part of: the tour · chapter 3 of 12
How to read the numbers
Belief bars, the unknown residual, the floor, and the lens that every number names.
The anatomy of a belief bar
A horizontal bar per candidate answer: the fill is that answer’s share under the active lens, the label is a link to the claim, and beside it sit the standing chips and a sparkline. The unknown bar closes the set.
Why It is the site’s signature component precisely because it is the site’s argument: the answers are shown together, ranked but not filtered, with the ignorance included in the picture.
Connects The same component is reused wherever a Question appears — the front page, search results, story pages — so it always reads the same way.
See it live How to read a belief bar
What the shares are shares of
The bars divide up everything that could be the case for that Question — including “none of these” — so they add to a whole, not to a hundred percent of the listed options.
Why Normalising over only the listed answers is the quiet mistake that turns a shortlist into a certainty. If the shares added to 100% across the named branches, the interface would be asserting that the truth is among them.
Connects This is why the residual is treated as a branch everywhere — in the ranking, the share card, the JSON and the feeds.
See it live A split where the unknown leads
Leading is not proven
Wherever a top branch is named, the sentence qualifies it in the same breath: “… is currently leading — not established. The unknown residual stands at 67%.”
Why A leading branch is where the current evidence points, not a finding. The phrasing is enforced across the site rather than left to whoever wrote the page, because this is exactly the sentence that erodes first.
Connects The same qualification travels into the machine layer: the structured rating a search engine reads carries an explanation saying the same thing.
See it live The sentence in place
The floor: ignorance is not fifty-fifty
A hypothesis nobody has supported does not start at “maybe”. It starts near zero — the belief floor — and has to earn its way up. Branches sitting there are labelled at the belief floor — nothing has lifted it yet.
Why It is what makes open hypothesis generation safe. If proposing a theory gave it standing, anyone could move the model by proposing things; because an unsupported theory has no power, proposing one costs nothing and proves nothing.
Connects It is also why “untested” and “refuted” are shown as different states: the page says “Nothing supports this branch yet — untested, which is not the same as refuted.”
See it live The floor · Branches at the floor
Reading a growing unknown
The unknown share rises when assertions arrive without anything to discriminate between them, and falls when evidence separates the branches.
Why It is the site’s most useful single number for a reader in a hurry, because it answers a question no headline count can: is this story actually being resolved, or is it just being covered?
Connects When a Question has a lot of assertion and a fat residual, the front page gives it a badge — much reported, little shown — with the counts as the whole statement.
See it live Much reported, little shown · The residual
Dormant, not gone
Branches the evidence has left behind are greyed and marked dormant, and they stay in the list, in rank order, with everything that was ever said about them.
Why Removing them would hide the shape of the argument — and would make it impossible to tell a theory that failed from a theory nobody has looked at.
Connects On pages with many, a collapse control appears with JavaScript on; the branches themselves are always present in the page.
See it live Dormant branches in place
The lens: two ways of reading the same structure
Every page has a lens control offering Evidence-weighted and Structural. It is a pair of ordinary links — ?lens=structural@1 — and the server renders the whole page under whichever you pick.
Why Judgment is a view, not a fact. Making the view switchable, named and part of the URL keeps the site from having a single official number, and makes any disagreement about the arithmetic a disagreement about a lens rather than about the record.
Connects Switching lenses never changes which branches exist. Belief may rank branches; it may never hide one — that holds under every lens.
See it live The same Question, structurally · What each lens does
Structural publishes counts, not percentages
Under the structural lens the percentages disappear entirely and the same rows render as counts: 1 evidentiary leg · 2 sources · 4 challenges · contested. The page says why: these are counts of how well tested a branch is, which is a different claim from how likely it is.
Why Untested and contested must read as different shapes, not as different decimals. Publishing a percentage where the model only has a count would be inventing precision — so it publishes none.
Connects It is the lens to use when you want to audit the record rather than read a projection over it — and, historically, it was the only lens available before the evidence-weighted one existed.
See it live The structural reading
Every number names its lens
No share appears without an attribution: 21% under Evidence-weighted, and at the foot of the page the technical key it came from, log-odds@1.
Why A number with no stated provenance becomes the site’s opinion the moment it is quoted anywhere else. Attaching the lens makes it quotable as what it is: the output of one named model over the record.
Connects The attribution follows the number into the JSON API, the Markdown twins and the structured data — the same string, everywhere.
See it live A number with its lens attached
Nothing computes belief in your browser
Interactive elements read numbers the server has already produced; none of them calculates one. The link previews, for example, receive a finished sentence rather than the parts to build it from.
Why Two implementations of the arithmetic are one implementation too many: the moment a script recomputes a share, the page can disagree with the API about what the model believes.
Connects It is the same reasoning that gives every page exactly one query layer feeding the HTML, the Markdown twin and the JSON.
See it live One query layer, three renderers
The number is never branded
There is no “TruthScore” number on this site. The site is called TruthScore Narratives; the numbers are called shares under a named lens, and they always will be.
Why Branding the default lens would turn a projection into a verdict with a trademark on it — the exact thing the About page says this is not. Keeping the brand and the arithmetic separate is deliberate and permanent.
Connects It is why the lens switcher exists at all, and why new lenses can be added without the site having to change its mind about anything.
See it live What it is not
Where the arithmetic is actually shown
Every claim page carries the full term breakdown behind its number: each contribution, which link it came from, how it was damped, and — separately — the contributions the engine saw and refused to count, with the reason.
Why “Belief is computed, never assigned” is a claim about the system that the system has to be able to demonstrate on demand. The breakdown is the demonstration.
Connects That is the next chapter.
See it live A full term breakdown · The claim page