Orientation · Article 2 of 60

What counts as a claim

The admission rules that keep the ledger from becoming a quotation museum.

A sentence enters the ledger only if it names a future state of the world that could turn out to be false. Enthusiasm is not a claim. A description of what a company is currently doing is not a claim. A claim is a sentence whose author could be shown to have been wrong.

This rule removes a great deal of what gets quoted in technology journalism, and it removes it on purpose. Where a public figure has only said that something is important, the ledger records nothing rather than a softened version of something.

• A horizon, or an admission that there is none.
• A subject specific enough to be looked up later.
• A direction: more, fewer, sooner, larger, cheaper.
• An author who said the words in public.

Figures computed from docs/predictions/ledger.json at build time. Every claim quoted on this page carries its own sources in the ledger.