# r2-edh-b1 triage record — Fable pass, 2026-08-06

**Input:** `popper_r2_edh_minted_1..3.json` (25 conjectures, batch size disclosed 25)
+ minting README. **Adjudicator:** Fable (orchestrator), under the operator's standing
delegation. **Standing law applied:** the six r3-b1 method amendments; the
r3-b1-17/Puducherry degenerate-support precedent; DESIGN_POPPER_V2_RUNG3 record schema.

## Verdict

**25/25 PASS to pinning. Zero triage kills.** (r3-b1 had two; this batch's minting
pass pre-filtered at the angle level — its "considered and dropped" ledger records
seven discarded angles, which is where the killing happened. Correct behaviour.)

Quality notes for the record: margins are stated against observed values everywhere;
9/25 directionals all carry named, pre-registration historical mechanisms; the two
disclosed-risk instruments (16's 1.5pp Etruria margin, 23's single-exemplar Cisalpine
claim) are flagged as risks in their own notes rather than padded — both are the kind
of honest wager the method wants.

## Hardening directives (binding on the pinning pass; all pre-registration, so no
frozen text is being altered — this is what triage exists to catch)

**T1 — Denominator harmonization (01, 02, 03).** The standing unit-class note excludes
`Inc` from every conjecture, yet 01/02/03 say "the 33 holdout provinces" / "12 of 33" /
"5 of 33". Pin the evaluation set as **the 32 geographic holdout provinces (Inc
excluded)** and restate: 01/02 denominators = full 32-province holdout total; 03
thresholds stay the absolute counts already minted (≥12 under 300; ≥5 at ≥1000) now
expressly "of the 32". Inc's own landed record count is DISCLOSED alongside results
but never enters any conjecture's arithmetic.

**T2 — Per-conjecture eligibility tables.** The standing note resolves Rom/ReB by
family description ("density family", "mechanism-based claims"), which leaves genuine
ambiguity for the floor/heterogeneity instruments (04, 06, 07, 08, 09, 14, 16, 18, 19,
20, 24, 25): is Rom eligible for a genre-diversity floor? Pinning must emit, for each
of the 25, an **explicit enumerated list of in-scope holdout provinces**, frozen in the
registration doc, resolving Rom and ReB per conjecture with one stated reason each. No
family-description eligibility survives into the registration; only lists.

**T3 — 14/17 contradiction repair.** 14 ("every eligible holdout province peaks in
buckets {0,1}") is killed by precisely the outcome 17 predicts for Mesopotamia (peak
bucket ≥2), should Mes land with N(dated)≥150. Name **Mesopotamia as an exhaustive
carve-out of 14** with cross-reference to 17 (amendment law #4: enumerated exception,
recorded now, before any data). No other carve-outs: Thracia, Regnum Bospori etc.
remain in 14's scope — if one of them peaks late, 14 dies honestly.

**T4 — Attrition-proof rewording (15, 22) + uniform min-eligible floors.** 15 and 22
both say "fewer than 3 of the 4 then-eligible ... provinces" — a fixed count against a
variable eligible set: if only two clear the support floor, the kill fires spuriously
even when both agree with the mechanism (the exact r3-b1 −31 lesson). Reword both to
**"fewer than 75% of the then-eligible"**, and add a uniform decidability floor to
every group-percentage conjecture (05, 09, 10, 13, 15, 21, 22): **a group with fewer
than 2 then-eligible provinces renders that clause UNDECIDABLE** (recorded, counted
neither way). This only ever makes claims harder to decide, never easier to survive.

**T5 — Aggregation pin (21).** The group comparison must state its aggregation:
**unweighted mean of per-province average transcription lengths** (matching the
minting arithmetic: frontier ~79.8 = mean of three province averages), not a
record-weighted pooled mean. Pin it in the frozen query text.

## Block B joins the same registration (operator directive 2026-08-06; programme doc
DESIGN ENTRY same day)

Registered recovery predictions — the amputation–recovery demonstration — freeze in
the SAME commit as Block A. Design fixed by this triage:

- **Evaluation object:** the holdout half as EDH catalogues it. Composition targets
  are computed over ALL holdout records; allocation/rank targets over the 32
  geographic provinces; Inc disclosed separately; Rom included (records are records).
- **Known-quantity disclosure:** EDH's public download page (read pre-registration,
  logged in the ingest doc) implies the whole corpus is ~82k and hence the holdout
  remainder ≈ 82,828 − 42,009 HD-number ceiling minus visible — an approximate,
  contaminated-but-public quantity. It is therefore **banned as a target** and
  **permitted as a declared input** (for count-family predictions), with provenance
  stated. Per-province allocation, and every compositional property, remain genuinely
  unknown on this box.
- **Target families (12–16 registered targets total):** (B1) allocation structure —
  top-1 share, top-5 share, #provinces ≥1000, #provinces <300; (B2) century-share
  vector of dated rows with per-bucket intervals + one registered total-variation
  ceiling; (B3) language — non-Latin share per declared stratum (13's Latin-West /
  Greek-East partition; conditional targets need no size predictions) + one wide
  aggregate; (B4) genre — epitaph and votive shares of typed rows; (B5) dated-share;
  range-precision share; (B6) bracket-density; no-image rate; (B7) Marmor share per
  10's declared strata.
- **Method-as-instrument:** one committed script derives every number from the visible
  half only — point prediction + 90% interval via province-level bootstrap (10,000
  resamples, fixed seed, percentile intervals; stratified where a declared stratum
  applies). No hand-adjusted numbers anywhere; my own priors are confined to Block A's
  directionals, and the script's zero-case-knowledge is the point of the headline.
- **Scoring rule:** decided only when all 32 geographic holdout provinces have landed
  EXACT; mechanical coverage check (target inside/outside interval), N-of-M coverage
  headline against the registered 90% expectation; near-boundary values get the
  standing independent re-derivation treatment.
- **Honesty label:** EDH is pre-cutoff → every Block A and Block B verdict is
  **replication-grade**; the split is alphabetical, not random, and cross-half
  exchangeability is exactly the wager being tested. Both stated in the registration.

## Sequencing (unchanged)

Pinning lane (frozen SQL + eligibility tables + T1–T5 applied + Block B script run on
visible half) → my review → **one registration commit** → only then the second-half
fetch → machine scoring → countersignature → note rewrite.
