XyraSinclair enumerate-discriminating-alternatives
Feynman's all-paths discipline fused with von Neumann's structured alternative space and Grothendieck's base-variation tie-breaker: do not let one explanation win because it arrived first. Organon: P1 enumerate + P17 sample-many + P22 adversarial-refute + P23 tournament. Phase: SENSE -> GENERATE -> JUDGE. Respiratory: expand the hypothesis set first; compress only by tests that break ties.
Procedure
Freeze the observed facts. Write only what is actually known so far, in a form every candidate must explain.
Generate at least four hypotheses. Each one must be genuinely distinct and still consistent with the facts already observed. Similar phrasings of the same story do not count.
Attach a discriminating prediction to each hypothesis. For every live candidate, name an observation, test, or future trace that would separate it from at least one rival.
Run the cheapest discriminating tests first. Eliminate candidates only when their own prediction fails, not because another story sounds better.
Forbid convergence while predictions tie. If two or more hypotheses still share every confirmed prediction, do not vote. Generate a new test that would break the tie and run it.
Name the survivor and the killed alternatives. The output is not only the winner; it is the tournament record that made the winner honest.
The gate
Exactly one hypothesis survives its discriminating test. If two or more hypotheses still survive, the next move is a new test, never a vote. A single plausible story with no killed rivals does not pass as explanation.
Hypotheses may be conjunctive: when evidence suggests joint causation, promote the conjunction ("lock amplification AND retry storm") to a hypothesis of its own and test it — the gate demands one surviving hypothesis, not one surviving cause.
Example
An ingestion job slows down after a schema change. Four live hypotheses: database lock amplification, larger payloads, cache bypass, or retry storm. Two quick checks kill payload growth and cache bypass. Lock amplification and retry storm still fit all facts, so the process may not choose. A new test inspects lock wait time under retries disabled; wait time collapses. Now exactly one hypothesis survives, and the explanation is earned rather than narrated.