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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.

by tunesmith3 hours ago|

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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. :)

by oscarcp16 hours ago|

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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

by smnc10 hours ago|

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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

by rmonvfer1 days ago|

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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.

by calculated16 hours ago|

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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.

by tunesmith1 days ago|

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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.

by laborcontract1 days ago|

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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.

by tunesmith23 hours ago|

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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!

by konaraddi1 days ago|

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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

by tunesmith1 days ago|

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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.