---
slug: hidden_researcher_degrees_of_freedom_collapse
name: Hidden Choice-Space Collapse
one_liner: "A silently explored space of locally-defensible choices is collapsed into a single declared result, hiding the true multiplicity and inflating apparent confidence without any single choice being made in bad faith."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [epistemic, cognitive, social]
origin_domain: research_methodology
alternate_origin_domains: [decision_making, statistics, communication]
aliases: [silent_choice_pruning, undeclared_search_space, garden_of_forking_paths_concealment, path_multiplicity_erasure, presented_as_inevitable]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-05 generalization) — the proposed GENUS of `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` (lift: strip the research/statistics domain frame — subjects, covariates, tests, p-values — leaving the bare form 'a silently explored space of locally-defensible choices collapses into one declared outcome, concealing its own multiplicity'). Discovered in the op-05 remaining-strata sweep 2026-07-03. Tier B candidate. STATUS: HOLD pending owner keep/cut. Flag: siblings (chef's untracked seasoning; hiring committee's shifting criteria) genuinely span domains and are absent from corpus — but this is a proposer coinage, watch coinage-vs-genus."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). SI/SF/similarity are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity-check vs `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` (input) and any survivorship / selective-reporting / hindsight prime in the corpus; confirm it is a genuine genus (covers the input AND the chef/hiring/photographer siblings) and is not a restatement of the input nor an alias of selective reporting or survivorship bias; draw a subsumption edge input→candidate + sibling edges at incorporation; sync one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 4
  domain_breadth: 4
  structural_abstraction: 3
  transfer_evidence: 4
  reasoning: 'The bare form — an agent traverses a branching space of locally-defensible choices, the losing branches leave no trace, and a single result is declared as though it were the inevitable or only one — is a clean informational/epistemic structure and recurs wherever a process both explores options and controls its own presentation: cooking, hiring, photography, curation, forecasting, engineering design reviews. It is more substrate-independent than its statistics-bound input `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` (which is scored lower for being wedded to analytic pipelines and p-values). Structural abstraction is held at 3 rather than 4 because the pattern carries an irreducible epistemic-content commitment — it is about *concealed multiplicity distorting a warrant for belief*, which is not as content-free as a pure graph or scheduling relation; the "collapse hides confidence-inflation" payload is evaluative-adjacent. Composite 4 on the strength of clear cross-domain transfer.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: researcher_degrees_of_freedom
  similarity: 0.68
structural_framed:
  label: structural
  aggregate: 0.4
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.7, evaluative_weight: 0.4, institutional_origin: 0.2, human_practice_bound: 0.5, import_vs_recognize: 0.3}
  rationale: 'The pattern is mostly recognized as a bare structure — a branching search whose unchosen branches are erased and whose single output masquerades as inevitable — and its vocabulary (choice space, collapse, concealed multiplicity) travels beyond research. It carries some evaluative weight (the collapse is a distortion, and "without bad faith" is a normative qualifier) and is somewhat bound to human presentation practices, which lifts it off the pure-structural floor, but it has no single institutional home and is imported as a mechanism rather than a doctrine. Lands nearer the structural pole than the framed one.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Hidden Choice-Space Collapse

## Core Idea

Hidden choice-space collapse is the bare structure in which *an agent silently traverses a branching space of locally-defensible choices, the paths not taken leave no visible trace, and a single result is declared as though it were the only or inevitable one* — so a downstream observer, seeing one clean outcome, has no way to know how many defensible alternatives were available and quietly pruned. The one constraint stripped from the input `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` to reach this genus is the *research-and-statistics domain frame*: the input phrases the pattern in terms of subject exclusions, covariate sets, test choices, stopping rules, and inflated p-values, but nothing in the load-bearing form requires that the branching space be an analysis pipeline or that the distortion be statistical. What remains is a general epistemic hazard about presentation erasing multiplicity.

The anatomy has three load-bearing parts. First, a *branching space of locally-defensible choices* — at each step several options are individually reasonable, so no single choice is culpable in isolation. Second, *silent exploration with no retained trace* — the agent moves through the space, but the branches not chosen (and often the fact that a choice-point existed at all) are not recorded or reported. Third, *collapse to a single declared result presented as inevitable* — the output is offered as *the* answer, "the recipe," "the photo," "the reason," concealing that it was selected from many. The characteristic payoff is *legibility and authority*: a single clean result is communicable and persuasive precisely because it hides its own contingency. The characteristic cost is *inflated apparent confidence*: because the multiplicity is invisible, the observer over-trusts the result, and — crucially — this happens *without any individual choice being made in bad faith*, which is what makes the pattern insidious and hard to police. It is an emergent distortion of a search-plus-presentation process, not a lie.

Read structurally, the same move recurs far from statistics. A *chef* makes dozens of untracked seasoning adjustments, then declares the outcome a fixed "family recipe" — the tasting-and-adjusting search is erased and the final dish presented as canonical. A *hiring committee* informally shifts its criteria as it evaluates candidates, then names a single stated reason for the decision, collapsing a contingent deliberation into one clean rationale. A *photographer* shoots hundreds of frames and presents one as "the photo," the discarded exposures invisible to the viewer who reads the single image as the scene. In each, the substrate differs — a kitchen, a committee, a camera roll — but the skeleton is identical: a silently-explored space of defensible choices, no retained trace of the unchosen, and a single result declared as if inevitable. That the input (an analyst's forking pipeline) is just one more species is the sign the lift is real.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by operator 05 (generalization / lift) as the proposed genus of `researcher_degrees_of_freedom`, by stripping the research/statistics frame to expose a domain-neutral epistemic structure about concealed choice-space collapsing to a single declared result. Surfaced in the op-05 remaining-strata sweep on 2026-07-03. It claimed the siblings *chef's untracked seasoning → "family recipe"*, *hiring committee's shifting criteria → single stated reason*, and *photographer's discarded shots → "the photo"* as structurally-unlike co-species genuinely absent from the corpus. Manifest tier: B (remaining-strata, `crank/sweep_op05_rest.jsonl` + `manifest_op05_rest.yaml`).

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** The case FOR: the pattern has real reach — the "silent search then present-as-inevitable" form appears wherever a process both explores and controls its own narration, and the chef/hiring/photographer siblings are convincingly unlike the analytic-pipeline input while sharing the exact skeleton; it also names something the corpus's likely neighbors (survivorship bias, selective reporting) do not quite capture, because the emphasis here is on *concealed multiplicity of one's own choices* rather than on a filtered population. The RISKS, stated plainly since this is Tier B: (1) **coinage-vs-established-genus** — there is no single canonical name for this genus; "garden of forking paths" is close but is itself the statistics framing, so the abstraction is a proposer coinage and the label is bespoke. Keep only if the genus-level concept earns its slot over just annotating `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` as domain-neutral. (2) **alias risk with survivorship / selective reporting** — if the corpus holds a survivorship-bias or selective-reporting prime, the boundary must be drawn deliberately: those concern a *filtered sample* or *what gets published*; this concerns *one agent's own unrecorded branch-pruning presented as inevitability*. If that distinction does not hold up, cut as alias. (3) **restatement of the input** — similarity ~0.68; the worry is that stripping the frame yields the same thing `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` already says once read structurally. Sharp keep/cut question for Kurt: **is "silently-pruned defensible choices declared as the inevitable result" a genus worth its own prime, or is it `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` in domain-neutral clothing plus overlap with survivorship/selective-reporting?**

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity against `researcher_degrees_of_freedom` (input) and any survivorship-bias, selective-reporting, or hindsight-inevitability prime; if it survives, draw a subsumption edge `researcher_degrees_of_freedom → hidden_researcher_degrees_of_freedom_collapse` plus sibling/instance notes for the chef, hiring-committee, and photographer cases, and deliberate boundary edges to the survivorship/selective-reporting neighbors. Missing-edge note: the input currently has no genus parent of this shape; that edge is the densification value if kept. Consider renaming the slug to drop "researcher" if the genus is accepted, since the whole point of the lift is that it is not about researchers. Write a v1 draft and sync the one_liner across v1 and v2 per CLAUDE.md before merge.
