discovery

Type: types/tag-readme.md

How a conjecture that goes beyond the available evidence is formed, tested, and accepted. The discovery lifecycle runs from observation through conjecture, derived consequences, and test to acceptance and integration. Assign this tag to work on those operations, the conditions that enable them, or the explanatory-reach and warrant of what they produce. Recognizing particulars as instances of a new concept belongs here; retrieving an already known document alone belongs to context-engineering. Constraining narrows interpretations, and reshaping source material can preserve its claims without adding a conjecture. A child of learning-theory.

The operation

• recognition, not linking, is the hard problem in knowledge systems — recognizing shared structure is the expensive step, articulating a seen link is cheap; naming a recognized structure amortizes later recognition
• discovery lifecycle — definition: the staged path from conjecture to accepted discovery (observe → conjecture → consequences → test → accept → integrate); ampliative traffic enters at the conjecture stage, and the co-arising insight is the degenerate case with the phases telescoped
• candidacy evidence licenses escalation to assessment, not acceptance — conjecture: cheap evidence can route a hypothesis to expensive assessment without gaining verdict authority; Peirce's economy of research, witnessed by pricing-versus-adequacy and source-grounding cases
• automated synthesis is missing good oracles — why discovery resists automation: no cheap verifier for whether a posited generalization is good
• known-target discovery benchmarks show reachability, not discovery — benchmark critique: recovering a planted generalization measures search, not the open-ended act

Reach — what discovery produces

• first-principles reasoning selects for explanatory-reach — Deutsch's adaptive-vs-explanatory distinction: explanatory knowledge transfers because it captures why, not just what works
• Theory warrant should be tracked at the finest granularity evidence licenses — separates structural candidacy from earned warrant: support attaches to the finest claim, bundle, and scope the evidence identifies, and joint warrant distributes only through entailment or attribution
• warranted reader update is the objective of substantive writing — the contribution criterion: substantive writing selects a nontrivial audience-relative update and earns it with evidence and reasoning
• brainstorming: how explanatory-reach informs KB design — working notes applying the explanatory-reach concept to KB design decisions
• retained theories may improve sample efficiency under structured shifts — conjecture: a useful supplied theory can reduce target observations after a shift that preserves the structure it names; the separate selector conjecture asks whether reach-assessment can discover such theories often enough to beat alternatives
• revision guided by rationale needs faithfulness, not just legibility — when repair uses a recorded rationale, misleading dependencies can direct it to the wrong premise; test that guide by intervention
• Derivation and inheritance give starting warrant; discriminating evidence or proof earns scope — provenance grades a posited carve's starting warrant and relocates its untested part to a statable place; an underdetermined choice gets none, and scope is earned only over the domain evidence or proof actually covers

Conditions for discovery

• ad hoc explanation can be rational when error is cheap and local — prices the lifecycle's heavy phases: derive/test/integrate controls errors that can propagate, while disposable guesses can select cheap local probes before the reach toll is paid at promotion
• short composable notes maximize combinatorial discovery — the artifact-shape argument: small claims compose into more candidate generalizations
• information value is observer-relative — the gap discovery (and consumer-directed reshaping) bridges: structure exists but is inaccessible to the bounded observer until transformed
• Epiplexity by example — worked examples: encrypted messages, shuffled textbooks, CSPRNGs, and chess notation make observer-relative extractable structure concrete
• reverse-compression is when LLM output expands without adding information — the failure inverse: expansion that adds no extractable structure, where productive transformation makes structure accessible
• minimum viable vocabulary — naming as the discovery lever: the vocabulary that most reduces extraction cost for an observer entering a domain