regime is unverified; the undated '?' stratum shows the OPPOSITE pattern (1.671) and deserves its own look. The conjecture as operationalized is dead; a version about NON-catalogued market material remains untestable here.

In-house test (triage: adjacent - the market-selection mechanism is qualitatively established, unquantified): among CDLI records of the same period, unprovenienced tablets (origin_place empty - the market-flavored stratum) are genre-enriched toward legible/prestige categories (non-administrative) relative to provenienced tablets.

Resolution criteria: Population: tradition=cuneiform, period_canonical_name in {Ur III, Old Babylonian}, genre = raw genres_for_ws_e (empty excluded, share reported). For each period compute the NON-administrative genre share among unprovenienced vs provenienced records. CLAUSE PRECEDENCE: (1) KILLED if the unprovenienced non-administrative share is <= 1.1x the provenienced share in BOTH periods, or lower in either. (2) SUPPORTED if the ratio is >= 1.5x in BOTH periods. (3) Otherwise INCONCLUSIVE. Narrative (non-binding): full genre breakdowns per stratum, the top enriched genres, and the '?'-period stratum reported for context. Caveat binding at registration: origin_place-empty is a PROXY for market provenance (some excavated pieces lack recorded findspots), and the local harvest's sampling regime is unverified.

Known priors disclosure: Seen at registration: stratum sizes only (Ur III 1,283 unprovenienced / ~58.4k provenienced; OB 3,826 / ~11.1k) and the period-level genre distributions from the entropy-floor resolution (Ur III ~97.9% administrative overall; OB ~43% administrative) - but NOT any genre-by-provenience cross-tab. The conjecture's direction is plausible from the qualitative literature (which is why triage said adjacent); the size of any enrichment is genuinely unknown.

As pre-registered: non-administrative genre share per provenience stratum per period, clause precedence explicit. Script preserved alongside the artifact.

Dataset: CDLI catalogue metadata (126,000 records): genre-labelled Ur III (provenienced 58,320 / unprovenienced 1,135) and Old Babylonian (10,381 / 3,327) strata by origin_place presence. Read-only.

computed 2026-07-05

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