falsification-first-stress-test

name	falsification-first-stress-test
description	Campaign: Truth-seeking adversarial validation for scientific research artifacts (NOT publication defense). Core question: Where have we fooled ourselves, and is each load-bearing claim even falsifiable? Win-condition is INVERTED from survival/resilience to active refutation. Methods: Popper falsificationism, Lakatos Proofs and Refutations, Mayo severe testing, Platt strong inference.
type	campaign
produces	FalsificationLedger
artifact-types	["theory-map","claim","isomorphism-claim","convergence-claim","validation-design","proposition"]
dependencies	{"strategies":["adversarial-debate-truthseeking","circular-validation-audit","elegance-trap-probe","independent-convergence-audit","isomorphism-falsification","red-team-truthseeking"],"sops":["context-checkpoint","context-init","stress-test-saturation-detection","verdict-synthesis","weakness-classification"]}

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:

Bucket	Meaning	Action
BROKEN	A concrete refutation (counterexample / disagreeing case / failed derivation) was found.	Revise the claim or demote it. Record what the refutation taught.
CORROBORATED	The claim was stated falsifiably, attacked severely, and held.	Raise confidence. Record WHAT was forbidden-and-held (the more it forbids, the stronger).
UNFALSIFIABLE	No statement of the claim could be found that some observation/computation could refute.	RED FLAG. Demote to conjecture or relabel (e.g. "isomorphism"→"analogy").

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)

Claim/artifact type	Primary strategy	Secondary
a beautiful unification / elegant backbone	elegance-trap-probe	adversarial-debate-truthseeking
an isomorphism claim (A ≅ B ≅ …)	isomorphism-falsification	adversarial-stress-testing (sibling campaign)
load-bearing propositions	counterfactual-probing (sibling campaign)	adversarial-stress-testing (sibling campaign)
an "N paths independently converged" claim	independent-convergence-audit	red-team-truthseeking
a validator / sandbox design	circular-validation-audit	red-team-truthseeking
any sharp claim	red-team-truthseeking	adversarial-debate-truthseeking

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

Parameter	S (Quick)	M (Standard)	L (Deep)
Load-bearing claims attacked	4	8	14
Refutation attempts per claim	2	4	7
Severe tests designed per claim	1	2	4
External evidence searches	3	6	12

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.

Available Strategies

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

Strategy	When to use
adversarial-debate-truthseeking	Strategy: Dialectic engine retuned for truth-seeking, not survival. A defender steelmans a claim into its MOST falsifiable form, a critic attacks to refute it, a judge classifies the exchange into BROKEN/CORROBORATED/UNFALSIFIABLE — the judge does NOT pick a winner or score persuasiveness. Methods: Irving debate (repurposed), Toulmin argumentation, Mayo severe testing.
circular-validation-audit	Strategy: Run BEFORE building any validator (sandbox/simulation/benchmark). Builds a non-circularity matrix of theory-claim × validator-assumption to detect when a validator would 'confirm' a theory only because it was built on the theory's own premises. A circular validator's PASS carries zero evidential weight. Methods: Cartwright nomological machines, Winsberg sanctioning-of-simulations, tautology detection.
elegance-trap-probe	Strategy: Attack a beautiful unified result on the suspicion that its beauty is the bug. Distinguishes EARNED simplicity (forbids/predicts/subsumes) from DECORATIVE simplicity (re-describes/relabels/accommodates). Directly serves the Occam aesthetic by making it a falsifiable bar, not a vibe. Methods: Sober parsimony-as-evidence, MDL, Meehl risky prediction, accommodation-vs-prediction.
independent-convergence-audit	Strategy: Attack the evidential weight of an 'independent convergence' claim. When N reasoning paths all reach the same conclusion, the confidence boost is real only if the paths were actually independent. Measures shared-prior / shared-blindspot contamination and corrects the over-counted confidence. Methods: Bayesian agreement-as-evidence, correlated-error analysis, jury theorem assumptions.
isomorphism-falsification	Strategy: Attack an isomorphism claim by demanding an explicit structure-preserving map and trying to break it. Targets any multi-language claim of the form 'X ≅ Y ≅ … across N mathematical languages'. Forces the claim to either earn the word 'isomorphism' or be demoted to 'analogy'. Methods: category theory (functor/natural-iso criteria), model theory, Lakatos monster-barring.
red-team-truthseeking	Strategy: Systematic adversarial probing retuned for truth-seeking. Threat surface = the set of load-bearing claims. Output is NOT a resilience score and NOT a hardening list — it is, per claim, the specific observation/computation that would refute it, plus which attacks succeeded. Methods: UFMCS Key Assumptions Check (repurposed), CIA Devil's Advocacy, Platt strong inference.

Available SOPs

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

SOP	When to use
context-checkpoint	Append research process and results to the current Phase's context file. Covers both process and results with genuine substance. Use this skill at plan-designated checkpoint points — typically after each strategy completes or at key decision nodes within a research Phase.
context-init	Create a new context file for a research Phase. Called once at Phase start to initialize the file that subsequent context-checkpoint calls will append to. Use this skill whenever a new research Phase begins and a fresh context file is needed.
stress-test-saturation-detection	Determines whether validation has reached saturation — no new weaknesses or failure modes being discovered. Used by all 5 campaigns as termination signal.
verdict-synthesis	Synthesizes findings from a completed campaign into typed verdict reports. Produces DebateVerdict, RedTeamReport, FailureAnticipationReport, CounterfactualMap, or AdversarialStressReport depending on campaign. Also supports cross-campaign StressTestSummary.
weakness-classification	Classifies discovered weaknesses into severity tiers (fatal/major/minor/cosmetic) with structured justification and exploitability assessment.