part of: the tour · chapter 2 of 12
The Question page — the heart of it
One open uncertainty, every candidate answer side by side, and what argues for and against each.
The header: what kind of question this is
The label, then a status line: whether the answers are exclusive (at most one can be right) or an open list, how the Question came to exist, when it was promoted, and how many sources bear on it. Subject chips name what the Question is about.
Why Whether the branches compete or coexist changes what the numbers mean, so it is said before any number appears. “Promoted from measurement” tells you a machine noticed a disagreement in the record — no editor picked this Question.
Connects Every subject chip is a link to that entity or event; the source count links down to the provenance footer listing them all.
See it live A Question header
The context line — anchors, not breadcrumbs
Above the heading, a line naming the page’s primary anchors: part of: the surrounding story · about: Nord Stream pipeline system. Both are links.
Why Breadcrumbs would claim containment — that this Question lives inside that story — and containment would be a lie here (see chapter 1). Naming anchors gives you the same orientation without asserting a hierarchy that does not exist.
Connects The “part of” link leads to the story view; the “about” links lead to the entity or event pages, where this Question appears in their list of Questions in turn.
See it live A page with its anchors
The split: every branch on one screen
One bar per candidate answer, all of them, including the ones doing badly and including the negative branch. Above them, a sentence naming the lens; below them, a plain-language summary that names the leader and immediately qualifies it.
Why This is the one screen no news product ships. Showing only the leading account is how a live disagreement becomes a settled story without anyone deciding it should. Belief may rank branches; it may never hide one.
Connects Each bar links down to that branch’s own section, where the evidence for and against it is laid out.
See it live The split, live
The unknown bar, always last
The final bar is unknown — none of the above, drawn hatched and in a different colour because it is a different kind of thing. When the ranked narratives decline to answer a Question at all, the page says so above the bars: “2 of the 6 ranked narratives decline to answer this Question — the residual is winning it.”
Why It is the room left for an answer nobody has proposed yet. A Question whose unknown share is large and growing is one where the world is talking and the evidence is not moving — which is precisely the situation where an ordinary interface would be showing rising confidence.
Connects The same share travels with every quotation of this page: it is in the Markdown twin, the JSON, the share card and the JSON-LD rating explanation, because a share quoted without its residual is a misquotation.
See it live A large unknown share · Why the residual is a branch
Standing chips: legs, challenges, dormancy, the floor
Under each bar, small chips count what the branch actually rests on — 0 legs · 5 challenges, dormant, at the belief floor — nothing has lifted it yet — followed by the branch’s own belief under the active lens.
Why A share is a summary; the chips are the shape underneath it. Two branches at 4% are not in the same condition if one has three independent legs and the other has never been tested, and the chips are where you see that at a glance.
Connects An evidentiary leg is an independent line of support — the same notion that makes repetition inert. Every chip’s subject is a link to the thing it counts.
See it live Branches with their standing chips
The sparkline: has this actually moved?
A small server-drawn chart beside each branch, with a text equivalent that says exactly what it shows — for example “flat at 21% over the last 9 recomputations”. Pointing at it reads out individual values and dates.
Why Stillness is a real reading and an easy one to hide. A branch that has not moved in nine recomputations is telling you something about the evidence, and the sentence says it in words so that it survives with images off, in the Markdown twin, and for a screen reader.
Connects The values come from belief snapshots in the change log — the same records the ?asof scrub replays.
See it live Sparklines with their readings
Supports and challenges, side by side
Below the bars, each branch gets its own section with two columns: ▲ Supports in green and ▼ Challenges in red, every item linked to the claim or artifact it is, with its sources beneath it.
Why Showing what argues against a hypothesis in the same visual breath as what argues for it is the site’s first invariant. A page that lists only the case for something has taken a side by omission.
Connects Contradictions (⚡) appear on both claims involved, so a contradiction can never be visible from one side only.
See it live A branch with both columns
What kind of evidence it is
Every piece of evidence carries chips naming its kind and strength: physical-trace, document, testimony, statistical, circumstantial — and strong, moderate, weak.
Why Recovered fragments and a spokesman’s denial are both evidence and are not the same kind of thing. Naming the kind lets the reader weigh what the arithmetic deliberately does not try to.
Connects The kind is a property of the link between two claims, not of either claim, which is why the same claim can support one branch circumstantially and contradict another outright.
See it live Evidence with its kind and strength
Independent, or just repeated
Evidence is marked as an independent leg or as a restatement, and repeated assertions show their multiplicity plainly — recorded 2× — rather than appearing twice.
Why This is chapter 1’s rule made visible at the level of a single line. You can see that four outlets said a thing, and you can see that it counted once.
Connects Restatement links are recorded on the source pages in both directions, so you can follow a claim back to the document that first carried it.
See it live A document and what restates it · Voices are counted, never weighed
The ◆ diagnostic mark: evidence that actually discriminates
Evidence bearing on exactly one live branch is marked ◆ diagnostic and sorted to the top of its list. Evidence consistent with every branch sinks, labelled as agreeing with everything.
Why This is the central lesson of analysing competing hypotheses, taught by layout rather than by a lecture: the useful evidence is the evidence that would have come out differently under a different answer. A fact everybody’s theory predicts tells you nothing about which theory is right.
Connects The mark is computed from the answer structure itself — which branches a piece of evidence touches — so it updates as branches are added, without anyone scoring it.
See it live Diagnostic evidence, sorted first
“If this were true…” — inferences and their critical questions
Where the model has drawn a conclusion from a branch, it shows the inference as a card: the derived claim, the named argument scheme that produced it (inferred — expert-testimony v1), the premises it rests on, and that scheme’s critical questions with their status — open, favourable or unfavourable.
Why Machine-made inferences are the easiest place for a system like this to smuggle in confidence. Naming the scheme, the premises and the standard challenges to that pattern of reasoning turns an inference into something you can attack in a specific way — and an unfavourable answer withdraws it.
Connects The same critical questions are collected into “What would change this” below, and the derived claim has its own page showing which inference produced it.
See it live Inferences with open critical questions · Schemes and critical questions
What would change this
A section listing the evidence that would actually move the Question: every open critical question, noting where several inferences are waiting on the same one, and the branches nothing has tested yet.
Why It converts an argument into a to-do list, and it commits the model in advance: these are the places it is explicitly waiting to be corrected. It is read straight off the structure, not editorialised.
Connects Answer one of these and the change appears in the change log and moves the bars above — which is exactly the loop the whole site is built to make visible.
See it live What would move this Question
Where this leads: the ranked narratives
A strip of ranked possible worlds passing through this Question, each showing the choice it makes here and in the neighbouring Questions — including “left open” as a choice — and each a link into the explorer with those choices preselected.
Why A Question is rarely alone: how you answer it constrains the answers next door. The strip is where a single split becomes a set of coherent versions of events, and where a combination that has been ruled out is announced as ruled out.
Connects Before the ranking exists for a neighbourhood, the strip says so — “narrative ranking pending” — rather than rendering an empty box.
See it live Ranked narratives through this Question · The explorer, explained
Recent developments
The change log, filtered to this Question and written as sentences: “answer on the table: …”, “belief recomputed; unknown 67%”. Every line links its subject, and every line offers see the page as it stood then.
Why It is the difference between a page that is current and a page that has a history. The “as it stood then” link is the honest version of a timestamp: instead of telling you something changed, it shows you the earlier page.
Connects Those links set ?asof, the same knowledge-time scrub used by the timeline; the full log is at Changes, and the same entries are available as an Atom feed scoped to this Question.
See it live The whole change log · This Question’s developments
The provenance footer
Every source bearing on the Question, listed and linked; the active lens named with its technical key; links to the story, timeline and explorer views of the same Question; and the machine-readable twins — Markdown, JSON, Atom.
Why Third invariant: every claim links to its source, and no unsourced assertion appears in public view. Gathering them at the foot means you can audit the document base of a whole Question without opening a single branch.
Connects Each source page shows the reverse: what that document claims, and which other documents restate it.
See it live A provenance footer · One of the documents behind it
When there is nothing there yet
A Question with no answers linked renders a single 100% unknown bar and says why: “assertions have been recorded, but nothing has been offered as an answer. That is an honest state of the record, not a missing page.”
Why Every empty state on this site states its mechanism rather than apologising or vanishing. A blank section teaches the reader that the site is broken; a sentence teaches them what the model currently knows.
Connects The same discipline runs through every list here — “no independent evidence yet”, “track record: not yet computed”, “narrative ranking pending”.
See it live A Question with nothing on it yet
Focusing a branch (and why you never need to)
With JavaScript on, controls let you collapse or focus a single branch to read it without the others. With JavaScript off, every branch is simply expanded in the page.
Why The rule for every interactive element on this site: the enhancement may change what is comfortable, never what is available. Collapse is comfort; the content ships regardless.
Connects Chapter 12 sets out the rule and the check that enforces it across the whole site.
See it live The shadow-layer rule
Sharing a Question
A Question pasted into a chat or a social post unfurls into a generated card showing the label and the branch bars — with the unknown share drawn last, hatched, and never dropped, over the line “computed from evidence, never assigned. Leading is not proven.”
Why The share card is where a nuanced page usually becomes a headline. Guaranteeing the residual survives into the preview means the one number most likely to be stripped out is the one that cannot be.
Connects When a long label needs more room, the card drops a branch row — never the unknown row.
See it live The Question this card would be made from