---
name: refuse-mechanism-until-something-discriminates
description: "supplying a plausible mechanism for someone else's anomaly gets the story adopted before anything tests it — name the observation, refuse the mechanism until an experiment discriminates; and a census whose rows are uniform in the asserted property discriminates nothing"
metadata: 
  node_type: memory
  type: feedback
  originSessionId: 50b95749-0f10-434a-b29d-7899d080cff2
  modified: 2026-08-02T13:17:02.679Z
---

**2026-08-02, with hertz (conhost cwd-pin amend).** He reported his finder opened NONE of 52 conhosts
unelevated. I supplied a mechanism — "must be requested access rights, mine asks only
`PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION|PROCESS_VM_READ`". Wrong: it was a **parse bug in his caller** (his finder
reads 46/50 unelevated, same mask as mine). The observation I contributed was real and useful —
*elevated=False and I read 49/54, so elevation is not the discriminator* — but the mechanism I bolted
onto it was invention, and it nearly went into a shipped hazard doc as a caveat.

hertz named the same shape in himself an hour earlier: zero hits from an sccache trial, meaningless
until he ran a positive control.

**Why:** a plausible mechanism is *adopted* the moment it is stated — it stops the search, and the next
person cites it. Anomaly-reporting and anomaly-explaining are different acts with different evidence
bars, and the second one is not mine to perform on someone else's system.

**How to apply:** report the observation and the control that makes it meaningful, then stop. Say "this
needs checking" where the mechanism would go. Offer a *discriminating experiment*, never a story.

**The paired trap, same episode:** I nearly sent a census as confirmation — 8/8 `--headless` conhosts
reading `system32` — when their creator's cwd *was* `system32`, i.e. the exact value the rival
hypothesis predicts. Uniform rows fit both hypotheses and read as support. The fix was a rig whose
outcome differed between hypotheses (launch from a cwd ≠ system32; kill the client BEFORE the conhost).

See [[uniform-table-blindness-sweep]], [[discriminator-question]], [[ruling-rests-on-a-premise]],
[[instrument-soundness-guards]], [[orphan-conhost-cwd-pins-worktree]].