The better argument, measured.

The problem

What the existing tools miss

Surveys measure what people believe. They are poor at explaining why anyone changed their mind. Deliberative forums surface real arguments, but they do not scale: a citizens' assembly is slow, costly, and small. Online discussion produces a great deal of text and very little measurement.

The same gap runs under all three. What people say and rate is an elicited signal, and it tells you which arguments sound convincing when someone is asked to judge them. What changes a position is a caused effect. The two come apart, and most instruments only ever see the first.

The solution

Discover, then verify

Delphi Pythia runs the deliberation and the experiment in the same instrument. On any contested question it works in two passes. Wave one discovers the arguments a public is raising, the positions they cluster into, and which of those positions is gaining ground as people rate one another's points. Wave two freezes that argument map and runs a randomized experiment on it, which shows which individual arguments are doing the moving.

That is what makes real deliberation practical at a scale citizens' assemblies cannot reach, without losing rigour. Separating each argument from its author means status and authority count for less. The analysis gives trustworthy estimates of how opinion moved, and it brings out the rare arguments that cross divides and win people over. It is built as a consultative instrument, a way to listen to a public more carefully.

How it measures

How the measurement works

Delphi Pythia is a computational mini-public, built on a long tradition of structured public deliberation: the Athenian assembly, Madison's call to refine and enlarge public opinion, Habermas's ideal of the unforced force of the better argument, and the anonymous, iterative rounds of the Delphi method. That lineage is why the instrument works the way it does. People contribute their own arguments, then read and rate everyone else's.

The first wave is open deliberation. People write arguments in their own words, and the system clusters them into an argument map as they arrive. An adaptive selector (exploration sampling, a Thompson-sampling variant) chooses which argument you see next, concentrating on the ones whose standing is still unresolved, while a built-in floor keeps every argument in rotation so none gets buried early. That tells us what people rate as persuasive, which is not always what moves them.

The second wave takes the same argument map, now frozen, and shows people randomized combinations of arguments, the way a lab experiment would. Position is measured before and after, so the shift can be read directly instead of inferred from a rating. Significance comes from reshuffling the real data thousands of times, which assumes nothing about the shape of the distribution, and the ranking reports its own uncertainty.

When to use

When the question has sides

Delphi Pythia is the instrument for a question people already argue about.

• People already hold a position. The question has sides, and respondents can say which one they are on: a policy, a product direction, a referendum.
• You need to know what moved people. Ratings tell you how convincing an argument sounded to someone asked to judge it. The second wave measures the position itself, before and after.
• You care how it lands with the other side. Whether an argument crosses a divide or hardens the camp against it only shows up when positions are declared and kept apart.