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The Looking Glass

Glyphosate — not just the answer, but how good the answer is.

The five dimensions in the ALETHEIA coordinate system are not five risk scores. They are five evidence-evaluation lenses. Magnitude asks how severe the hazard is. The other four ask how much you should trust that answer. Consensus is a meta-property of each cell, not a sixth lens — surfaced here as the border style and the small inset bar. When IARC and EPA disagree, the cell says so honestly instead of synthesising a false majority.

PROTOTYPE · hard-coded data · not wired to the live API
How to read the Looking Glass
Border thickness
1 5 10
Independent sources backing the cell. Scales 1 → 10 named sources.
Border style
Solid consensus reached · Dashed sources disagree · Thin single source (no test).
Inset bar
Consensus strength, 0 → 1. Empty when single-source.
Corner chip
N
Citation count on Material + Product rings. Compound counts are in the value table.
Methodology pattern
EBM tier on Methodology wedge: dots animal · lines cohort · cross-hatch RCT · weave meta-analysis.
Glyphosate CAS 1071-83-6

What this view is doing

Five lenses, not five scores

Magnitude — severity. IARC Group 2A maps to 0.75; EPA “not likely” maps to 0.15. Higher = more concerning.

Confidence — how well-supported the assessment is. Higher = better backed.

Recency — how current the data is. Five-year half-life: a 2021 study contributes ~50% of the weight of a 2026 equivalent; a 2016 study, ~25%.

Methodology — study-design quality. EBM hierarchy: animal → cohort → RCT → meta-analysis. The pattern texture inside Methodology cells shows the dominant tier.

Specificity — how applicable the source data is to the chosen context. A study on mammals applied to a dog-context query is weighted lower than a breed-specific study.

Why glyphosate, and what to look for

Glyphosate is the most famous regulatory disagreement in modern chemistry. IARC classifies it Group 2A (probably carcinogenic); EPA IRIS and EFSA say “not likely.” Every Magnitude cell renders with a dashed red border — consensus failed, and ALETHEIA refuses to manufacture one. That is the receipts-not-conclusions claim, made visible.

Then watch the Specificity wedge from inner ring outward. Most safety research targets pure compound, not retail formulations — so Specificity drops as you move from Compound (inner) to Product (outer). That drop is the methodology surfacing its own limitation, not failing.

Pick the Aquatic life context for the killer demo: Magnitude climbs through the rings while the evidence lenses stay bright. POEA and similar surfactants amplify membrane disruption beyond what glyphosate alone would do, and the data on that amplification is well-supported.

Methodology, made visible. The entire visualisation — every encoding decision, the colour ramps, the consensus thresholds, the per-cell narration — is rendered in plain readable JavaScript. View the source: /js/looking-glass.js. The OG image you may have arrived from is also static SVG, generated by scripts/generate-og-looking-glass.js. Nothing is hiding.