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CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/ seasonal-intelligence/ Book Two: OUTLINE essays/ the six pieces archive/ superseded originals, unmaintained by design PORTFOLIO.md the split and the sequence Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are historical documents.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.
26 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
26 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
# Theory
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The shared foundation. Both books and all six essays rest on these two files.
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| File | What it does |
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| **`EVIDENCE.md`** | Every load-bearing claim sorted into four tiers, with sources. **Governs what may be asserted anywhere in the project.** |
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| `THEORY.md` | The Relevance Theory itself — the argument, narrowed to what the evidence supports, with the cut material and reasons at the end. |
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## The tiers
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| Tier | Meaning | How to write it |
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| **A** | Well-supported, multiple sources | State it, cite it, move on |
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| **B** | Contested — real dispute in the literature | Present both sides *in the text* |
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| **C** | Plausible, untested — the author's hypothesis | Mark as hypothesis, in the text, every time |
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| **D** | Speculative or personal | Memoir or metaphor; cannot carry an argument |
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**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.
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## Two things in `EVIDENCE.md` worth knowing without opening it
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**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.
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**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.
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