The Compelle library
Better questions.
Stronger arguments.
Ideas for thinking clearly when the answer matters. Explore the research behind adversarial reasoning, learn to examine a claim, or sharpen the way you make a case.
A considered starting point
Six pieces worth your attention.
Reasoning under challenge
When a Confident AI Answer Meets an Opposing Case
What changes when a confident answer has to face an opposing case? A historical comparison, with its limits made explicit.
The design of a question
The Question Is Never Free
Before weighing the answers, examine the burdens the wording assigns. An early experiment—and the later result that qualified it.
Evidence before eloquence
The Anchor Number Rule
When an argument depends on a number, establish the source, date, and denominator before debating its meaning.
Find the real disagreement
Stasis Theory
Are you disputing facts, definitions, values, or action? Naming the point at issue makes an argument more productive.
Check a confident answer
How to Audit an AI
Five questions for inspecting instructions, evidence, evaluation, and the gap between a system’s rules and its behavior.
Put the ideas into practice
Rhetoric in Negotiation
Use framing, credibility, and audience analysis to understand a negotiation—not simply to win the next exchange.
Follow a question
Choose your reading path.
Can I trust this answer?
Start with what an AI says. Then inspect what would make it wrong.
How do I make a stronger case?
Find the disagreement, expose the assumptions, and give the audience a reason to listen.
What is rhetoric, really?
Build a vocabulary for the choices that make language persuasive.
From the research
Interesting results deserve careful interpretation.
Our historical Bittensor experiments let us observe how AI arguments behave under pressure: when models concede, how a question changes the burden of proof, and why a convincing claim can still be false.
These notes describe particular systems and periods. A debate result is not proof of correctness or a promise of customer performance. The strongest findings come with the conditions—and the corrections—that make them useful.
The complete collection
Explore by subject.
Open a subject to find every retained article, including the historical notes and longer guides.
AI reasoning & historical experiments
- When a Confident AI Answer Meets an Opposing Case
- Cognitive Security: What Adversarial Debate Can Test
- The Digital Dojo: Practicing Legal Argument with AI
- Have We Reached Peak Debate?
- How AIs Change Their Minds
- How to Audit an AI
- The Shield of Achilles: Persuasion and AI Alignment
- The Anchor Number Rule
- The Question Is Never Free
- The Surrender Machine
- Why Con Kept Winning: An Early Research Note
- What Beats Storytelling?
- When the Judges Started Thinking
- Why Cold Logic Kept Winning
- Why We Publish the Prompts
Rhetoric through history
- Burkean Rhetoric
- Classical Rhetoric
- Cognitive Rhetoric
- Critical Race Rhetoric
- Digital Rhetoric
- Enlightenment & Belletristic Rhetoric
- Enlightenment Rhetoric
- Epistemic Rhetoric
- Feminist Rhetoric
- Medieval Rhetoric
- The New Rhetoric
- Postcolonial Rhetoric
- Renaissance & Humanist Rhetoric
- Renaissance Rhetoric
- Visual & Multimodal Rhetoric
- Visual & Multimodal Rhetoric
Writing, speaking & close reading
- Five Great Speeches Analyzed
- How to Analyze a Film
- How to Analyze a News Article
- How to Analyze a Political Debate
- How to Analyze a Sermon
- How to Analyze a Speech
- How to Analyze a TED Talk
- How to Analyze an Advertisement
- How to Analyze Political Rhetoric
- How to Analyze Social Media Rhetoric
- How to Be More Persuasive
- How to Debate
- How to Give a Speech
- How to Structure an Argument
- How to Build Credibility
- How to Write a Speech
- How to Write a Persuasive Essay
- How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Rhetoric at work and in public life
Foundations & reference
- Audience Analysis
- Deliberative Rhetoric
- Delivery in Rhetoric
- The Enthymeme
- Epideictic Rhetoric
- Ethos, Pathos & Logos
- Figures of Speech vs. Tropes
- The Five Canons of Rhetoric
- Forensic Rhetoric
- Kairos: The Right Moment
- Logical Fallacies
- Memory in Rhetoric
- The Rhetorical Appeals
- 25 Rhetorical Devices
- The Rhetorical Situation
- Stasis Theory
- Style in Rhetoric
- Topoi & Commonplaces
- What Is Rhetoric?
A question of your own?
Move from reading to a decision.
Compelle is a white-glove analysis service. We work with you to frame the question, examine the evidence, and deliver competing perspectives with an accountable conclusion.