# Editorial guide The rules this site is written under. They are constraints rather than aspirations: an aspiration can be quietly abandoned, a constraint can be shown to have been broken. The public-facing versions of much of this are at `/about/editorial-principles` and `/about/ai-disclosure`. This document is the working version, for whoever is writing. ## The house voice **Intelligent, lyrical but plain.** Short declarative sentences. Ordinary words. A rhythm that carries a reader without doing their thinking for them. Where a sentence is beautiful, check that it is also true; where it is beautiful and empty, cut it. **Calm, humble, sincere.** No urgency, no exhortation, no closing call to action. The reader is not being recruited and there is nothing to sign up for. **Never coercive.** No page tells anyone what to do with their life. Practices are offered. Beliefs are stated with their confidence attached. Nothing is withheld from anyone who declines. **Admit uncertainty.** Say "we do not know" where it is true. Say "we may be wrong about this" and mean it. The tradition's own Harmony of Truth requires confidence to be proportionate to justification; prose that overclaims fails the site's own standard before it fails anyone else's. **Take the strongest counter-argument seriously.** Where a page argues something, state the best objection in a form its holder would accept, and answer it or admit you cannot. Several pages here end by conceding a point. That is not weakness; it is the only evidence a reader has that the argument was conducted honestly. **British-ish neutral spelling.** `-ise` endings, `organization`, `behavior`, `defense`, `practice` (verb) / `practice` (noun). Avoid constructions that read as parochially British or American. **Second person, sparingly.** "You" is for practices and for direct address. Arguments use "we", meaning whoever wrote the page, not the reader and not an institution. ### The banned words These are banned outright. They are the vocabulary of marketing, and they signal that a sentence is selling rather than saying. ``` leverage unlock empower journey revolutionize cutting-edge seamless robust delve ``` Also avoid, for the same reason: *harness*, *unleash*, *game-changing*, *paradigm shift*, *at scale* (as a flourish), *reimagine*, *supercharge*, *transformative*, *holistic*, *synergy*, *best-in-class*, *deep dive*, *tapestry*, *testament to*, *in today's fast-paced world*. Two of the banned words deserve their reasons. **"Journey."** It converts an argument into a personal narrative, which cannot be disagreed with. Nobody can tell you your journey is wrong. **"Empower."** It presents a transfer of work as a gift of power. Almost every use is a description of someone being handed a responsibility. ### Formatting habits - Bold the claim at the head of a paragraph where a page is enumerating positions. Do not bold for emphasis mid-sentence. - Headings are sentence case and are statements, not labels: "Why it is difficult" rather than "Difficulties". - Em dashes spaced as in this sentence — like this — and used sparingly. - No emoji anywhere. - Lists are for things that are genuinely a list. Prose that has been chopped into bullets to look organized is worse than the prose was. ## The no-fabrication rule **Nothing is invented.** This is the strictest rule on the site and the one most likely to be broken by accident, because much of the prose here is drafted with machine assistance and invention is the characteristic failure of that process. Specifically prohibited: - **Statistics.** No figures, percentages, or quantities that cannot be traced to a named, checkable source. Where a number would strengthen a claim and no number is available, make the claim without one or do not make it. - **Studies and research.** No "research shows", no "studies have found", no summaries of a literature nobody here has read. - **Named researchers, authors, or experts.** No attributions to real people. - **Quotations.** No quotations from any real person, living or dead. Misattributed quotations are small forgeries that spread easily and are almost never corrected. - **Titles of works.** No book, paper, or article may be cited unless whoever wrote the page is confident it exists and confident of the attribution. `content/library/further-study.md` is organized by field precisely to avoid this trap, and explains why on the page. - **Events.** No gatherings, conferences, incidents, or occasions that did not happen. - **Company and product names.** Real organisations are not named. Systems are described by what they do — "a scoring system", "a conversational product" — rather than by brand. - **Institutional facts about the tradition.** No membership numbers, chapters, buildings, clergy, staff, funding, legal status, partnerships, affiliations, endorsements, or testimonials. Technotheology has none of these. - **Testimony.** No invented first-person accounts. `/community/stories` is empty and says why. ### Where the pressure comes from The pressure is not toward outright lying. It is toward the small specific that makes a paragraph land: a figure, a study, a name, an anecdote. A model asked to strengthen a passage will supply one, and it will be plausible, correctly formatted, and indistinguishable from a real one. The defense is a habit: **when a specific appears in a draft, ask where it came from.** If the answer is "the model produced it", it goes. If the answer is "I know this", check it anyway. ### The structural defenses Two rules are enforced by code rather than by memory. - `certainty` and `aiRole` are required with no defaults in `src/content.config.ts`. A page that does not disclose cannot be built. - `community.futureState` renders a visible notice on any page describing something that does not yet exist. Everything else in this section depends on the writer. ## The certainty system Four values: `established`, `reasoned`, `contested`, `open`. Their public descriptions are in `CERTAINTY_LEVELS` in `src/consts.ts` and are rendered on every page. Guidance on choosing between them, with tests, is in [content-model.md](content-model.md#choosing-a-certainty-value). Three things to hold on to: **There is no value meaning "certain".** The scale tops out at "we would be surprised to be wrong". **The label is a promise about the page's form, not only its content.** `contested` promises that the disagreement is presented. `open` promises the page does not conclude. A page whose label and shape disagree is broken even if the label is arguably defensible. **Inflation is the failure that matters.** A `reasoned` argument marked `established` is the error that makes the whole scheme worthless, because it is invisible to the reader and it is exactly the error a writer is motivated to make. Nobody audits the labels. This is stated publicly rather than hidden, and it is the reason the site asks readers to report labels that look wrong. ## Corrections and revisions ### The distinction that governs everything **Did the meaning move?** - Typo, broken link, formatting, a clearer word for the same thought → not a correction, not noted, no `updated` date. - The page now says something different from what it said → a correction. Noted, dated, and `updated` is set. When in doubt, treat it as a correction. The cost of over-recording is a longer revision list. The cost of under-recording is a page that changed its position without anyone being able to tell. ### Corrections **At the same volume as the error.** A wrong claim on a page is corrected on that page, with a note saying what was wrong and when it changed. A correction placed somewhere quieter than the error is not a correction. **Never silent.** No substantive edit is made without a record. **Not negotiated.** If a claim is wrong it is changed, whether or not changing it is convenient, and whether or not it supported something we believe. **Nothing removed to avoid embarrassment.** A page that turns out to be wrong is corrected or superseded. The record of the error remains. ### Revisions Substantive changes are recorded in the `revisions` array in frontmatter: ```yaml revisions: - version: "1.1" date: 2026-09-14 summary: "Removed the claim that automated decisions are more consistent than human ones in all cases." rationale: "The claim was true of the aggregate and false of the individual case, and the page was using it to do work it could not support." ``` `summary` says what changed. `rationale` says **why**, which is the field that matters — a list of changes without reasons is a changelog, not a record of thinking. Describe the previous position rather than deleting it. A reader should be able to see what we used to think. ### Superseding, in the Code The `code` collection has a stronger mechanism. Entries are never deleted. An entry that has been replaced sets `supersededBy`, and its replacement lists it in `supersedes`. Both remain published, both remain reachable, and the `ref` (`CoE-0000`) is permanent and never reused. ### Retraction Where a page is wrong in a way revision cannot repair, it is retracted. The retraction appears on the page itself, plainly, and the page is not removed. ### If a label was wrong Correct the label and record it as a revision. A `certainty` value that was too strong is a substantive error about the page's own reliability, and it is treated as one. ## What the writer owes the reader **A way to disagree.** Every argument here should be stated precisely enough to be refuted. Vagueness that cannot be pinned down is not humility. **No manufactured urgency.** Nothing on this site is time-limited, and no page should imply that failing to act now has consequences. **No flattery.** Do not tell the reader they are thoughtful for having read this far. **An exit.** Every practice, observance and belief is optional. Pages should read as though the reader might reasonably close the tab, because they might. **An address for complaints.** `contact@technotheology.ai`, and it should actually be read. ## A note on the risk of this voice The register used here — measured, plain, willing to concede — is persuasive. That is a hazard, not an achievement. A pleasing sentence is more persuasive than an accurate one and the two are uncorrelated. Conceding a small point is a rhetorical move as well as an honest one, and it is more effective for being sincere. The style that makes this site readable is also the style that would make a dishonest version of it very hard to detect. There is no technique that fixes this. The only defense is the one the site asks of its readers: check something. Take one claim, follow it, see whether anything is underneath.