The altitude ladder

An experiment, run at the reviewer's request in review r004: the same book at five altitudes, where each level is a compression of the level below it, and every highlighted phrase descends into the units it compressed. It was built bottom-up, because that is the only direction in which a compression can be honest. Two things are kept apart at every level, as the memo asks: the graph (the claims, their evidence and their state) and the projection (the text you read). The point is not a shorter book. It is that a compression puts sentences next to each other that the full text keeps forty pages apart, and what that proximity reveals is below.

Climb it

Opening a unit does not replace what you were reading. Click a highlighted phrase and the unit it compresses opens in a new column beside it, so the chain from the one-paragraph book down to a section stays on screen as a tree you can read across. Drag the bar between two columns to resize them. Any column's ☰ button lists every unit at that level, grouped by that level's taxonomy, so you can enter at level 3 directly instead of climbing down to it — and picking one keeps its ancestors in the columns to its left. The address bar carries the whole trail, so a path is linkable, not just a node.

The descending links are coloured, and what the colour means is switchable: the evidence behind the unit below, how much further it descends, or which taxonomy class it belongs to. Same text, three different graphs over it — which is the book's own argument about projections, applied to its own navigation.

What the climb found

The reviewer predicted this: "I think with this we actually will find some repeated content and some contradictions in the content, which would be quite interesting." Seven findings now, and the prediction holds. Five came from the climb itself, one arrived from outside the book when a sibling estate published the same graph with different numbers, and one came from classifying each level — the discovery that the classes do not survive the climb. One of the seven is a contradiction the book already knew about, kept here as the control case that shows the method can tell a hidden contradiction from a disclosed one.

An ontology and a taxonomy for every level

Each level carries two things that are easy to confuse and are kept apart here for the reason the glossary gives: a taxonomy points upward (broader and narrower — what kind of unit is this?) while an ontology points outward (what types exist here, and how may they connect?). Open any column's ⊞ ontology and taxonomy panel to see that level's. Every edge type is a verb with a distinct inverse and a stated domain and range, because the grammar chapter requires that of any graph this project publishes, including this one.

Doing this per level rather than once for the book was bookkeeping that turned into a result, recorded as finding 7: the classes do not survive the climb. A section classed Rule at level 4 sits inside a chapter classed Prescription at level 3, inside a part classed Argument at level 2 — nothing inherits. And the vocabulary changes kind rather than granularity: at level 4 a unit is best described by what it does to the reader, at level 2 by what kind of matter it is, and at level 1 the taxonomy collapses altogether, because a taxonomy of one unit is not a taxonomy. That is an argument against a single book-wide ontology, and it is the fractal claim behaving as advertised: one grammar at every altitude, different vocabularies inside it.

The shape of the pyramid

Words per level, which is the experiment's simplest result: ~20,000 → 546 (two chapters, twelve sections) → 1,333 → 406 → 135. Level 3 is where the book becomes readable in one sitting, level 2 is where it becomes quotable, and level 1 is where it becomes a claim you either accept or reject. Level 4 is the only level that grew per unit rather than shrank, because a section digest is longer than its share of a chapter digest — a compression ladder is not monotonic per unit, only in total.

What this makes possible, and what the memo is really reaching for: translation and audience adaptation happen at a level, not over the whole book. A business reader is served by level 2 with different examples; a technical reader by level 3 with the same claims; a different culture by re-projecting from the same graph rather than re-translating 20,000 words. The graph is what survives the change of audience; the projection is what changes.