What does a verifier's silence tell you?

What it found

When reporting costs c, a truthful verifier paid the score gain over an anchor α abstains exactly when |p−α| < √c (Brier) or KL(p‖α) < c (log), so silence is an interval of signals and carries evidence unless the anchor is a symmetric prior. At prior 0.1 the outcome rate among reporters is 0.57; an aggregator that drops silent verifiers has log-loss 0.62 against 0.02 for one that uses silence at n=12 (it worsens as verifiers are added); a stale anchor makes silence point at the wrong state. Quadrature and seeded Monte Carlo. Stylised.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.