People are asked to make decisions that matter on the strength of statistics nobody has checked.
A number appears in a report. It gets quoted in an article, then a post, then a headline, then a conversation. Somewhere in that chain the caveats fall off, the scope widens, and a narrow finding becomes a verdict on an entire category. By the time it reaches you, the person quoting it usually cannot say where it came from.
The Hype Index scores that chain, in AI and security but also in business, money, science, health, culture and sport. Not only whether the research is sound, but how far its popular use has drifted from what it measured.
Every claim gets a verdict, a published component score, and a call with a date on it. The calls resolve in public and stay on the record whether they held or missed. A newsletter issue is dead in two days. A record gets more useful every month.
Mark Lynd is a five-time CEO, CIO, and CISO who has spent thirty years on the receiving end of confident numbers, and has learned to check them before acting. He holds the CISSP from ISC2 along with the ISSAP architecture and ISSMP management concentrations. He is a four-time author, on cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and the next generation of digital citizens. The Hype Index is the check he wishes someone had run on the claims he was handed.
It is free and there is no paid tier. No edition is sponsored, and no scored claim has ever been placed, suggested, or bought. If that changes, it will be disclosed at the top of the edition it affects, not in a footer.
The independence component asks whether the publisher sells the solution its own finding recommends. Applied here: the editor runs an advisory practice in AI and cybersecurity, and Boldly Reimagined is an advisory brand. Those are the same categories most of the claims come from.
What we do about it. No edition is sponsored and no scored claim has ever been placed, suggested, or bought. No edition sells a service, and there is no consulting call to action in any of them. Where a scored claim touches a company or category the editor has a current commercial relationship with, that relationship is stated at the top of the edition. If any of that changes, it gets disclosed in the edition it affects, not in a footer.
The editor runs an advisory practice in AI and cybersecurity and Boldly Reimagined is an advisory brand, so the publisher plainly benefits from being read as authoritative in the categories it scores. That is a real interest. It is not the 15 to 17 band, because no edition sells a service, no scored claim has been placed or bought, and the findings concern the evidence behind public claims rather than any product this publication sells. It is not the 5 to 9 band either, because there is no independent co-author and no external review. Thirteen is the honest read, and it is a worse Independence score than we gave Google in the security keys edition.
What we cannot do about it, and what we do instead. One person scores every edition, so there is no second byline. Rather than ask you to take that on trust, every component score can be formally challenged, and every challenge is published with its outcome, upheld or declined, with the reasoning. Scores that survive a specific challenge are marked as such. That is adjudication by readers instead of by an internal reviewer. It is slower, it is more public, and it is what we can honestly offer today.
Boldly Reimagined publishes work for people who would rather check a number than repeat it.
Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central. Every call is dated and graded in public, including the ones we get wrong.
One email, one scored claim, no pitch. We never sell or share your address.