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Topic: People

Definition: People covers human nature, personal character, and how much of a person's life is shaped by their own choices as opposed to the circumstances they were born into.

Topic Metrics
Importance: not scored yet | Evidence Depth: 0 findings cited | Controversy: 0% of beliefs argued both ways

2 beliefs and 12 pages beneath them. Every number on this page is read from one of those pages; nothing here is typed.

What this page does. It gives every belief about this topic one fixed address, so the thousand ways of saying the same thing collapse into a single entry and the real reasons to agree or disagree can be counted and weighed by evidence instead of by how often they get repeated. The address has three parts, one per table below: Direction (which way it runs), Claim Strength (how absolute), and Specificity (where it sits on the general-to-specific tree). Same address means the same claim, so it merges; nearly the same address gets the redundancy discount.

📊 Continuum 1: Direction (Oppose ↔ Support)

Which way the belief runs, from total opposition (-100%) to total support (+100%). The Belief Score column is a separate thing: how well the belief holds up once its arguments are scored, not which way it points. A claim can sit at +100% and still score badly.

Positive means: holds that individuals are mainly responsible for how their lives turn out, negative holds that circumstances and upbringing mainly decide.

Position	Core Belief / Claim	Top Underlying Argument	Belief Score
-100% (Strongly Oppose)	Nothing here yet.
-50% (Skeptical)	Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood.	Habits and instincts laid down in childhood are the hardest to unlearn because they were formed before anyone could question them.	+0.00
0% (Neutral/Nuanced)	Nothing here yet.
+50% (Supportive)	A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out.	Siblings raised in the same home by the same parents often end up in very different places because they made different decisions about school, work, money, and friends, which shows that choices do much of the deciding.	+0.00
+100% (Strongly Support)	Nothing here yet.

💪 Continuum 2: Claim Strength, How Absolute the Claim Is (Modest ↔ Total)

How absolute the claim is, from a hedged "sometimes" to a flat "always," independent of which way it runs and of whether it is true. Two beliefs match on this axis when they are equally bold.

Claim Strength	Pro Belief at This Strength	Anti Belief at This Strength	Scope & Telltale Words
Modest (20%) Hedged	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Narrow. "Some," "tends to," "in certain cases."
Moderate (50%) Standard	A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out.	Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood.	Definite but bounded. "Clearly," "generally." Where most serious arguments live.
Strong (80%) Broad	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Near-universal. "Across the board," "fundamentally."
Total (100%) Maximal	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Total, zero limits. "Always," "never." One counterexample sinks it.

Key insight: The strongest arguments on either side usually live at Moderate (50%), not Total (100%). Attacking only the Total versions is a straw man. Engage the best version of the opposing argument, not the loudest.

🌳 Continuum 3: General to Specific, with Branching Subcategories (General ↔ Specific)

The same topic holds claims at every altitude, from a sweeping worldview down to one line-item policy. A general belief branches into subcategories, and each subcategory holds the specific beliefs beneath it. A belief only merges with another that shares its branch and its rung, so a worldview never gets double-counted with the policy it implies.

Rung / Branch	Pro-Topic Belief	Anti-Topic Belief
Most General (Worldview)	A person's choices matter more than their circumstances in how their life turns out. 0.50	Most people's character is set by their upbringing and changes little in adulthood. 0.50

📜 Assumption Stack Behind Each Position

Not a fourth axis. Continuum 3 sorts beliefs by altitude; this takes each stance and lists the assumptions a person must accept to hold it, which is how a fight at the bottom gets traced to its real root higher up.

To Hold Position	You Must Accept These Assumptions (General to Specific)
-100% to -50% (Strongly Oppose)	Nothing here yet.
-20% to +20% (Nuanced/Mixed)	Nothing here yet.
+50% to +100% (Strongly Support)	Nothing here yet.

⚖ Core Values Conflict

Advertised values each side claims, and the motivation critics attribute.

Values Supporting This Topic	Values Opposing This Topic
Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.

⚡ The Engagement Landscape (Passive ↔ Active)

A map of who will act, not a matching axis. It measures how far a person will go to act on a belief, which is a fact about the person, not the belief, so it never feeds the three-part address above. A casual supporter and someone willing to go to prison hold the same belief.

Engagement Level	Pro-Topic: What It Looks Like	Anti-Topic: What It Looks Like
1. Preference Passive lean	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
2. Active Advocacy Engaged participant	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
3. Principled Non-Compliance Conscientious objector	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
4. Civil Disobedience Principled lawbreaking	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.

Key insight: Engagement is independent of the three matching axes. Someone can hold a moderate claim (50%) about a cause they feel lukewarm toward (+40%) and still go to prison for it (Level 4).

🤝 Common Ground and Compromise

The scored cost-benefit trees read sideways. Compromise Candidates are the winnable disagreements, the ones a small likelihood shift can flip, as opposed to the symbolic value conflicts no negotiation resolves.

Shared Interests Impacts both sides want	Real Value Conflicts One side prices freedom, the other safety	Compromise Candidates A small likelihood shift flips a category's net
Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.

⚖ The Evidence Ledger

A highlight reel of the highest-impact evidence appearing anywhere under this topic, each side sorted by score, highest first. Evidence formally attaches to specific beliefs and is scored on its own page; this is the cross-topic view.

Supporting Evidence (Pro)	Quality	Weakening Evidence (Con)	Quality
Nothing here yet.

📏 Best Objective Criteria for This Topic

Agree on the yardstick before measuring. Each proposed criterion is a belief with its own page, scored on four dimensions: Validity (does it capture what we claim?), Reliability (do different observers get the same reading?), Linkage (how directly it connects to the claim), and Importance. Arguments that connect to high-scoring criteria carry more weight.

Proposed Criterion	Criteria Score	Validity	Reliability	Linkage	Importance
Nothing here yet.
Missing a criterion? Propose one in the repository with reasons for its validity, reliability, linkage, and importance.

📚 Best Media and Resources

Every work cited on a belief page in this topic, sorted by how much it moved those pages. Quality and impact are argued on the work's own page.

Title	Medium	Bias/Tone	Positivity	Claim Strength	Quality	Key Insight
Nothing here yet.

The Children column is where full subcategories from Continuum 3 go once they outgrow a row and earn their own page.

Broader (Parents)	Sub-Issues (Children)	Related (Siblings)	Opposing / Critical Views
Society & Culture	Nothing here yet.	Environment Religion Family Crime and Justice Core Principles	Nothing here yet.

📬 Contribute

If you would rather use git, every cell here is a row in the repository: a belief is a page row with the topic people, and a cell on this page is an edges row with page people and one of the topic sections.

Built from revision 42c8344, committed 2026-10-04. 2173 pages. Every number above is computed from the two tables in that revision, so a reader who fetches it gets these numbers and not different ones.