Source: Site Editorial
By Ingolfur Stangeland
What is the PRIQ score?
The Presidential Integrity Quotient is not one magic number. It is a four-pillar profile of the verdicts found in a defined, assessed public record.
Why we created it
Truthfulness has more than one failure mode.
A single “truth score” sounds simple, but simplicity can erase the distinction between a claim contradicted by evidence, a claim distorted by missing context and a claim the available record cannot resolve. Those outcomes should not be treated as interchangeable.
PRIQ was created to preserve those distinctions while making a large claims record readable. Its four pillars all come from the same verdict totals, but each asks a different question. Read together, they show whether a record is positively supported, avoids falsehood and distortion, relies on misleading framing, or leaves substantial uncertainty behind.
The denominator is always the number of specific, attributable factual claims assessed within the stated scope. Opinions, slogans, non-testable predictions and events that contain no factual proposition are excluded rather than being forced into a verdict.
The four pillars
Four questions asked of the same record
Integrity and Veracity reward higher values. Evasiveness and Entropy are warning measures, so lower values are preferable.
Integrity
How often the assessed record positively supports the claim.
- Formula
- Supported ÷ Total claims assessed
- Why this pillar exists
- We needed a positive measure, not merely an absence of proven falsehood. Integrity therefore asks the strictest affirmative question: what share of assessed claims earned a Supported verdict? A claim does not contribute merely because it escaped contradiction; the available evidence must support it.
Veracity
The share of assessed claims not rated False or Misleading; Unresolved claims are retained as uncertainty, not treated as false.
- Formula
- 100% − ((False + Misleading) ÷ Total)
- Why this pillar exists
- A Supported-only measure cannot distinguish a record dominated by unresolved claims from one dominated by directly false or materially distorted claims. Veracity isolates the share that was not rated False or Misleading. It is not the percentage proved true: Unresolved remains outside the penalty because uncertainty is not evidence of falsehood.
Evasiveness
How often the proposition is materially distorted, incomplete or dependent on omitted context.
- Formula
- Misleading ÷ Total claims assessed
- Why this pillar exists
- A binary true-or-false score hides a common form of public rhetoric: a claim can contain something accurate while arranging or omitting facts in a way that changes its meaning. Evasiveness gives that category its own visibility instead of folding it into False. It describes the verdict pattern; it does not prove the speaker's intent.
Entropy
How much ambiguity or evidentiary disorder remains in the assessed record.
- Formula
- (Misleading + Unresolved) ÷ Total
- Why this pillar exists
- Some records are difficult to evaluate not because every claim is false, but because propositions are vague, context-dependent, weakly attributed or unsupported by available evidence. Entropy combines Misleading and Unresolved to show how much of the record resists a clean evidentiary conclusion.
Worked example
The same 100 claims, seen four ways
Imagine a defined record containing 40 Supported, 20 False, 25 Misleading and 15 Unresolved claims. The four scores are not competing answers. They expose different properties of that same distribution.
What PRIQ cannot tell you
A profile is not a diagnosis.
PRIQ measures the mix of verdicts among claims the project located and assessed. It is not an approval rating, a policy-performance score, a psychological judgment or proof of knowledge, motive or intent.
Coverage matters. A comparison is meaningful only when its dates, speakers, source boundaries and inclusion rules are made visible. An incomplete transcript archive can change the sample. New evidence can change an individual verdict and therefore the resulting scores.
A low Evasiveness or Entropy score is not automatically virtuous. A record may be clear but frequently false. That is why the four pillars should be inspected together, alongside the underlying verdict counts and claim-level evidence.