Conviction

Every chunk in the graph carries one number, its conviction, an estimate of how load-bearing that piece of thinking is to the rest of what you think. Conviction scores significance, not truth. A question you have no answer to yet can carry high conviction if the rest of your thinking leans on it, because the Oracle is measuring how much weight an idea holds, not whether it is right.

Five weighted components

The Oracle reads each passage along five components and weighs them in a fixed order of trust.

Semantic density carries the most, because significance is the scarce signal here. A short passage that holds a real idea outranks a long one that says little. Recency and temporal depth sit equal beneath it, balanced on purpose, so the Oracle values what is alive in your thinking now alongside what has matured over months of returning to it. Domain novelty rewards the passages where you open new ground rather than restate settled ideas. The Cultivator signal, what your attention and edits say about a passage, counts least and is bounded, so it can nudge the Oracle's judgment but never overrule it. Those are the shipping defaults. The values are tuned per vault over time, so the exact numbers in the diagram are a starting point.

What it changes

Conviction decides what reaches you without your asking. The morning brief opens with the highest-conviction movement in your graph since the last one. Library ranks what you see by significance rather than by the date you last touched it, so the ideas doing the most work surface first. When you form a team, conviction is weighed before anything crosses to it, so what carries the most weight in your thinking is what the Oracle considers sharing.

A passage never loses its place by losing conviction. When its weight falls, it stays in the Library and settles into the background, ready to rise again if something later raises it. Nothing is deleted to make room.

Conviction is about your thinking, how significant a passage is to the whole. Confidence is about the Oracle, its own disposition to act on what it has read, and like conviction it is never a claim about truth.