Reading room
Sixty ways into the ledger
Each piece is generated from the same dataset at build time: every figure is computed, every quotation is the one already in the ledger, and nothing is scored before its horizon elapses. Read them in order or start with the worked examples.
Orientation
8 articlesWhat the ledger counts, and what each count is actually counting.
The admission rules that keep the ledger from becoming a quotation museum.
Cited claims, editorial summaries and photographs are three different things wearing the same clothes.
Why the ledger would rather have fewer records than a paraphrase presented as quotation.
Four kinds of deadline, and the honesty of an open-ended one.
Most of the ledger is a clock that has not run out. That is not a defect.
One document is a quotation. Two documents is a fact about what was said.
Five refusals that shape everything else on this site.
Domains
9 articlesThe largest domain in the collection, and the one with the least agreement.
Fabs, accelerators and the parts of the future that need a building.
The largest human-stakes domain, and the one where 'jobs' hides the most.
A small domain with the highest cost of being wrong.
Claims that have to survive contact with gravity and maintenance schedules.
Every other forecast in the collection is a bet financed by this one.
The domain where a sentence becomes a statute, and the slowest clock in the collection.
The claims most likely to be graded by an incident rather than a paper.
A small domain that decides who is allowed to compete.
People & institutions
9 articlesThirty-five people who can sign something, and the seven whose words are documented on the record.
Who speaks for a government, and why the answer changes the claim.
Five institutions whose forecasts are also their instruments of persuasion.
The people whose sentences move markets before any product does.
The people whose job is to measure, test and disagree.
Investors forecast in public and hedge in private.
The critics, and the claims that cost them the least to make and the most to check.
The claims made by people whose customers can check them.
The distribution of attention, counted.
Time & horizons
9 articlesWhen the ledger's clocks are set to go off.
Claims that will outlive the people who will be asked to grade them.
The claims that can be settled soonest, and why they matter most.
The calendar view of the ledger, and the work it implies.
The open-ended majority, and what to do with it.
Sentences that have been in the ledger longer than most of its readers.
A date is a promise with a witness. Almost nothing else in a prediction is as useful.
Time zones, inclusive dates, and the arithmetic that decides when a clock expires.
Why the ledger shows a date, and what changes when it moves.
Evidence
9 articlesHow much of the ledger would survive the loss of one source.
A verbatim transcript and a news report are not the same kind of document.
A vocabulary of subjects, and the subjects that turned out to matter most.
Tags help retrieval. They are not evidence.
The records that could be shown to be wrong, and how they differ from the rest.
The unrated column, and why it is honest to leave it filled.
Six words, each with a definition that can be argued with.
A changed claim is a new claim, and the old one stays visible.
What to include so a reader can check you, not just quote you.
Worked examples
9 articlesA claim with a number, a date and no separate series to test it against.
A government target with a mechanism attached, which makes it unusually checkable.
A forecast split that is also a warning, and how a condition changes a claim.
An infrastructure claim made by someone with no budget for infrastructure.
A national ambition with a named year, which is the strongest form of a public promise.
A conditional forecast quoted with its condition still attached.
A majority-of-spending claim that will be settled by somebody's annual report.
A 24-month claim filed one day before the snapshot.
What a failure looks like when the record is written before the outcome is known.
Standing rules
7 articlesWhy the ledger shows a licence or a pair of initials, and never a synthetic portrait.
Every face on this site, with its photographer, licence and file page.
Initials on a colour, and the reasoning behind the fallback.
What you may do with the file, and what stays with the publishers.
The four questions the ledger asks before it records a sentence.
Whether any of it is going to happen.
The next three things worth building, in order of what they cost.
Also: sixty apps built on the same file · the ledger itself · methodology