Someone has to be answerable for the record
I started Sleyor because I wanted to read something that took hard subjects seriously and still left me with somewhere to put my hands. Nearly everything available does one or the other. Serious and hopeless, or cheerful and thin.
I am conservative. I am saying that here, at the top, in plain words, because the alternative is pretending to a neutrality nobody actually has and letting readers work out my priors from the shape of the coverage. Disclosure is more honest than performance. What I owe you is not the absence of a view — it is a method you can check, a critique that arrives with a working alternative, and a record I keep up when it embarrasses me.
That last part is what The Count is for. A forecast is the rare opinion the world grades for you. We publish the probability before the event and the score afterwards, permanently, including the misses. If the score goes bad, it stays up.
- Corrections run in place
A correction is appended to the piece it corrects, dated, describing what was wrong — never a quiet edit and never a separate page nobody reads.
- Method before result
Any number published by The Count ships with the method that produced it. Hand overrides are logged as overrides.
- No undisclosed interests
If a piece touches a business, client or investment I have a stake in, the stake is named in the piece.
- Every critique carries an alternative
Naming a failure is half the job. A piece is finished when it can say who has already solved a version of the problem.
The editorial rules every piece is written against live separately, in the Standard. There are 7 of them and they are short on purpose.