0.2 · How we will know what is true

BeginnerDuration ~10 min readTools The document you sealed in 0.1

The big idea: a number is not evidence until you know what state it is in, and there are only four states it can be in.

The analogy

Think about what is in your bin at the end of a shoot.

Some of it you shot yourself. Cards backed up twice, releases signed, you know who is in frame and you know what they agreed to. Some of it a friend sent you, and it is beautiful, and nobody can tell you where it came from or who owns it. Some of it is two takes of the same moment that do not match, and you cannot cut them together without an audience noticing. And some of it is a reenactment, which is a legitimate thing to shoot, and which becomes a lie the moment it is presented as the thing itself.

You already sort footage this way. You would not drop a clip with no paperwork into a delivery, not because you are cautious by nature, but because you know exactly who eats it if that clip turns out to belong to somebody else.

The habit is already in you. This lesson moves it onto numbers.

How it works

Four states. Everything you will be handed for the rest of this course is in one of them, and each one permits something different.

Sourced. Somebody named, using a method you can describe, published this. Jovito Salonga chaired the government commission that chased the Marcos family’s money across four countries for years, and the figure he published, built from a documentary trail, is five to ten billion dollars. That is what sourced looks like. A person, a method, and a number you are free to attack. You will also meet thirty billion. It comes from economists offering an estimate rather than a finding, and this course names it as an estimate every time it appears.

Two kinds of source sit underneath that word, and the difference matters more here than in most subjects. A primary source is the record made inside the event: a royal decree, a court ruling, a wire report filed the same day, a survey’s own published dataset. A secondary source is a scholar reading those records and arguing about what they mean. The course uses both, constantly, and never swaps one for the other. The document is how you know the thing happened. The scholar is who you are quoting when you say what it meant. Confusing the two is how a filmmaker ends up putting an argument on screen in the voice of a fact.

Disputed. More than one credible figure exists and the field has not closed the gap. During the dictatorship a platform collapsed at the Manila Film Center and workers fell into wet concrete. The government said three had died. A wire service filed a much larger number the same day. The architect gave a third figure years later. The figure that travels furthest online is larger again. Credible published figures run from 3 to 169.

Do not pick. Do not average, because averaging invents a number nobody published and quietly buries the actual finding, which is this: there is no complete list of who was on that site that night, because a security cordon kept rescuers and reporters out for hours while a statement was prepared. The absence of a count is itself a fact about the regime. A government that cannot tell you how many of its own workers it killed building a film palace is the same government that was telling filmmakers what the country was allowed to look like on screen.

That is the first thing this course will ask you to hold. A missing number is not a hole in the story. Sometimes it is the story.

Unverified. The claim is repeated everywhere and the original cannot be found. Manila is routinely called the second most destroyed Allied city of the war, and the line is routinely attributed to Eisenhower. The devastation is not in question, it is documented at book length. The attribution is. Every trail leads to another article repeating it.

You will never see the word unverified on a page in this course. That tag lives in the research files. On a page it becomes one of two ordinary English sentences: the claim is cut, or the claim is written out with the gap named, both versions given, no hedging tone. There is no third option where a shaky claim gets waved through because it feels right.

Perception rather than incidence. The number is real, it is well made, and it is measuring what people believe rather than what happened. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index is a survey of experts and businesspeople. It is careful work and it tells you something true about reputation. It does not count a single stolen peso. Anyone who says the index proves corruption rose has just cut a reenactment into a documentary without a label.

Then there is the thing you are reading these lessons for. At the bottom of every lesson in this course sits a collapsed block called the receipts. That is where the full citations live: author, title, year, page or link, one line on what the source actually argues, and one word on whether you can get to it for free. The prose stays readable and the evidence stays one click away, which means nothing in the body is ever asking you to take it on trust.

Sourced, you can put on screen with the attribution spoken. Disputed, you put on screen as a dispute, both figures, both owners. Unverified, you cut. Perception, you label in the same sentence you use it.

The pattern

Before a number goes in the cut, say out loud which of four states it is in. Sourced: named person, described method, publishable with the attribution spoken. Disputed: more than one credible figure, publishable only as a dispute, never averaged. Unverified: repeated everywhere, original missing, not publishable at all. Perception rather than incidence: real measurement of what people believe, publishable only with the label attached. The states are not about how likely a number is to be true. They are about what the number entitles you to say. When a figure resists being sorted, that resistance is usually the finding.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• This lesson is explainer-led by design. It has no video, because its job is to install a working method rather than to narrate an event. The three cases below are all real cases from this course’s own research base, and each one is taught in full later.
• The Marcos figure. Jovito R. Salonga, Presidential Plunder: The Quest for the Marcos Ill-Gotten Wealth, 2000. Salonga chaired the Presidential Commission on Good Government, and his US$5 to 10 billion range is the basis of the Guinness World Records entry for the largest-ever theft from a government. Library access. The outer estimates of up to US$30 billion come from Bernardo Villegas of the Center for Research and Communication and from Jesus Estanislao, and are estimates rather than adjudicated findings. Course rule, carried from the research file: use “US$5 to 10 billion, per Salonga and the recovery commission,” and name the higher figures as estimates. Full treatment in Lesson 1.7.
• The Manila Film Center, the disputed case, source by source. Scaffolding under a concrete-pouring platform collapsed at about 3:00 a.m. on 17 November 1981. Published figures: 3 dead and 34 injured, the government statement released after the news blackout, via Working With Crowds, “Manila Film Center incident”; 7 dead, from architect Froilan Hong as relayed by former Cultural Center of the Philippines president Baltazar N. Endriga in a signed opinion piece, https://opinion.inquirer.net/108458/account-1981-manila-film-center-deaths ; 26 dead, UPI wire report filed 17 November 1981, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/11/17/26-dead-in-Philippines-movie-theater-collapse/8733374821200/ ; 40 to 45 workers on the collapsed floor, Manila Bulletin Research, 22 November 2013, which is a count of workers present rather than of deaths; and “at least 169,” the most widely circulated figure and the least directly documented. All free.
• The blackout, which is not disputed. Rescuers and ambulances were held outside a security cordon until an official statement had been prepared, and were admitted roughly nine hours after the collapse. Some accounts describe a fifteen-hour news blackout. Sources as above. Handled in full in Lesson 3.4.
• The unverified case. The line that Manila was the second most destroyed Allied city of the Second World War, commonly attributed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, could not be traced past tertiary Philippine sources repeating each other. The scale of the destruction itself is documented in Alfonso J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in World War II, 3 February to 3 March 1945, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1994, which is also the standard source for the civilian death toll of at least 100,000. Lesson 1.5 uses Aluit and does not use the Eisenhower line.
• The perception index. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 . The Philippines scored 32 and ranked 120th of 182. Free, with a downloadable full series back to 2001. Transparency International’s own method note is explicit that the index aggregates expert and business assessments of perceived public-sector corruption. Caveat to state every time it is used: it is evidence of reputation, not a count of stolen pesos. Returns in Lesson 1.8.
• Where this discipline came from. The four states are this course’s own working vocabulary, built out of the tagging rules used in the research maps in the Library, where every disputed number carries its competing figures inline and every untraceable one is tagged rather than dropped.
• The disputed-numbers handling card. One page, the four states with the on-screen rule and a worked example for each, built from this lesson.

Disputed-numbers handling carddisputed-numbers-handling-card.pdf134 KBCourse original, formatted from this lesson's own sources

Your one move

Open the file you sealed in 0.1 and add a second page. Do not reopen the first paragraph.

Write down three things you currently believe about the Philippines that have a number in them. Any three. The share of the budget that gets stolen, how many Filipinos work abroad, how many people died under the dictatorship, how much of the population is poor. Whatever is actually sitting in your head, in the words you would use with a friend.

Then put one of four labels beside each: sourced, disputed, unverified, perception. Guess. You are not allowed to look anything up yet, and the guess is the point.

Twenty minutes. Done when three beliefs are written and three labels are attached.

Want to go further?

Spend ten more minutes trying to find where you originally got one of the three. Not whether it is true, only where it came from. A teacher, a post, a documentary, a relative. Most of the time the trail stops within two steps, and finding out how short the trail is does more for your evidence habits than any rule on this page.

The needle: this course ends by pointing at one sentence about where the corruption actually came from, and that sentence is only worth anything if every link in it survives the sorting you just practised. You have not seen the sentence yet. What you have now is the method that decides whether you should believe it when you do.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Primary source
• Secondary source
• Sourced / disputed / unverified
• Receipt
• Perception index

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. You find a claim that a regime official privately admitted a death toll far higher than the published one. It appears in four Philippine news pieces, each citing the previous one, and no original interview or document can be located. Which state is it in, and what does that permit?

   Sourced, because four separate publications ran itUnverified. It does not go on screen at all, and if the subject matters, the page says the claim circulates and the original could not be foundPerception rather than incidence, because it is somebody reporting an impressionDisputed, so both figures go on screen with their sources

2. A researcher hands you the Corruption Perceptions Index and says it proves corruption got worse. What is wrong with the sentence, and what would fix it?

   The index measures what experts and businesspeople believe about a country, so it is evidence about reputation. Fixing it means saying so in the same breath, and getting the incidence claim from prosecutions, audits or budget recordsNothing is wrong. The index is compiled by a respected organisation and its method is publicThe problem is that it is a secondary source, and only primary sources belong on screenThe problem is the year. Any index older than five years should be treated as unverified

3. Two accounts of the same night give three dead and at least a hundred and sixty-nine dead. A producer tells you to pick the middle. Why is that the wrong instruction?

   Because a range is always more dramatic on screen than a single numberBecause the middle figure would still be unverified, and unverified claims cannot be broadcastBecause the higher figure comes from academic writing, which outranks a government statementBecause averaging manufactures a number nobody published, and it hides the actual finding, which is that no complete count exists and the people who could have made one chose not to

4. What is the working difference between a primary and a secondary source, and why does the course use both?

   A primary source is the record made inside the event, a secondary source is a scholar arguing about those records. The document proves the thing happened; the scholar is who you are quoting when you say what it meantA primary source is recent and a secondary source is old, so primary sources overrule secondary onesA primary source is free and a secondary source is paywalled, so the course prefers primary sources for cost reasonsA primary source is Filipino and a secondary source is foreign, and the course balances the two

Check answers

You can move on when you can… take any number in the course and say which of four states it is in: sourced, disputed, unverified, or perception rather than incidence, and say what each state permits you to put on screen.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Next up: 0.3 · The whole board, before we walk it, where the nine eras and the four levels get laid out in front of you, so no single dark lesson can pass itself off as the destination.
• The History research map is where this discipline is visible in its raw form. Its numbers-to-flag table lists every figure in Level 1 that needs handling, with the handling rule written beside it.
• The Cinema research map carries the full Manila Film Center table, all five published figures with their sources, laid out the way a researcher would hand it to a director.
• Transparency International publishes the full Corruption Perceptions Index series as a free spreadsheet. Download it once now. Having the actual file makes the difference between quoting an index and reading one.