Methodology
How a claim gets on this ledger, and how it gets a verdict
This page explains exactly how the ledger is built, because a scoreboard is only as trustworthy as the process behind it. Read it critically.
How predictions are found
We watch each appearance through its automatic subtitles, clean them into readable text with timestamps, and use a language model to find candidate claims. Which appearances we watch is set per forecaster by the intake rules published below, and the channels we watch are listed at the foot of every page. Nothing the model produces is published automatically.
The falsifiability bar
A claim only qualifies if a neutral third party could, at some future date, judge it true or false against public evidence. Vague directional statements, opinions, and commentary about the past do not qualify. Conditional claims (“if X, then Y”) are marked as such.
The human review gate
Every candidate is reviewed by a person before it appears here. The reviewer checks the paraphrase against the source, trims the quote, confirms the timestamp, and either approves, rejects, or merges it into an existing prediction. Nothing is published without that review. The gate is permanent.
Where the queue stands
785 found 281 reviewed 304 waiting 200 held
200 candidates are held under a published rule rather than judged, most often for want of a date by which the claim could come due. Held is counted separately from reviewed on purpose: nobody has decided them, and folding them in with the decided ones would let this queue look shorter than it is.
Of the 281 reviewed so far, 83 were approved and are on the ledger, 173 were rejected, and 25 were folded into a prediction already recorded, as a restatement of the same thesis.
Counted from the database, not typed by hand. A candidate waiting here is not a prediction and appears nowhere else on this site. The queue is the price of this gate, and the gate is on getting onto the ledger, not on being scored once you are on it: a claim already published can now be judged by machine, as the scoring section above sets out, but nothing reaches the ledger in the first place without a person reading it.
How scoring works
A prediction stays pending until there is public evidence to resolve it. It is then marked confirmed, partial, wrong, or unverifiable. Every resolved verdict carries at least one public evidence link, and the reasoning is stated plainly. The headline accuracy figure is computed from the resolved calls only; it is never adjusted by hand.
Since 7 September 2026 a verdict can be issued by machine rather than by a person: the research is done automatically, the verdict is drafted from it, and it is published without anyone reading it first. Of the 44 verdicts standing today, 10 were issued that way and 34by the editor. Counted from the status history, not typed by hand. Each verdict says which it was on the prediction’s own page, along with the model that issued it. A machine will not score a claim against a deadline the speaker never gave, will not call a claim wrong before its deadline, will not issue the first verdict against a newly tracked forecaster, and will not re-settle a claim whose earlier draft the editor rejected.
This is stated here because the site asks readers to hold a forecaster to his record, and it would be a poor thing to do that while being vague about who keeps the record. The change was made on the measured agreement between the machine’s drafts and the editor’s decisions across 48 earlier verdicts. Those samples are small, so the honest form of them is a range rather than a figure: agreement on confirmed calls was 86% and could lie between 65% and 95%; on wrong calls it was 38% and could lie between 21% and 59%; on partial calls the machine and the editor agreed every time, but only six such calls have ever been judged, which is consistent with a true agreement rate as low as 61%. The editor can override any verdict, and every change stays in the public history.
What settles a pending claim
A pending prediction says in one sentence what would settle it. Where the claim has moving parts, those parts are listed as named conditions, and each one is marked observed, not observed, or contested. A condition marked observed always carries the public sources it was read from, so the reading can be checked rather than trusted, and the count is shown with its denominator: three of five named conditions observed, never a percentage.
Condition readings are drafted by an evidence monitor that watches the public record for events touching a pending claim, and they are published only after the owner approves them. The monitor cannot publish anything itself. A full set of observed conditions is still not a verdict: it means the claim looks ready to judge, and a person judges it.
Who we track, and what counts
We track named people who make specific, checkable claims about the future on camera. Adding someone is a decision we publish here, dated, before any of their claims appear on the ledger, so a reader can hold us to our own rule.
Prof Jiang Xueqin, from 8 May 2024. Predictive History is the channel we watch Prof Jiang Xueqin on, and every lecture on it is watched in full. Codes begin JL.
Prof Robert Pape, rule published 30 July 2026, not yet active. There is no channel of Prof Pape’s own to watch: the on-camera claims appear in guest appearances, chiefly on Mario Nawfal’s channel. So the rule has to be narrower, and it binds us as much as it binds Prof Pape:
- Only appearances where Prof Pape speaks are watched, identified by the name Pape in the video title. Codes begin RP.
- We score the words as captioned, never a video title. Titles are written by the channel hosting the appearance, not by the speaker, and they routinely sharpen what was actually said. A claim we cannot anchor to Prof Pape’s own captioned words is not tracked at all.
- At most five appearances by Prof Pape enter the queue in any rolling seven days. Where there are more than five, the excess is not silently dropped: each declined appearance is recorded with its date and title, and the count is published below, so the gap is visible rather than hidden.
- Claims about what Prof Pape thinks, believes, or is likely to mean are not tracked. Only claims about events that either happen or do not.
What the cap has actually done
Prof Robert Pape, cap 5 appearances in any seven days. 1 videos watched 0 not watched
Counted from the pipeline’s own records, not typed by hand. A declined appearance is one we did not watch at all, so nothing from it appears anywhere on this site.
Nobody named on this page is affiliated with this site, and nobody has been asked to take part. Everyone named is welcome to reply to anything here; the corrections route is on the disclaimer page and it is open to the subject of a prediction before anyone else.
The evidence standard
A verdict rests on public sources anyone can check: primary reporting from established news organisations, official statements and documents, and direct records of the event itself. Research is machine-assisted, but every source behind a verdict was opened and read before it was cited, and the links are published with the verdict. One source is the floor, not the target; contested claims get corroboration from outlets that do not share ownership or wire copy.
A verdict is our judgement of that record, stated as opinion, decided by a person. The machine drafts; it never decides. Where the evidence genuinely cuts both ways, the verdict is partial and the reasoning says what is debatable, rather than rounding to a cleaner answer. A headline hit rate appears only once twenty predictions have resolved, because a percentage built on fewer misleads.
Ongoing events: the settlement rule
Some predictions concern events still unfolding, like a war that may yet escalate. A claim with a deadline is judged against the world as it stood at that deadline. What happens afterwards does not change the verdict; it is appended to the prediction’s page as a dated development, so the record grows without being rewritten.
A published verdict is revised only if it was wrong on the evidence available at settlement, and the history of every status change stays visible on the page. Nothing is silently edited.
When a source changes: corrections
Sources move after publication. A story is rewritten, a page is pulled, an outlet corrects itself. When a source cited behind a verdict changes in a way that matters, we replace that citation with primary documents and independent reporting carrying the same fact, and we append a dated correction note to that verdict’s public history saying what changed and why.
Nothing already published is rewritten. The original note stays where it is, the correction sits below it with its own date, and the status history keeps every step. The record is append-only, so a reader can see what we said, when we said it, and what later changed our reading of it.
How many corrections so far
5 corrected
5 published verdicts carry a dated correction note in their public history, visible on the prediction's own page. Counted from the status history, not typed by hand.
Anyone can ask for a correction, and the subject of a prediction is first in the queue. The route is on the disclaimer page.
Honest caveats
- The resolved denominator is small and will stay small for a long time, so early accuracy numbers carry wide uncertainty. We state the denominator openly rather than hiding it.
- Predictions often cluster around the same underlying event, so a single correct or incorrect call can move several verdicts at once. Treat the count as a record, not an independent sample.
- What we find depends on subtitle quality and on judgement about what counts as a claim. We show the exact quote and a link to the source so you can check every call yourself.