Comment by tunesmith
18 days ago
https://concludia.org/ - I've mentioned it here before, it's a site to help people reason through and understand arguments together. No real business purpose for it yet, it's more an idea I've had for years and have been wanting to see it through to something actually usable. You can graphically explore arguments, track their logical sufficiency/necessity, and make counterpoints. It's different than other types of argument theory that just have points "in favor" and "against" because of how it tries to propagate logical truth and provability.
I’ve had a concept like this in the back of my mind for years. Happy to see someone executing it so well.
For me, it started when I spent a year and a half reading and digesting books for and against young earth creationism, then eventually for Christianity itself (its historical truth claims). It struck me that the books were just a serialization of some knowledge structure that existed in the authors’ heads, and by reading I was trying to recreate that structure in my own head. And that’s a super inefficient way to go about this business. So there must be a shortcut, some more powerful intermediate representation than just text (text is too general and powerful, and you can’t compute over it… until now with LLMs?)
That graph felt a lot like code to me: there’s no unique representation of knowledge in a graph, but there are some that are much more useful than others; building a well-factored graph takes time and taste; graphs are composable and reusable in a way that feels like it could help you discover layers of abstraction in your arguments.
Yes - currently, each argument/graph is independent, but I've designed it in a way that should be compatible with future plans to "transclude" parts of other public graphs. Like if some lemma is really valuable to your own unrelated argument, being able to include it.
I do think there's quite a lot that could be done with LLM assistance here, like finding "duplicate" candidates; statements with the same semantic meaning, for potential merge. It's really complicated to think through side effects though so I'm going slow. :)
This is pretty cool! I'm not sure how you'd make a business out of it, but I can definitely see myself using it to justify some decisions on my day to day stuff.
I'm also a sucker for serif fonts so points for that.
Yeah, I only just yesterday got it to the point where people can create their own arguments. I was just using it to check my own assumptions on why I have such a complicated "end-of-month finances" list of things to do. :) But I also like the idea of using it for political arguments or even fun stuff like mystery-solving.
Speaking of politics, I've always thought it would be fun to see the different assumptions made by two "sides". My expectation is that both sides gradually accumulate more and more extreme, and often more and more ridiculous, assumptions to distinguish their side from the other.
Eventually, everyone's downstream beliefs are resting on extreme assumptions that nobody actually believes! Which makes moderate well-reasoned arguments from "the other side" much more threatening than extreme positions that can be passed off as lunacy, naivete, or evil.
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I wanted to add more value to this comment about monetisation - regardless if that's doable or not, it's an extremely cool project!!
What if you could sell the data for each argument? That might be valuable to LLM labs, because then you can essentially guarantee that every single argument you provide is human checked, and you could accumulate a large DB of those. Of course you'll never be able to capture every single argument possible, but it's rather a mechanism that would allow incremental improvement with time. But codifying logic and natural language is a very nice idea.
We would have saved so many wasted hours in the last company I worked for if we had this... you have no idea, to give you a sense, the decision to move from a Neo4J db to MySQL (the service was failing, the DB was failing, it was a bad architecture decision) took 6 months, when it should have been at most a couple days discussion.
Nurture this, it will become a great tool in the belt for a lot of people
Do you mind me asking, what kind of problems did you run into with Neo4j? Did you encounter performance issues after the DB grew to a certain size, or did you realize that the data wasn't suited to a graph DB and weird query patterns started causing trouble, or was it something else entirely?
I'm considering using a Neo4j self hosted instance for a project, but having only played around with it in low-stakes + small-data toy projects, I'm not really familiar with the footguns and failure modes...
All that aside, plugging holes in a sinking database for six months because you can't come to a descision does not sound like a fun time :D
It was a "compound" error you can say.
The first mistake was management not wanting to pay for Neo4J, so we were working in production with the free edition (no backups, only one database, lots of limitations).
The second error was that none of us had production level experience with Neo4J apart from what you just said, tinkering in toy projects at home or very low stakes services, so in the end, the schema that was created was a bit of a mess, you would look at it and say "well, it makes sense..." but in reality we were treating Neo4J as a twisted NoSQL/SQL interpretation.
The third mistake was treating Neo4J as a database meant to handle realtime requests from thousands of users doing filtering and depending on huge responses from external systems (VERY OLD systems, we're talking IBM AS400 old) while in an environment where each response depended on at least 2 or 3 microservices. We had one cypher query to handle almost all use cases, you can imagine what a behemoth that was.
In the end as I said, compound error between lack of experience, not analyzing correctly our needs and a "just go with it attitude" that to this day I'm pretty sure it cost quite a bit to the company. Eventually the backend team managed to move to MySQL (by that time I had moved to Ops) and the difference was abysmal.
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This is an interesting idea. Have you considered this in the context of arbitration? For example, if you integrate your favorite LLM and reference the relevant legal code, you can obtain a consensus outcome? Kinda like robo-arbitration.
edit: Another application - arbitrating divorce settlement without lawyers. I admit this is a little dark.
I like this. It reminds me of the interesting type of experimentation that was done with LLMs before agentic coding took over as the primary use case.
I am interested in seeing a personal version of this. Help people work out their own brain knots to make decision-making easier. I'm actually decent at mending fences with others. Put making decisions myself? Impossible.
You can actually register now (with a waiting list) and make your own private graphs, if that's what you meant by a personal version. (You'd be like member #4 haha)
I've actually had a lot of fun hooking it up to LLM. I have a private MCP server for it. The tools tell it how to read a concludia argument and validate it. It's what generated all the counterpoints for the "carbon offset" argument (https://concludia.org/step/9b8d443e-9a52-3006-8c2d-472406db7...) .
And yeah... when I've tried to fully justify my own conclusions that I was sure were correct... it's pretty humbling to realize how many assumptions we build into our own beliefs!
Cool idea, I think graphs (what you’re doing) are a better way of modeling arguments because it captures nuance often lost in 1 v 1 model of debate
Frustration at that kind of debate has been a large part of the motivation, how it occludes so much of what ideally should be a dialectic. I especially dislike how if someone gets flustered, they're seen as losing.
Genuinely think this is a brilliant idea, hope you find traction with it!
Look very cool! Can I self-host this?
That's not on my radar right now. I'm not explicitly rejecting the path, but I'm more intent on figuring out ways to make it easier for people to collaborate on arguments together, which means one destination for now.
Makes sense, all the best!