falsification-first-stress-test

Falsification-First Stress Test

Core question: Where have we fooled ourselves — and is each load-bearing claim even falsifiable?

This campaign is a deliberate inversion of publication-oriented stress testing. In a publication frame, the artifact is a thing to be defended; success = it survives debate and gets hardened. That frame optimizes for persuasiveness and is actively dangerous for truth-seeking research: it rewards a claim for being un-attackable, which is exactly the failure mode of an unfalsifiable theory. Here the artifact is a suspect. We WANT to break it, because breaking it teaches us something true and cheap (compute/thought) before we spend expensive effort (sandbox, wet-lab) on a false premise. Confidence is not assumed and defended down; it is EARNED up, only by surviving honest assault.

Stance (operator-set, non-negotiable)

• 证伪优先, 不摁死 (falsification-first, not execution). The goal is diagnostic: surface flaws WE overlooked, not manufacture a verdict that kills the work for sport. A successful attack revises the map or demotes a claim; it does not "win." A failed attack (the claim survives) is also a real result — corroboration — provided the attack was severe (Mayo: a claim is corroborated only to the degree it passed a test it would probably have failed if false).
• No hardening. Finding a weakness NEVER triggers "patch it to look stronger." It triggers exactly one of: (a) revise the claim, (b) demote the claim's status, (c) record it as honest residue. Patching-to-survive is the patchwork anti-pattern this whole project rejects.
• Unfalsifiability is the worst outcome, not the best. A claim no attack can touch is not strong — it is empty. Flag it RED and demote to conjecture/analogy.

Three outcome buckets (the only verdicts)

Every load-bearing claim exits in exactly one bucket:

Methodology Sources

• Popper (1959) — Falsificationism: a theory's content = what it forbids; seek the forbidden.
• Lakatos (1976) — Proofs and Refutations: counterexamples force claim refinement, not abandonment; monster-barring vs. concept-stretching.
• Mayo (1996, 2018) — Severe testing / error statistics: a passed test corroborates only if it was severe (would likely have failed if the claim were false).
• Platt (1964) — Strong inference: for each claim, design the experiment whose alternative outcomes exclude hypotheses.
• Meehl (1990) — Risky predictions; the difference between a theory that predicts and one that merely accommodates.

Strategy Routing (by artifact type)

Strategies in this campaign

• adversarial-debate-truthseeking — dialectic engine; defender steelmans into the MOST falsifiable form, critic attacks to refute, judge classifies into the three buckets (does NOT pick a winner).
• red-team-truthseeking — systematic-probing engine; threat surface = load-bearing claims; output = the specific observation/computation that would refute each claim + which attacks succeeded. NO resilience score, NO hardening list.
• isomorphism-falsification — for an isomorphism claim; demand an explicit structure-preserving map or downgrade to analogy.
• circular-validation-audit — run BEFORE building any validator; non-circularity matrix of theory-claim × sandbox-assumption.
• independent-convergence-audit — for a convergence claim; measure path dependence, correct the confidence weight.
• elegance-trap-probe — for the unification; is the simplicity EARNED (forbids/predicts) or DECORATIVE (re-describes)?

Sibling campaigns (routed to, not owned)

These are existing campaigns this campaign routes claims TO; they are referenced, not declared as dependencies (4-layer rule: a campaign lists only its own strategies and sops).

• adversarial-stress-testing (Lakatos/Popper/BVA) — monster-barring and boundary probing on load-bearing propositions; route isomorphism-claim and proposition residue here.
• counterfactual-probing (Pearl SCM / Lewis / PNS-PS) — load-bearing factor identification on propositions and the unification; route "what actually carries this conclusion?" questions here.

Discarded (do not invoke this round)

• failure-anticipation (FMEA/RPN/IEC-60812) — category mismatch. RPN scores manufacturing/process failure likelihoods; it does not test whether a theory is TRUE. If forward failure analysis is wanted, reframe as "if the theory is false, what observation exposes it?" — which is just Popperian falsification, covered above.

Budget Table

Context Management

Each attack subagent runs in isolated context to prevent the defender's framing from contaminating the critic. The Falsification Ledger is the single accumulating artifact; every checkpoint appends, never overwrites. Saturation: stop attacking a claim when 2 consecutive rounds find no new refutation vector AND no new severe test.

Output

Produces FalsificationLedger: a table of every load-bearing claim → {falsifiable? (Y/N) | what observation/computation would refute it | attacks attempted | outcome bucket | if BROKEN: the refutation + revision/demotion | if CORROBORATED: what was forbidden-and-held + severity of the test passed}. Plus a top-level honest-residue list: claims that are irreducibly unfalsifiable by compute and require an external oracle.