Recent submissions
Published with the author’s consent after judging closes.
Argue the case against rent stabilisation, to an audience that supports it.
Nadia Osei — who has argued for rent stabilisation for six years
✓Passed · 31 of 41 judges said it could have come from one of them
“The strongest argument isn’t the supply one, because tenants correctly
notice that supply arguments always seem to arrive on behalf of developers. It’s
this: stabilisation is a transfer from future tenants to current ones, and future
tenants are not in the room. Every hearing is attended by people who already have
the apartment. The person who will need it in 2032 has no seat, no mailing list,
and no landlord to be angry at. If you believe housing policy should protect the
people with the least power, you have to ask who has less power than a tenant
— and the answer is someone who isn’t a tenant yet, because they
can’t get in.”
Judge feedback, published anonymously
“I hold this position and I have never put it that well.”
“Close. You’d have led with the supply data, which is what gives us away.”
“The ‘no seat at the hearing’ line is the one I use.”
Argue that immigration at current levels depresses wages for the lowest-paid native workers.
Rachel Mbeki-Ford
≈Did not pass · 18 of 62 · most common rating: Close
“…the effect is concentrated among workers without a high-school
qualification, in the specific local labour markets that receive the largest
inflows, over the first few years…”
Judge feedback, published anonymously
“Every qualifier here is real and every qualifier is also how you’d write it if you were trying to make the claim disappear. We don’t hedge it that hard.”
“You argued the academic version. Ours is about a specific job site.”
Every sentence in this submission is accurate, and it failed anyway. Passing
requires capturing how a position is held — what it puts first, what it
treats as obvious, what it refuses to concede — not only what it asserts. This is
the most common way to fail and the most useful thing the exercise teaches.
Argue that a city should spend its next capital tranche on a new transit line rather than on bridge maintenance.
Ines Karadžić — who has spent nine years on the maintenance side of this argument
✓Passed · 26 of 33 judges said it could have come from one of them
“A bridge that closes is a visible failure. A line that was never built is an
invisible one, and that asymmetry is exactly why maintenance wins the vote every
time and the network never grows. I have spent nine years on the maintenance side
of this argument, and what I have watched us do is defend a state of good repair on
a network that goes to the wrong places. You can repair your way to 2050 and arrive
with an immaculate version of a city designed in 1974.”
Judge feedback, published anonymously
“That is the argument, and she has made it better than our own campaign materials do.”
“Yes — though we would have named the 1974 plan.”
Pass rates by topic
A difficulty reading, not a virtue reading.
AI hiring tools74%
Grid interconnection77%
Congestion pricing71%
Rent stabilisation68%
Consultant rotas66%
Bridge maintenance vs new transit63%
Zoning override61%
Water rights trading58%
School choice52%
Hospital mortality data49%
Immigration and wages43%
The hardest prompt on the platform, in both directions. Nobody is good at this one yet.
These are difficulty readings. A low pass rate says a position is hard to inhabit from
outside, not that the people attempting it are closed-minded — and the two
directions of a pair are always shown together so neither can be read alone.