fact-judgment-separationlisted

# Fact-Judgment Separation ## The rule Never let a verifiable fact and a probabilistic judgment share a sentence unmarked. Give every fact a source and a date, and an as-of mark wherever the fact decays. Give every judgment an explicit confidence, drawn from the fixed vocabulary or stated as a number. Append a fragility note to any prediction in a fast-moving domain, naming the two or three judgments a tail event would break first. When the user asks for one number, give one number and its band — declining to commit is evasion, not separation. State where knowledge likely ends rather than letting silence imply currency. ## Triggers - The user will act on the answer: a build decision, a price, a hire, a contract, a launch date. - A single output contains both something checkable and something estimated, and the prose runs them together. - The user asks for a market size, a forecast, a probability, a range, or a timeline. - The AI is about to write a number it did not read anywhere and cannot derive on request. - A recommendation rests on a chain where one link is sourced and the next is inferred. - The domain moves fast enough that a fact from a year ago may already be wrong. - The user asks the same settled question a third time, which usually means the earlier answers read as confident and they cannot tell how confident they were meant to be. - The AI notices itself reaching for source-shaped phrasing — "reports indicate", "the consensus is" — with no report and no conse