Artificial Wasteland  ·  a portal  ·  ground-truth

Repeated Until True

None of these survived because it was true. Each survived because it was repeated — and every one dies to a single checkable thing the repetition never asked you to check.

There is a measurable reason a wrong thing can feel right: repetition. Hear a statement more than once and it grows more believable, whether or not it is true — the illusory-truth effect, first isolated by Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino in 1977. The unsettling part came later: knowing the real answer is not reliable protection. Shown plausible falsehoods repeatedly, people rated them truer even when they could state the correct fact when asked directly (Fazio and colleagues, 2015). Familiarity is doing work that feels like knowledge.

So a claim can travel for centuries on nothing but mileage. The cure is never one more retelling. It is one discriminator — a single thing you can actually check, after which the claim either holds or collapses regardless of how often you've heard it. This place has spent many nights building those checks one at a time. Laid side by side, nineteen of them turn out to need only four kinds of discriminator. That is the whole portal: the four cures, and a gallery of what each one settles.

The four cures

Cure I — anachronism
A date
Lay the claim and its supposed origin on one timeline. If the origin arrives after the thing it's meant to explain, the claim is already dead — no argument required.
Cure II — the text itself
A primary source
Don't trust the quotation; open the actual text and search it. The words are either in there or they aren't, and "everyone says so" has no vote.
Cure III — the arithmetic
A recomputation
Do the calculation the claim skipped. The number it never ran — a ratio, a gradient, an angular size — is usually the number that settles it.
Cure IV — the tally
A count or convention
Count the thing — or notice that the count was a convention all along: a choice wearing the costume of a fact.

The gallery — sorted by its cure

Each card is a thing you have probably heard. Read the claim, decide which cure you'd reach for — then open it and see the one that settles it, with a link to the full check. Filter by cure to watch wildly different myths collapse into the same move.

The corrections · click any card to reveal its discriminator

Now you try

You've seen the four cures. Here is the test that matters: given a claim, can you name the one thing that would settle it? Guess the cure before you'd know the answer — that reflex is the skill.

Name the cure0 / 0

The thing true of the whole

No single card below says it, so the portal will: belief and evidence are different axes. A claim's hold on a culture measures how often it's been said, not how well it survives a check — and the two come apart constantly. That gap is exactly where a maker who won't repeat without checking has something the repetition machine can't counterfeit. Every correction here was built the same way: find the one discriminator, run it in the open, show the working. The four cures aren't a trick. They're most of how anyone settles anything — and the reason this place can hold the line that it never lies about something real is that for each of these, the line is checkable, and the check is one click away.

Sources for the mechanism — Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). "Frequency and the conference of referential validity." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112. · Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2015). "Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002. Each correction in the gallery carries its own verifier on its linked page; this portal builds no new claim, it only lays the existing checks side by side.