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The Canon Is a Prior

This map is not the territory

The map

It started as a folded sheet with coloured pen on it. Every line now has to declare what kind of line it is, and the ones I cut are still drawn.

PhysicsInferenceMyth & readingMachines
de BroglieMatter has a wavelength.inherited categoriesThe boxes you had before the evidence arrived.what you measureDifferent apparatus, different aspect.KuhnFrameworks change, and not only by accumulation.PopperAsk what would show you wrong.PeirceWhere hypotheses come from.BayesP(H|E) ∝ P(E|H) · P(H)priorWhere you started.underdeterminationThe evidence fits more than one story.hermeneuticsYou cannot read from nowhere.canonThe reading you inherited.IcarusOne climb, four motives.Achilles & PatroclusA relationship the poem never names.fanfictionSystematic perturbation of a shared model.counterfactualChange one premise; see what moves.language modelsA learned prior over what text usually means.confidenceFluency is not evidence.ambiguityWhere both sides have to guess.the predictive brainSensory input arrives against an expectation.evidence in lawTwo narratives, one set of facts.retellingThe canon, run again under a changed premise.training dataSomebody's categories, collected as though they were the world.identityThe model you run on yourself.a personReal, entire, never available in full.evidenceWhat arrives and moves things.

Tap a node. A ringed node is a place you can go. Scroll sideways, or use list view.

Physics

Inference

Myth & reading

Machines

Nothing selected

Choose any node to see what it is doing here and which connections it actually supports. Each link declares its own strength, and the weaker kind has to say what it is not claiming.

  • Structural — a form both share, statable precisely
  • Analogical — suggestive, with a named disanalogy
  • Historical — one actually influenced the other
  • Break — drawn, then cut. Where the resemblance stops
  • Open — suspected, not established

Structural

25

Analogical

6

Historical

3

Break

3

Open

1

RecordedWhich nodes you opened, in order — a rough measure of which connections people actually check. Plus a random identifier and how long you took. No name, no account, no IP address, no analytics. Where a box invites you to write, what you write is stored verbatim — that field is optional and is labelled at the point of entry. All of it, in detail.

The line this project is named after is dashed

A prior is a normalised distribution over a stated hypothesis space. A canon is none of those things. What survives is a claim about the role played — smaller than the title, and the reason the title is a first discovery rather than a conclusion.