the record · exhibit 10 · loop 02, Production
Deep cuts before blind juries: 0 for 4
Every deep cut tried in the July repair pass lost its blind A/B, and the twenty-chapter pass that did subtraction without amputation won twenty to nothing.
· principle 8 of twelve
What it shows
Principle eight. Every deep cut proposed in the July repair pass went to a blind jury against the original, and every one lost, at margins from eighty-five to fifteen down to seventy to thirty. The pass that survived cut restatement without cutting tissue, and an independent jury preferred it in all twenty contested chapters. The record of the losses is what makes the wins mean anything.
The principles are numbered on the method page. Cuts in the excerpts below are marked with an ellipsis in brackets; the three kinds of cut are stated on the record’s front page.
From the record
- **Pass B repair (2026-07-03):** blind A/B (85/15 for the original) overturned the deep cut; second movement restored in full; the doubled one-softness ending trimmed ~200 words per the blind reader's prescription.
- **Pass B jury repair (2026-07-03):** blind A/B (80/20 for the original) — all five cuts reverted ('and I was the table' ruled the best sentence in either version; the plant-spend-harvest cost chain restored); the jury's one adoption kept (hard stop at 'and I sat at this desk with them').- **Pass B jury repair (2026-07-03):** blind A/B (70/30 for the original) — original body restored (the stoop, the fifteen-demonstration, the no-*for* audit paragraph); only the two jury-endorsed tail cuts kept.
- **Pass B jury repair (2026-07-03):** blind A/B (70/30 for the original) — the why-not-my-own-hand fold reverted; 'The one who keeps may not be the one who strikes' and the confession-irony circuit restored.
2026-07-04 16:41 Pass B: structural repetition edit (B2/B3), accepted by independent 20-0 blind A/B Pass B: structural repetition edit (B2/B3), accepted by independent 20-0 blind A/B The de-restatement pass across 22 chapters: self-summary, pre-announcement, and coda restatement cut; ch21 gains the B3 Okonkwo paper scene and the photograph image; ch17 close re-staged (C067 brother fix applied). Acceptance test (2026-07-04): a second, fully independent blind A/B — one juror per changed chapter, prose bodies only, labels randomized, no access to canon or critic notes — preferred the revision in all 20 contested chapters (9 strong, 11 lean, 0 toss-ups, 0 for the old text). Jurors consistently found the cuts protect the apophenia ambiguity and the ending's restraint. Six juror micro-restorations applied post-verdict: ch08 "mostly", ch14 "no doer in it", ch16 "calling itself rigour", ch20 the judgment-worth-defending either/or, ch21 "a man's belief is not the world", ch28 "The answer was older than all of us." Continuity: C067 (blocking) resolved, C068 resolved, C069 advisory-only. Critic notes for the pass added under .archive/critic-notes/pass-b-*. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>