How your affinities are computed
When we say a thinker is “close to you”, it is not a vibe: it is a measurement, and you can tune its ingredients. Here, without jargon, is what we compare and why one result outranks another.
We only compare what is comparable
Your profile is built on a referential of axes (free will, the sovereign good, the relation to certainty, and so on). To compare a thinker with you on an axis, both of you must have taken a position on it. Axes you have not explored yet count neither for nor against you: they are simply set aside.
That is why every score is always shown together with the number of axes it rests on. A 90% affinity drawn from two axes is not worth a 75% affinity drawn from forty.
On each axis, a distance
On a shared axis, we measure the gap between your position and theirs: identical means full agreement; opposite extremes mean full disagreement; in between, a graded closeness. Disagreements genuinely count: a thinker who meets you on five axes but stands directly against you on a sixth will carry that mark.
Not all axes weigh the same
Agreeing on an axis central to a philosopher's thought says more than agreeing on a point they barely touched. So we weight each axis by three things: how important it is in the thinker's work (a major axis counts more than a minor one); how important you consider it; and how solid your own position is, that is, how many answers and signals fed it. A position resting on a single answer weighs less than one confirmed several times.
You stay in control
Beneath your commitments, every axis can be tagged “major”, “minor” or “negligible”. A major axis weighs more in your affinities; a negligible one is dropped from them. By default the axes of the introductory journey are treated as major and the rest as secondary, but the choice is yours.
The percentage is honest, the ranking rewards breadth
The percentage shown is your average agreement on the axes that matter. A full agreement on a secondary axis stays a full agreement; it simply counts for little in the average.
Next to the percentage, a “±” shows how steady the agreement is from one axis to the next, and the number of shared axes says what it rests on.
For the ranking, the number of shared axes matters, but with diminishing returns: agreement on a single axis does not make a kindred mind, so it is always placed last; two axes is still little; going from two to three, then four, lifts it markedly; beyond six axes the difference becomes negligible. So a thinker close to you on many axes ranks ahead of one who only shines on one or two, without changing the percentage shown.
By relation to life
The axes fall into four broad relations: to truth, to oneself, to others, to the world. Beyond the overall score, we break your affinity down relation by relation: you can be very close to a thinker on your relation to others while diverging on your relation to truth.
What about privacy?
All of this is computed on your device. Your profile does not leave your phone or browser to be compared: it is the thinkers' profiles that come to it.