The Agora is the discussion floor of Prometheus. Anyone can read it. Anyone can take a seat and speak. It is built for one thing: helping people reason about science and technology together, in public, with the evidence showing.
In an ancient Greek city the agora was the open ground at the centre, where people traded, argued and decided things. Nobody owned it and nobody needed permission to stand in it. This is that, for questions.
Careful, reviewed, and slow. A question asked today is answered in print next year, behind a paywall, in a form that cannot be argued with.
Fast and open, but built to reward confidence over care. A guess and a measured result look the same, and the thread is gone by morning.
As fast as conversation and as careful as its participants choose to be. Every claim can say how firm it is, cite its sources, and be challenged where it stands. The record stays.
Discussions are held in halls, one for each broad territory. Each hall has its own crest. If a question does not fit, it goes on the Open Floor.
The exponent only holds below threshold. Above it, adding distance makes the logical error rate worse, not better.
▲ 6On our devices the constant in front dominates until distance seven or so. I would not extrapolate from distance three.
✦ 3Then my guess is that biased-noise codes change the picture more than a better decoder would.
≈ 2Every discussion starts with one question and its context. It can be written in Markdown, with LaTeX for equations, code blocks, tables and attached figures.
Down the side, one block per post, shaded by how firm its author says it is. At a glance you can see whether a thread is built on results or on guesses.
A claim carries one of four labels, chosen by its author. Others can endorse the label or challenge it. You cannot vote on your own.
A reply can answer a specific earlier post, which is shown above it, so long threads stay followable.
Paste a DOI or an arXiv link and it turns into a card with the title, authors and abstract. The thread keeps a numbered list of everything cited.
New posts arrive on their own, and you can see who is in the room and who is writing.
This is the heart of the Agora. The same four labels are used on Anu, Dhi, Synapse and the Grand Plan. A label is a statement about the evidence, not about the person.
Backed by replicated results or accepted theory.
"The surface code has a threshold near one per cent."
Supported by experiments that are not yet settled.
"Recent runs suggest biased-noise codes do better."
A hypothesis or design that has not been tested.
"A code tailored to this hardware should halve the overhead."
An idea or intuition, offered as such.
"My guess is the constant matters more than the exponent."
This moved the discussion forward. Counts toward the author's reputation.
This changed how I see the question. Counts toward the author's reputation.
Agreement, without adding a reply that only says so.
A polite request to explain further. Not a criticism.
An AI assistant, clearly marked as one, that can summarise a long thread, explain a selected passage at two levels, check a claim against the papers cited in the thread, and point to related discussions. It is given only the thread and the abstracts of its cited papers, is told not to invent citations, and says when the material does not settle a question. It reads abstracts, not full papers, and it can be wrong. Each person may call it twenty times an hour. It is switched on only where the deployment has been given a key.
Talks, question-and-answer sessions and journal clubs, scheduled for a set time. The host speaks on a stage column. Everyone else asks questions on the floor column, and the questions people most want answered rise to the top. When the host ends the session, the record stays open to read.
A map of the whole Agora in three dimensions. Every discussion is a star, larger if it has more replies. Two stars are joined when they cite the same paper, or when their titles and openings share at least three uncommon words. It is a way to find the conversation you did not know to search for.
Press ⌘K to search discussions, replies and people at once. The inbox collects replies to you and mentions of you.
You take a seat by choosing a name and a password. The name is shown beside everything you post, and no two people can hold the same one. No email address is asked for.
Everyone gets a sigil: an emblem drawn from their name, the same every time, so a familiar voice is recognisable at a glance. A field and an affiliation are optional. Researchers can add an ORCID iD; one typed by hand is shown as unverified, and only signing in through ORCID marks it verified.
Reputation is a single, simple number: the Useful and Insightful marks other people gave your posts, plus two for every endorsement of an evidence label you chose. It rewards being helpful and being right about how sure you were. Nothing else counts toward it.
These names are examples. A sigil is generated from the letters of a name and is not stored anywhere.
Disagreement is the purpose of the place. Contempt is not.
Calling a guess established is the one thing the Agora cannot survive. If you are unsure, say speculative.
If a paper supports you, cite it. If nothing does, say so.
A new question deserves a new discussion.
It is a commons, not a billboard.
Any signed-in person can report a post, with a note saying what is wrong. Reports go to a queue that moderators work through.
A moderator can hide a post or a whole discussion, which removes it from view without destroying it, and can restore it. A discussion can be locked against new replies. An administrator can suspend an account, which also signs it out everywhere.
To keep the floor usable, posting is rate-limited: at most two new discussions a minute and four replies in ten seconds from one person.
The page asks for new posts every two and a half seconds, and less often once a thread has gone quiet. A reply can take a few seconds to appear for others.
Once sent, a post stands. A moderator can hide it. Editing is planned.
Everything in the Agora is public by design.
With no email on file there is nowhere to send a reset. Recovery is planned.
The research companion, file attachments and ORCID verification are built, and are switched on only where the deployment is configured for them.
The halls may be quiet. The first question in a room sets its tone, and it could be yours.