The evidence gate

A claim supported by a single answer is dropped before it reaches anything you read. It is not softened into a hedge and it is not printed with a caveat. A hedged claim is still a claim, and the reader remembers it without the hedge.

The reason is not caution. Two people who know you in different settings, arriving at the same observation without talking to each other, have told you something a single person cannot. One person describing your behaviour has described one relationship, and the person on the other side of it is them.

Not opinions. Episodes. An answer that says a friend is thoughtful contributes nothing; an answer describing what they did the week somebody was in hospital is an episode, and episodes are what the reading is built from.

There is a floor on the whole set. Fewer than five people finishing, or fewer than two real episodes across all of them, and the gate does not open. Those numbers are low on purpose. They are a floor rather than a target, and clearing them is not an achievement worth advertising.

If nobody said anything about a part of the picture, that part stays empty. We do not complete it from the pattern, and we do not complete it from your own answers in a different grammar.

This is the most tempting rule to break, because an empty section looks like a product defect and a filled one looks like insight. The filled one would be a sentence about a typical person wearing your name, which is the Barnum move this whole category runs on.

The gate requires at least one finding that does not affirm you. A tradeoff, a silence, something being read differently from how you intended it, or a real gap between your account and theirs.

Meeting every evidence rule and saying only pleasant things is its own failure, and it is the one this category never names. Praise is agreed with rather than checked, so a Portrait that is entirely agreeable has proven nothing about whether it is accurate.

You never see a sentence one of your five wrote. Not quoted, not anonymised, not paraphrased closely enough to identify the author.

One exception exists and it is narrow: a single common word supplied independently by three or more of them can appear as that word. Three people separately reaching for the word steady is itself the finding, and one word cannot be traced back to a speaker. What your five are told sets out the promise from their side.

The check that decides whether a Portrait may be released is the same check that decides whether it may be charged for. One boolean, read twice. They cannot disagree, because there is nothing to disagree with.

When the gate does not open you get the honest partial: what did clear, free, with the missing parts named as missing. That outcome is worse for us than a paid Portrait. Building it the other way round is not something we would have been willing to describe on a page like this.