How it works
Claims are placed by one standard only: the strength of the verifiable evidence behind them. Better-proven sits closer to the center; weaker and less-supported sits further out.
The layers
Uncertainty is opt-in
By default you see the Core: only claims backed by primary documents and court records that have survived challenge. Nothing speculative is on screen.
Turning the depth dial outward brings the further shells into view, one at a time. The dial hides content, never existence — the count of what sits deeper is always shown, so nothing is quietly withheld.
A claim moves inward only by surviving challenge, and outward the moment its evidence fails. The asymmetry is deliberate: hard to move in, easy to move out.
- CoreDocumented, and survived challenge
- InnerWell supported; credible dispute remains
- MiddlePartial support
- OuterSpeculative; the path inward is stated
- OutermostChecked and failed; kept visible
The rules
Constraints in the database, not moderation after the fact
Each rule below is enforced at the moment data is written, which is what makes it bind everyone including the operator.
- Promotion requires surviving challengeHard to move inward, easy to move outward.
- Outer cannot feed innerA weak claim can never be cited as support for a stronger one, within or across topics.
- Moral and framing claims cannot occupy the factual CoreNo matter how strongly held, including by the operator.
- Metaphysical claims take no tier at allThe evidence axis measures them in neither direction. They live on an attributed-positions layer — argued and discussed, never ranked.
- Self-assertion scores zeroA source asserting its own author is right restates the claim rather than evidencing it. Only claimant-independent provenance moves anything inward.
- Claim text is immutableThe tier was earned by that exact sentence. Revise it and the revision earns its own placement.
- Accusations against living, identifiable people carry a heightened barUnadjudicated allegation stays marked as allegation. Named in a deposition, named in an unvetted tip, and named in a conviction are three different things, and the placement reason must say which.
- Popularity moves nothingNo count of supporters, followers or votes changes a tier. Only evidence surviving review does.
A placement, in the format the reader sees
The edge is a workspace, not a landfill
Claims that have been checked and failed are not deleted. They stay visible at the outermost layer, stated faithfully, next to the reason they are there — so the same ground doesn't get re-litigated forever.
The Great Wall of China is visible from space with the naked eye.
This is a popular claim rather than a physical one, so it cannot sit near the Core. Angular resolution at low earth orbit places an object this narrow well outside naked-eye visibility, however large it feels from the ground.
Designed, not yet built
Where an overreaching claim came from
Most claims at the edge are not inventions. They are extensions — a documented fact carried further than the documents go. The next stage of the design connects each outer claim to that seed: the nearest established ground it grows from and overreaches beyond.
The connection will carry a gap statement: what the kernel establishes, what the claim asserts beyond it, and what would close the distance — documented through 1973 · asserted beyond · path inward: any post-1973 primary record.
It will carry no evidentiary weight and can never move a tier or be cited as support, and it will say so on its face: this connection shows where the evidence stops — it does not support this claim.
- Support draws wholeWhere evidence actually connects two claims, the line between them is unbroken.
- A kernel link draws brokenSolid on the evidenced side, visibly snapping where sourcing runs out, dangling toward the claim beyond it. The width of the break is the evidentiary distance.
- No kernel means no lineAn unmoored claim floats free. That absence is its own signal, and is not filled in with a plausible-looking relative.
- Every hop is challengeableA flattering kernel — dressing a leap as a gentle slope — is the attack this feature invites, so the path is contestable step by step and a contested step renders differently.
Where a claim genuinely descends through intermediate steps, the path will be traced through them rather than jumping end to end — showing how far an idea travels on real evidence before it leaps.
Claims welded from two separate roots will draw both lineages at once, each breaking at its own point. One may carry through the middle layers before snapping; another may break straight off the documented core. That difference is information about the claim.
Designed, not yet built
What the map believed, when, and why it changed its mind
A map that shows only its current state presents itself as having always been right. The design adds a second control beside the depth dial: a time scrubber that replays any topic as it stood at any past moment — placements appearing, claims moving inward as evidence lands, sliding outward the day a challenge is upheld.
Nothing new has to be recorded to make this possible. The rules already force the system to keep the full record: claim text is immutable, so nothing was ever silently rewritten; every tier change carries its reason and timestamp; every challenge is kept, including the failed ones. The replay is a rendering of records that already exist, and no historical view can reach a write path.
The distinction it exists to make visible: a claim placed correctly on the evidence of its time, and demoted years later when better evidence arrived, was not a mistake. It was the system working. A replay separates was this right then from is this right now — and an auditor can evaluate any placement against the record as it stood, not as it stands.
This is the outermost ring's principle applied to time. Failed claims stay visible so nothing is re-litigated forever; past states stay visible so the system cannot quietly become correct. It shows its corrections, with dates.
The companion
The persona is absent from the reasoning, not told to behave
The engine ships with an optional AI companion. It advises; the rules decide. It has no write access, cannot propose a tier, and cannot mark a source verified — that state is computed from text actually retrieved, not authored by a model.
It also runs in a character of your choosing, and that is where the usual promise breaks down. Everywhere else, keeping a persona from coloring the analysis is a matter of instructing the model not to let it. Here the character is structurally absent from the analysis request. Not instructed against, not filtered afterward — not present. The persona exists only on the second pass, rendering findings it took no part in producing.
A substance-fidelity check then confirms the findings survived that rendering intact. A noir detective can make unproven atmospheric. It cannot make it sound likely.
No exemptions
The rules apply to the author
Rule five — self-assertion scores zero — has no carve-out for the people who wrote it. A claim about the engine's own integrity, backed by the engine's own passing test suite, is placed at Outer. The tests restate the claim rather than independently verifying it, and the placement reason says so: the path inward is an audit by someone who isn't its author.
A constraint enforced at the moment data is written cannot check who is writing. That is why it is enforced there rather than applied afterward as policy.