Tom
e73455d2ca
theory/ EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything a-days-walk/ Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/ seasonal-intelligence/ Book Two: OUTLINE essays/ the six pieces archive/ superseded originals, unmaintained by design PORTFOLIO.md the split and the sequence Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are historical documents. Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.
Theory
The shared foundation. Both books and all six essays rest on these two files.
| File | What it does |
|---|---|
EVIDENCE.md |
Every load-bearing claim sorted into four tiers, with sources. Governs what may be asserted anywhere in the project. |
THEORY.md |
The Relevance Theory itself — the argument, narrowed to what the evidence supports, with the cut material and reasons at the end. |
The tiers
| Tier | Meaning | How to write it |
|---|---|---|
| A | Well-supported, multiple sources | State it, cite it, move on |
| B | Contested — real dispute in the literature | Present both sides in the text |
| C | Plausible, untested — the author's hypothesis | Mark as hypothesis, in the text, every time |
| D | Speculative or personal | Memoir or metaphor; cannot carry an argument |
The failure mode this exists to prevent is a Tier C claim written in a Tier A voice. The original contribution — the three-distance relevance model — is Tier C in its entirety. Saying so plainly, in the text, is what makes the rest of the book believable.
Two things in EVIDENCE.md worth knowing without opening it
There is an internal contradiction that has to be resolved before drafting. The theory treats default-mode activity as the thing modern life starves us of, and therefore good. But mind-wandering predicts lower momentary happiness (Killingsworth & Gilbert 2010), rumination is default-mode-linked, and the best experiment in the literature (Bratman 2015) found nature helping by quieting self-referential thought. "We need more reflection" and "nature helps by reducing it" cannot both stand. The resolution — that the target is flexibility, not more of either mode — is chapter 7's job in Book One.
Several claims were cut and should not creep back. The foreign-policy argument, the weight-loss protocol, the diagnostic test's numeric scoring, the "I"/"me" labels for the networks, and the seasonal network mapping. Each has its reason recorded at the end of THEORY.md. If one reappears in a draft, that draft has regressed.