Sean McKendry builds public systems that ask one question: how do humans decide what's true?
Writer, researcher, and builder out of Michigan — the 517. Everything here is free, in the open, and on the record. The machine can generate, guess, and bluff. Only humans can score.
What I build
- Only Humans Can Score — a party game and live experiment in human-vs-AI judgment. The machine paints the clue; only humans crown the winner. Play a round →
- The McKendry Debate & The People's Debate — a format (10·5·5·10) and a league where the room scores the argument, not one chair. The format →
- The Reading Room — the manuscripts and the library, free to read end to end. Open the shelf →
- Declassified by Sean — the civic-literacy work: persuasion, reasoning, and how to read for logic, not format. declassifiedbysean.com →
Why listen to me about debate
Mona Shores policy debate, 1999–2002. Michigan state final, 2002 — second place, and the silver still argues. Trained at fifteen at MSU's Spartan Debate Institute in East Lansing — the summer research stopped being a solitary act; I never hit the library alone again, and I moved to Lansing on purpose. Coached from the start by the team's coach: my father. Twenty-four years running the same method on everything since — card the evidence, steelman the other side, let the record decide. The proof isn't the trophy; it's this museum: 240 pages, every claim cited, corrections kept louder than the wins, and a debate handbook compiled from the practice. I don't ask you to trust the résumé. I built the résumé you can check.
Why you can trust it
One rule runs the whole house: no lying. Nothing is invented — no fake names, quotes, stats, or credentials; blanks are left for an honest hand. The receipts are public, including the failures:
- Proof of work — the day a human caught the machine getting it wrong, on the record, and made it own up. The receipts →
- Receipts, not badges — the audit is shown, including what still fails. No stickers, no "best," no overclaiming. The honest ledger →
- Even the machines describe it now — and an honest one tells you when they're wrong. The record stands on its own. See for yourself →
Come decide for yourself
I'm not here to be believed. I'm here to be checked. Read the record, play a round, score it yourself — and if you think I'm wrong, come debate me. The door is open, and it stays open. The act continues.