description: "Curated head for the discovery tag — positing a general concept and recognizing particulars as its instances; explanatory-reach as the value of what discovery produces" type: kb/types/tag-readme.md index_source: tag index_key: discovery complete: true
discovery
A learning operation distinct from constraining and from source-derived reshaping: positing a new general concept and simultaneously recognizing existing particulars as instances of it. Discovery produces theories — the highest-explanatory-reach items accumulation can store. A child of learning-theory.
The operation
- conjecture is seeing the particular as an instance of the general — the dual structure (posit the general, recognize the particular); three depths from shared feature to generative model; the hard problem is recognition, not linking
- 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
- 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
- natural-language theories carry warrant claim by claim and scope by scope — separates theory-bearing capacity from warrant: criticizable structure makes reach assessable, while support licenses only interpreted claims over bounded scopes
- 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
- theory-mediated learning may improve sample efficiency under structured shifts — conjecture: the measurable payoff of a discovered theory is fewer target observations after a shift that preserves the structure it names, conditional on reach-assessment having earned it
- selective revision needs a faithful rationale, not just a legible one — the recorded basis is the surface revision operates on, so an unfaithful rationale repairs the wrong premise; faithfulness is tested by intervention, not by reading
- 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
- 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