Your confidence threshold
What it is
A number you set per case, before you finish reasoning: the confidence at which you will act even though the chain will never be complete.
"I will act on 85% certainty even if 15% is sealed."
Why it is stated in advance
Because the alternative is what everybody actually does: look at the evidence, reach a conclusion, and then decide — unconsciously — that the standard of proof was whatever the evidence happened to meet.
That is rationalisation, and being right does not protect you from it. Writing the threshold down first turns it into a position you can be held to, including by yourself in a year.
Why it is yours and not ours
The movement does not set a universal threshold, and it would be wrong to.
The right threshold depends on what the decision costs if you are wrong — and that varies enormously. Deciding how to vote is not the same act as publicly accusing a named person, and the same chain can be sufficient for one and nowhere near sufficient for the other.
So: your threshold, per case, stated, and visible to anyone reading your chain.
What it is not
Not permission to conclude anything. The chain still has to reach the threshold. A threshold of 0.3 does not make a weak chain strong; it makes your standard visible, and readers will judge it — which is correct.
Not a probability in the strict sense. It is a stated bar against a computed reading of your own chain. The value is in it being explicit and comparable across your own cases, not in it being a calibrated frequency.
Not a way around sourcing. The movement's publishing rules are unchanged by anybody's personal threshold: no claim about a living person without a source, ever, whatever you have concluded privately.
The honest framing
This pillar does not manufacture certainty and does not pretend to. It makes the shape of the uncertainty explicit — what is known, what is missing, why it is missing, and what standard is being applied — so that a decision taken under it can be examined rather than merely asserted.
That is a smaller claim than proof. It is also the only one available when the missing links are held by the people the conclusion is about.