‹ Culture 3.14 · What we ask ourselves
Question · Information
How do you represent a contradiction without hiding it inside an answer?
When two reliable sources say different things, summarising them into a single sentence destroys the most valuable information in the set.
Why it matters
An answer written in prose tends to average things out. If one document says the deadline is thirty days and another says forty-five, the most fluent output is the one that picks one of the two without saying so.
That choice is made by the model for reasons of drafting, not of judgement. And the reader loses the one signal that indicated there was something to review.
What we know so far
Showing the two claims side by side, with their source and their date, turns out to be more useful than any synthesis. Many apparent contradictions are in fact differences of version, of scope or of definition, and separating those resolves a good share of the cases.
In our demonstrators the contradiction is marked in the interface, not in the generated text.
What remains open
We have no good way of grading the conflict: a difference of nuance and a real incompatibility are presented in the same way today.
Nor do we know how many contradictions an interface can show before the reader stops looking at them.