Find the Truth & Claim Evidence Matrix

What It Does

Find the Truth takes a claim — or a question — and researches it from scratch. It gathers evidence for the claim, deliberately hunts for the strongest evidence against it, weighs everything by how trustworthy each source is, and returns a probability that the claim is true plus a cited report.

• Find the Truth (every signed-in user, token-billed) — the toolbar button in a Research Cafe. Type a claim, confirm a reshaped version if needed, pick a research depth, and run it. The verdict streams back as a probability meter, a plain-language finding, an evidence breakdown, and the strongest counter-evidence found.
• Claim Evidence Matrix (every signed-in user, free to view) — a companion page at /research/[cafeId]/claims that shows every claim in your Cafe (from Find the Truth and from regular Verify claim runs) as a table of supporting / contradicting / silent sources, grouped by credibility tier, with independent-source counting.

The two features share data: every claim Find the Truth checks appears in the matrix, and the matrix works even if you've never run Find the Truth — it's populated by any Verify claim run too.

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Find the Truth

How It Works

1. Open a Research Cafe and click Find the Truth in the toolbar (next to the Claims chip).
2. Type your claim — or a question. Examples: "Coffee consumption reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes" or "Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?"
3. A quick preview shows how the system understood your input:
   • Statements pass through mostly as-is.
   • Questions are reshaped into a checkable statement before anything runs — e.g. "Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?" becomes a statement you can accept or edit.
   • Claims that aren't checkable (opinions, nonsense, unfalsifiable statements) are rejected with a reason — nothing is charged.
4. Pick a research depth: Quick answer, Solid research, or Leave no stone unturned. Each shows a rough cost estimate before you commit — no tokens are charged until you click Run.
5. Click Run. A progress panel streams through the phases: Gathering → Hunting counter-evidence → Weighing evidence → Building the matrix → Scoring → Writing report.
6. When it finishes, the verdict card appears with the probability, the finding, the evidence breakdown, and a link to the full cited report.

Runs in the Background — Survives Closing the Tab

Find the Truth is a background job, same as Auto-Research and Verify claim:

• Close the dialog, switch tabs, or close the browser — the run continues server-side.
• Reopen the Cafe and the run reattaches automatically if it's still going.
• Every completed run is saved to a re-openable "Past truth checks" list, so you never lose access to a verdict or its cited report after closing the dialog.

What Sources It Uses

Find the Truth researches with web search, academic databases (OpenAlex, arXiv, PubMed), news search, and Wikipedia. It deliberately does not use social media, Google Scholar, or manual URL scraping for a truth run — those are Research Mode tools for gathering material generally, but they're excluded here because a truth verdict should only draw on sources that can responsibly move a probability. (These same tools remain available for regular Cafe research via the search bar and Auto-Research.)

Cost

Find the Truth is available to every signed-in user and costs tokens — it's one of the more expensive research actions because it runs two full research passes (gathering evidence for the claim, then separately hunting for the best evidence against it) plus scoring and report writing. The exact estimate for your chosen depth is shown before you click Run, and nothing is charged until you confirm; if your balance is too low to cover the estimate, you'll be prompted to buy tokens before the run starts.

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Reading the Verdict Card

The Probability

The headline number is a percentage that the claim is true, always between 5% and 95% — it never shows 0% or 100%. This is intentional: Find the Truth produces an evidence-weighted estimate, not a certainty. Even overwhelming evidence is clamped short of absolute certainty, and even claims with no evidence never round down to a flat zero.

The card always shows the dominant side of the verdict. A claim the evidence supports reads as likely true with its percentage; a claim the evidence refutes reads as likely false with that percentage — so a claim scoring 8% true is shown as "likely false" at 92%, never as a confusing "true, 8%". Same underlying number, always displayed from the side the evidence actually lands on.

Below the percentage is a qualitative band (from likely true through mixed to likely false) and a confidence read (low / medium / high) driven by how much evidence was found and how one-sided it is.

"What We Found"

Above the probability meter, a "What we found" block gives you the plain-language answer in a sentence or two — the actual finding, not just the number. This is often the fastest way to understand why a claim landed where it did (for example, a claim about a specific statistic might be technically false because the real figure only applies under different conditions — the finding will say so, even though the headline number alone wouldn't).

The Evidence Breakdown

Below the verdict, a breakdown table shows what the score is built from:

• An "Overall reading" row at the top — this is the model's holistic read of all the gathered evidence together, and it's the dominant factor in the score. It's shown as its own row (with an info tooltip explaining what it means) specifically so the visible rows account for the number you see — nothing is hidden.
• Per-source rows below it — each independent piece of evidence, its credibility tier, whether it supports or contradicts the claim, and its contribution to the score.

Independent-root counting applies here too (see Claim Evidence Matrix below) — several articles that all trace back to one wire story or press release count once, not once each.

Strongest Counter-Evidence

Find the Truth always runs a dedicated counter-research pass — it actively hunts for the best evidence against the claim, even when the claim looks obviously true. The verdict card surfaces the single strongest piece of counter-evidence it found, so you see the best case against the claim even on a claim that ultimately scores as true.

When the Card Says "We've Weighed the Sources as a Whole"

Occasionally the per-source breakdown is suppressed and replaced with a neutral note: "For this claim, we've weighed the sources as a whole rather than relying on individual for/against labels." This happens when the system detects that labeling each source as "for" or "against" would be unreliable for this particular claim (this is more likely on claims involving negation or absolute/universal wording, e.g. "always," "never," "everyone"). Rather than guess and risk mislabeling evidence, the card falls back to the honest "we can't confidently split these individually" framing — the headline probability is unaffected; it's still computed from the same weighed evidence, just displayed without the unreliable per-source split.

Why Your Number Might Look Lower Than You Expect

Credibility tier drives how much weight each piece of evidence carries: high (peer-reviewed, authoritative) > medium (established news) > low (general web) > unknown (unassessed, including most Wikipedia sources today). A claim that's actually certainly true can still land in the mid-80s rather than near 95% if the only sources found were Wikipedia — because Wikipedia sources currently weigh as "unknown" tier, several of them together can't push a claim's probability as high as even one or two solid high-tier sources could. "Unknown" means we haven't assessed this source's tier — not that it's untrustworthy. If a claim you know to be well-established lands lower than you'd expect, check the breakdown for the credibility tiers behind it; a Wikipedia-only basis is the most common reason.

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Claim Evidence Matrix

The matrix at /research/[cafeId]/claims is the claim-centric view of everything your Cafe has checked — reached via the Claims chip in the Cafe toolbar. It's free to view for every signed-in user — there's no additional research cost to look at claims you've already gathered evidence for.

What It Shows

For each claim, the matrix groups every source into three columns:

• Supporting — sources that corroborate the claim
• Contradicting — sources that dispute it
• Silent — sources in your Cafe that don't address the claim at all

Each column is further grouped by credibility tier (high / medium / low / unknown), and a line under each claim reads something like "4 sources · 2 independent roots".

Independent Roots

"Independent roots" is a dedup count: if three news articles all quote the same original wire story, that's one independent root, not three. This stops corroboration from being inflated just because a story got picked up widely — a heuristic pass runs automatically (matching by DOI or normalized URL), and it's what independent-root counts on both the matrix and Find the Truth's evidence breakdown are based on.

Refine Independence (Optional, Costs Tokens)

On a claim with several same-domain or ambiguous sources, a "Refine independence" button lets you run a one-time AI pass that judges whether each ambiguous source reports original findings or just relays another one. It shows a cost estimate and requires your consent before running — nothing runs automatically. The result is saved, so re-running the same claim later doesn't re-charge you.

Where Claims Come From

The matrix populates from two paths:

• Find the Truth runs — every claim you check with Find the Truth appears here automatically.
• Verify claim runs — every claim you verify on a source card (see Verify Claim & Cited Report) also appears here. If you have an older Cafe with verify results from before this feature existed, the matrix builds itself from that history automatically the first time you open it — no action needed.

Deep Linking

Click a claim to focus it — the URL updates with ?claim=<id>, so you can copy the link, share it, or bookmark it, and it survives a page refresh. With more than one claim in a Cafe, a claim selector lets you pick which one to view instead of scrolling through all of them.

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Tips

• Read the finding, not just the number — "What we found" often explains an important nuance (e.g. "true, but only under different conditions than usually assumed") that the headline percentage alone can't convey.
• Check the evidence breakdown before trusting a surprising result — if a confident-sounding claim scores lower than expected, look at the credibility tiers behind it. A basis of mostly "unknown"-tier sources (often Wikipedia) is the most common reason.
• Use Quick depth for a first pass — you can always re-run with more depth on a claim that matters.
• The counter-evidence callout is worth reading even on a "true" verdict — it shows you the strongest case against, so you know what you'd need to rebut if challenged.
• Use the matrix to see everything your Cafe has checked at a glance — viewing it never costs tokens, so it's worth checking any time you've been Verifying claims on source cards.
• "Refine independence" is optional — the always-on heuristic dedup is usually good enough; reach for the AI refine pass only when a claim has several ambiguous same-domain sources and the root count looks off.

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Availability

Find the Truth costs tokens because it's a relatively expensive background research run (two full research passes plus scoring). The Claim Evidence Matrix never costs tokens to view because it's a read view of evidence you (or your Cafe's Verify runs) already gathered.

See Also

• Verify Claim & Cited Report — the per-source claim check that also feeds the matrix
• Research Mode (Cafes) — the full Cafe feature set Find the Truth runs inside