Law 13 · Retrieval & Memory
Relevant Beats Plenty
Near-misses poison context worse than random noise.
The principle
It's backwards from what you'd expect: documents that are on-topic but don't answer the question hurt more than clearly irrelevant ones, because they look plausible and pull the generator toward answers that are wrong but adjacent. Stuffing more 'kind of relevant' chunks into the context lowers accuracy instead of improving coverage. Precision at the top beats breadth.
The mechanism, the warning signs, a worked example, and the apply-it recipe for this law are in the complete edition.
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