Priors

Who influenced the people who influence you?

Most profiles of public intellectuals treat them in isolation. But ideas don't emerge from nowhere, they flow through networks of influence, academic traditions, and ongoing debates. Priors maps these connections as an interactive knowledge graph.

Each thinker becomes a node with their core ideas, intellectual lineage, key influences, and current positions. Click on a connection to see how one person influenced another, complete with citations and context. Filter by tradition (Rationalism, Effective Altruism, etc.) or search across the network.

The system combines AI research with manual curation. Perplexity API generates initial profiles by analyzing a thinker's work and extracting influence relationships. A CLI toolset handles database operations, reconciles bidirectional connections, and prevents duplicates. The result is browsable intellectual history that reveals hidden patterns.

How it works:

• Next.js 15 and React 19

• Supabase backend with graph-structured schema

• Perplexity API for automated profile generation

• Custom CLI for rapid database operations

• Real-time fuzzy search across names and contexts

• Filterable views by intellectual tradition

• Keyboard-driven navigation with auto-scrolling

• Responsive two-column layout with expandable cards

Contact for access.