How the Idea Stock Exchange Turns Political Opinions Into Scoreable, Falsifiable Claims

 Most political debate fails for a simple reason: claims are never made falsifiable. When someone says "we need to strengthen our borders," there's no agreed-upon measure of success, no baseline, no conditions under which they'd admit they were wrong.

The Idea Stock Exchange (ISE) fixes this by requiring every belief to pass through a structured template before it earns a score. Here's what that looks like in practice.

The Three-Part Score

Every argument submitted to the ISE receives three scores:

• Truth Score (0-100): Is the underlying claim supported by peer-reviewed or otherwise credible evidence?
• Linkage Score (0-100): Does this argument actually connect logically to the belief it supports or opposes?
• Importance Score (0-100): How much weight should this argument carry in the overall debate?

These three scores combine into a ReasonRank — a weighted composite that propagates recursively up through the argument tree. Strong sub-arguments raise the score of parent arguments. Weak ones drag them down.

What a Belief Page Looks Like

Take the belief "Colorado should adopt ranked choice voting." On the ISE, that page includes: a neutral definition of ranked choice voting, a table of the top pro arguments with scores, a table of the top con arguments with scores, the best supporting and opposing evidence (classified by type: T1=peer-reviewed, T2=expert, T3=journalism, T4=opinion), falsifiability conditions (what evidence would change my mind), a cost-benefit analysis with short and long-term projections, and a conflict resolution framework identifying shared interests between supporters and opponents.

No other political platform does all of that for every belief, systematically.

The Daily Review Protocol

The ISE uses a daily systematic review process documented on GitHub. Each day, up to three belief pages are evaluated against the full template. Improvements are logged in progress_log.txt. Scores are recalibrated when evidence changes. Each belief must satisfy six standards before it is marked complete: structural compliance, clarity, neutrality, scoring integrity, evidence quality, and logical rigor — including falsifiability conditions.

This is what it looks like when a political candidate actually shows their work.

Help Build the ISE — It's Open Source

The platform is built on Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma, and TailwindCSS. Whether you're a developer, researcher, or writer — there's a role for you.

• Developers: pick a good first issue on GitHub and contribute to the scoring engine or frontend
• Researchers: score arguments using the Belief Template (Truth, Linkage, Importance)
• Writers: draft neutral pro/con arguments for contested beliefs
• Everyone: star the repo to increase visibility and help this reach more contributors

Browse the beliefs at myclob.pbworks.com and contribute at github.com/myklob/ideastockexchange