The debates use famous names to get your attention, but when I click on the details of each debate it says "Pending" next to those famous names. Apparently none of these people have agreed to debate or possibly even know tickets are being sold to their debate.
Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.
Charitable prediction: It'd only take 1 big name debate to happen for this idea to become viable. Once people know about it, and the most interesting debates get funded, the debate becomes like any other desirable speaking gig: a performance with a big paycheck and audience attached.
Less charitably, however, as soon as Logosive takes off a bit, the existing debating venues (news channels, big podcasts, etc.) can just look at what debate ideas are popular and make them happen, with the promise of a bigger paycheck and a bigger audience.
First, thank you for the confidence about Logosive taking off.
You describe an interesting problem with the moat. I'm hoping we can be the choice venue for debates by providing the best debate creation and discovery experience and by also providing larger paychecks to debaters than news channels and podcasts could ever hope to provide to debaters, hosts, and debate promoters, through Logosive's funding mechanism and a large revenue share for all parties involved in the debate.
And if these people aren’t aware, they haven’t even signed off on the “position” they are supposed to be debating. I can’t imagine many public intellectuals would end up agreeing to debate in support of words that were put in their mouth.
I think I get the idea of a kind of bounty on debate participation, but the logistics need more work.
Thanks for the feedback. One mechanism we can use to address this is to update the debate descriptions if the debaters have suggestions about how they'd like their positions described. Open to other ideas for this too, and I think we will figure out better approaches as we launch our first debates.
> Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.
When I initially read your comment, I agreed with it. But, on second thought, if the site is presented as a sort of Kickstarter for debates where people are funding something they hope will happen, I think it might work. It is important that this is clearly communicated though.
You’ve made a tech platform but you should just make content.
This won’t work out for you because you’ve designed it to be as close to a valueless middleman as possible. I don’t blame you as it’s a nice business model…when it works.
You sit back and do nothing while your community does all the work that a normal media company would do: coming up with content ideas, executive producing, and even doing the technical work of delivering the content if I’m reading your ToS right.
You used tech to solve a problem that isn’t tech related at all. You started with a decent vision statement for what you want the world to have more of, but you chose a hammer when your problem is a screw.
I think you’re more likely to realize this end goal by making a YouTube channel or whatever other social media profiles, do the hard work of consistently putting out debate content, and grow that audience organically to the point where you can actually invite well-known experts to make content with you.
I think much of the value is the funding infrastructure and also the debate creation and discoverability, similar in some ways to the role eventbrite serves for events.
Thanks for catching the copy and messaging edits. The homepage debate is a sample debate that directs to the list of proposed debates. I’ll change that sample debate so it’s less confusing.
That's a good point. Before a debater agrees to the debate, the debater is marked as "pending" on the debate page, but that could be made more clear on some other parts of the platform.
I don't want to discourage this idea, but I have to admit that I've lost interest in debates. It seems like a debate is not a search for the truth, but a form of public entertainment to see who wins. I wouldn't change my views based on the outcome of a debate.
Then again I may be biased because I'm a terrible debater. On the other hand, my mom used to show off her debate medals from high school.
Most public debates aren't a matter of truth seeking, and haven't been for a long time (two examples below). Rather, it's a platform for people to make their case to the audience.
That said, the level of respect and orderliness of the debates below is something I'd like to see more of.
This is true for many modern-style debates on podcasts on television, but my goal is for Logosive to elevate debate to truth-seeking again.
One debate format I'd like to see on Logosive is asynchronous debate, similar to the Federalist Papers, where the debaters submit their positions and rebuttals to each other as written statements, over the course of weeks. I think this format could align with more of a truth-seeking type of debate, and Logosive can already support this format.
I don’t think there are many debatable issues these days, at least mainstream ones. We’ve moved into a polarized kind of post-truth world where the issues of the day don’t share a lot of common ground. Like I feel you sort of need to have the same aims in order to debate which side would better achieve them. If you’re trying to do completely different things that arguing that your side is abstractly better doesn’t work.
>I don't want to discourage this idea, but I have to admit that I've lost interest in debates. It seems like a debate is not a search for the truth, but a form of public entertainment to see who wins. I wouldn't change my views based on the outcome of a debate.
The last debate that changed my mind on anything was about 20 years ago. It was a structured debate regarding marriage equality. The negative team, included a wildcard, a poly bisexual woman, whose relationship would still be ignored by the government after the change. She argued, very successfully in my opinion, that moving the bar one step made no sense, and the government simply shouldnt have a favoured relationship status at all.
Since then I cant think of any. However, I also cant think of another proper structured debate I have seen.
Not to mention that a lot of these public 'debates' about topics unfairly give time and energy to perspectives which do not deserve them.
For example, 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused, but - oh! - we need to be fair and balanced so we'll give time to the other side that has tons of untested and unproven crackpot theories about maybe that's just what climates do and we just shouldn't bother trying to do better.
Likewise with 'vaccines cause autism'. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever to show any link whatsoever, but we need to be balanced so we have to give time to both sides.
The headline example on their site is 'are seed oils healthy?' Assuming an agreed-upon definition of 'healthy', this shouldn't be a debate. Are they good for you in moderation or not? Let's look at the science. Oh, they're fine? Great, debate over.
They also have "AGI in 5 years?" What's to debate there? Sure, it's possible, who knows? What's the point in debating whether or not something might happen?
If it were 'will AGI be beneficial for humanity?' then okay, that could be a debate, but none of these topics I'm seeing are good fodder for debate; just arguments or baseless assertions.
>The headline example on their site is 'are seed oils healthy?' Assuming an agreed-upon definition of 'healthy', this shouldn't be a debate. Are they good for you in moderation or not? Let's look at the science. Oh, they're fine? Great, debate over.
The problem is that in any contentious topic where the science isn't definitive, each side will latch onto whatever ambiguous studies that favors their position. For seed oils it's various studies showing "inflammation", and ad-hominem on how opposing studies are funded by big oil (or whatever). Or think about how during the pandemic, there was conflicting evidence on whether masks worked, or whether ivermectin cured covid. We now have a much better understanding, but at the start of the pandemic there was weak evidence both ways.
That’s true, but I think even in those cases, debate unveils important questions that can help arrive at more definitive answers as future data comes in.
Thanks for these considerations. I think even if a debate doesn’t help arrive at an ultimate truth, it can still be beneficial as a substrate for revealing important questions that can then provide a deeper or more nuanced understanding of a given topic.
I understand that's the goal, but the end result is that a charismatic debater that engages in emotional rhetoric that can appeal to the audience will "win" over a well-researched academic more often than not.
Perhaps asynchronous debate through written word exchanges undertaken over weeks, in the spirit of the Federalist Papers, could help mollify this risk. Logosive supports this format.
I’ve also enjoyed the debate about debate that this discussion has generated, so thank you for that.
Debates have never been about finding the truth - or at least an objective truth. They have always been about emotions and controlling the audiences reactions. At their best debates help us find some emotional truths but that’s it.
AI is used on the debate creation form on the homepage to generate the debate description and to suggest debaters or topics based on debaters. Alternatively, there’s a manual debate creation flow, but most users start with the AI prompt then edit the output of the AI-generated debate details.
There are already organizations like Open to Debate and The Munk Debates organizing and publishing debates. What are you doing differently than them, aside from allowing users to suggest topics and giving them a cut? I feel like coming up with topics is probably the easiest part of the process. All you need is a vague pulse on what's in the news cycle, or ask a LLM.
Thanks for sharing those other platforms. I think what differentiates Logosive is the funding mechanism, which could allow debaters, organizers, and promoters to earn substantial revenue from their debates. This also provides more of a market mechanism to reveal which topics are most in demand for debate.
great idea, and there are many potential pathways for where this can go so excited to see Logosive develop. The key will be seeding the platform with some interesting debates that aren't necessarily part of the mainstream conversation (either topics that aren't getting enough attention, or debate participants that otherwise aren't being matched up against one another). Feel this is the perfect moment in time for this platform.
I like this idea but I fear the population, in the US at least, is not able to process something like a debate effectively. Any given debate, if won decisively enough, could shutdown any discussion on the topic for a long time. Imagine if you got Jordan Peterson and he absolutely shut-down someone else. I don't think the audience will accept the idea that the other person may have just been a bad debater, or that the ideas that they debated still have merit. It would effectively end the discussion.
People love winners, not ideas. It's just more us-vs-them. Especially because the US population only ever sees the word "debate" when it comes to a political debate on a stage, and those are not debates.
Again, I love this idea in theory but I fear it's time has come and gone already.
Thanks so much for your support and perspective. I’ve seen some debates where one debater dominates, but so far it hasn’t ended discussion of the given topic but has rather led to more questions raised for discussion in future debates. But I could see an outcome where it does end the discussion for some amount of time.
I’ve also seen a surge of interest in debate outside just political debate, especially on platforms like Jubilee, podcasts, and X spaces.
Thanks for the feedback on what could be confusing messaging. The debates happen between real people. The AI is used to create the debate launch page based on the debate organizer's prompt.
To most "advanced AI users", it will directly sound like "one more AI project" just due to the fact that the entire homepage is vibe-coded and feels awfully similar with Lovable projects and such, you can remove that feeling by being opinionated on your design.
The debates use famous names to get your attention, but when I click on the details of each debate it says "Pending" next to those famous names. Apparently none of these people have agreed to debate or possibly even know tickets are being sold to their debate.
Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.
Charitable prediction: It'd only take 1 big name debate to happen for this idea to become viable. Once people know about it, and the most interesting debates get funded, the debate becomes like any other desirable speaking gig: a performance with a big paycheck and audience attached.
Less charitably, however, as soon as Logosive takes off a bit, the existing debating venues (news channels, big podcasts, etc.) can just look at what debate ideas are popular and make them happen, with the promise of a bigger paycheck and a bigger audience.
Can't really find a moat for Logosive here.
First, thank you for the confidence about Logosive taking off.
You describe an interesting problem with the moat. I'm hoping we can be the choice venue for debates by providing the best debate creation and discovery experience and by also providing larger paychecks to debaters than news channels and podcasts could ever hope to provide to debaters, hosts, and debate promoters, through Logosive's funding mechanism and a large revenue share for all parties involved in the debate.
And if these people aren’t aware, they haven’t even signed off on the “position” they are supposed to be debating. I can’t imagine many public intellectuals would end up agreeing to debate in support of words that were put in their mouth.
I think I get the idea of a kind of bounty on debate participation, but the logistics need more work.
Thanks for the feedback. One mechanism we can use to address this is to update the debate descriptions if the debaters have suggestions about how they'd like their positions described. Open to other ideas for this too, and I think we will figure out better approaches as we launch our first debates.
> Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.
When I initially read your comment, I agreed with it. But, on second thought, if the site is presented as a sort of Kickstarter for debates where people are funding something they hope will happen, I think it might work. It is important that this is clearly communicated though.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll update the messaging to make this more clear.
You’ve made a tech platform but you should just make content.
This won’t work out for you because you’ve designed it to be as close to a valueless middleman as possible. I don’t blame you as it’s a nice business model…when it works.
You sit back and do nothing while your community does all the work that a normal media company would do: coming up with content ideas, executive producing, and even doing the technical work of delivering the content if I’m reading your ToS right.
You used tech to solve a problem that isn’t tech related at all. You started with a decent vision statement for what you want the world to have more of, but you chose a hammer when your problem is a screw.
I think you’re more likely to realize this end goal by making a YouTube channel or whatever other social media profiles, do the hard work of consistently putting out debate content, and grow that audience organically to the point where you can actually invite well-known experts to make content with you.
I think much of the value is the funding infrastructure and also the debate creation and discoverability, similar in some ways to the role eventbrite serves for events.
Thanks for catching the copy and messaging edits. The homepage debate is a sample debate that directs to the list of proposed debates. I’ll change that sample debate so it’s less confusing.
Also good point about “create with AI”.
That's a good point. Before a debater agrees to the debate, the debater is marked as "pending" on the debate page, but that could be made more clear on some other parts of the platform.
I don't want to discourage this idea, but I have to admit that I've lost interest in debates. It seems like a debate is not a search for the truth, but a form of public entertainment to see who wins. I wouldn't change my views based on the outcome of a debate.
Then again I may be biased because I'm a terrible debater. On the other hand, my mom used to show off her debate medals from high school.
Most public debates aren't a matter of truth seeking, and haven't been for a long time (two examples below). Rather, it's a platform for people to make their case to the audience.
That said, the level of respect and orderliness of the debates below is something I'd like to see more of.
* Russell v. Copleston on God https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMsbD1L5IlQ
* Buckley v. Baldwin on if the american dream is at the expense of the american negro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin%E2%80%93Buckley_debate
This is true for many modern-style debates on podcasts on television, but my goal is for Logosive to elevate debate to truth-seeking again.
One debate format I'd like to see on Logosive is asynchronous debate, similar to the Federalist Papers, where the debaters submit their positions and rebuttals to each other as written statements, over the course of weeks. I think this format could align with more of a truth-seeking type of debate, and Logosive can already support this format.
I don’t think there are many debatable issues these days, at least mainstream ones. We’ve moved into a polarized kind of post-truth world where the issues of the day don’t share a lot of common ground. Like I feel you sort of need to have the same aims in order to debate which side would better achieve them. If you’re trying to do completely different things that arguing that your side is abstractly better doesn’t work.
>I don't want to discourage this idea, but I have to admit that I've lost interest in debates. It seems like a debate is not a search for the truth, but a form of public entertainment to see who wins. I wouldn't change my views based on the outcome of a debate.
The last debate that changed my mind on anything was about 20 years ago. It was a structured debate regarding marriage equality. The negative team, included a wildcard, a poly bisexual woman, whose relationship would still be ignored by the government after the change. She argued, very successfully in my opinion, that moving the bar one step made no sense, and the government simply shouldnt have a favoured relationship status at all.
Since then I cant think of any. However, I also cant think of another proper structured debate I have seen.
Not to mention that a lot of these public 'debates' about topics unfairly give time and energy to perspectives which do not deserve them.
For example, 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused, but - oh! - we need to be fair and balanced so we'll give time to the other side that has tons of untested and unproven crackpot theories about maybe that's just what climates do and we just shouldn't bother trying to do better.
Likewise with 'vaccines cause autism'. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever to show any link whatsoever, but we need to be balanced so we have to give time to both sides.
The headline example on their site is 'are seed oils healthy?' Assuming an agreed-upon definition of 'healthy', this shouldn't be a debate. Are they good for you in moderation or not? Let's look at the science. Oh, they're fine? Great, debate over.
They also have "AGI in 5 years?" What's to debate there? Sure, it's possible, who knows? What's the point in debating whether or not something might happen?
If it were 'will AGI be beneficial for humanity?' then okay, that could be a debate, but none of these topics I'm seeing are good fodder for debate; just arguments or baseless assertions.
>The headline example on their site is 'are seed oils healthy?' Assuming an agreed-upon definition of 'healthy', this shouldn't be a debate. Are they good for you in moderation or not? Let's look at the science. Oh, they're fine? Great, debate over.
The problem is that in any contentious topic where the science isn't definitive, each side will latch onto whatever ambiguous studies that favors their position. For seed oils it's various studies showing "inflammation", and ad-hominem on how opposing studies are funded by big oil (or whatever). Or think about how during the pandemic, there was conflicting evidence on whether masks worked, or whether ivermectin cured covid. We now have a much better understanding, but at the start of the pandemic there was weak evidence both ways.
That’s true, but I think even in those cases, debate unveils important questions that can help arrive at more definitive answers as future data comes in.
Thanks for these considerations. I think even if a debate doesn’t help arrive at an ultimate truth, it can still be beneficial as a substrate for revealing important questions that can then provide a deeper or more nuanced understanding of a given topic.
I understand that's the goal, but the end result is that a charismatic debater that engages in emotional rhetoric that can appeal to the audience will "win" over a well-researched academic more often than not.
The outcome is often... less than desirable.
Perhaps asynchronous debate through written word exchanges undertaken over weeks, in the spirit of the Federalist Papers, could help mollify this risk. Logosive supports this format.
I’ve also enjoyed the debate about debate that this discussion has generated, so thank you for that.
Debates have never been about finding the truth - or at least an objective truth. They have always been about emotions and controlling the audiences reactions. At their best debates help us find some emotional truths but that’s it.
Searches for truth are left to academic papers.
Debates are pure entertainment, often misunderstood as fact, and often purely to manipulate.
I'd drop the AI part... Not sure why this is part of the platform.
AI is used on the debate creation form on the homepage to generate the debate description and to suggest debaters or topics based on debaters. Alternatively, there’s a manual debate creation flow, but most users start with the AI prompt then edit the output of the AI-generated debate details.
There are already organizations like Open to Debate and The Munk Debates organizing and publishing debates. What are you doing differently than them, aside from allowing users to suggest topics and giving them a cut? I feel like coming up with topics is probably the easiest part of the process. All you need is a vague pulse on what's in the news cycle, or ask a LLM.
Thanks for sharing those other platforms. I think what differentiates Logosive is the funding mechanism, which could allow debaters, organizers, and promoters to earn substantial revenue from their debates. This also provides more of a market mechanism to reveal which topics are most in demand for debate.
great idea, and there are many potential pathways for where this can go so excited to see Logosive develop. The key will be seeding the platform with some interesting debates that aren't necessarily part of the mainstream conversation (either topics that aren't getting enough attention, or debate participants that otherwise aren't being matched up against one another). Feel this is the perfect moment in time for this platform.
Thank you, very much appreciated! And thanks for the insights about priming the platform with non-mainstream topics
I like this idea but I fear the population, in the US at least, is not able to process something like a debate effectively. Any given debate, if won decisively enough, could shutdown any discussion on the topic for a long time. Imagine if you got Jordan Peterson and he absolutely shut-down someone else. I don't think the audience will accept the idea that the other person may have just been a bad debater, or that the ideas that they debated still have merit. It would effectively end the discussion.
People love winners, not ideas. It's just more us-vs-them. Especially because the US population only ever sees the word "debate" when it comes to a political debate on a stage, and those are not debates.
Again, I love this idea in theory but I fear it's time has come and gone already.
Thanks so much for your support and perspective. I’ve seen some debates where one debater dominates, but so far it hasn’t ended discussion of the given topic but has rather led to more questions raised for discussion in future debates. But I could see an outcome where it does end the discussion for some amount of time.
I’ve also seen a surge of interest in debate outside just political debate, especially on platforms like Jubilee, podcasts, and X spaces.
Great work! Love the concept and implementation!
Is it biotech or is it techbio!!!!!
Debate with AI? No thanks.
Thanks for the feedback on what could be confusing messaging. The debates happen between real people. The AI is used to create the debate launch page based on the debate organizer's prompt.
To most "advanced AI users", it will directly sound like "one more AI project" just due to the fact that the entire homepage is vibe-coded and feels awfully similar with Lovable projects and such, you can remove that feeling by being opinionated on your design.
Good point, thanks!
cool idea