The AI Alignment We Should Actually Fear: When Human Elites No Longer Need You We’ve been telling ourselves the wrong AI horror story. Most conversations about “AI safety” fixate on misaligned AI—some godlike superintelligence slips its leash and wipes out humanity because we wrote the prompt wrong. But
Part I: The Architecture of Self-Deception 1.1 The Press Secretary and the Elephant The fundamental error of modern governance is the assumption that institutions are rational actors pursuing their stated goals. We operate under the polite fiction that the Department of Education exists to educate, that the Defense Department
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." - Rumi This post diagnoses a pervasive social pathology: Dualistic Essentialism (DE). DE is the cognitive habit of sorting people, events, and outcomes into fixed "good" or "evil&
Preamble: The Inversion A revolution in thought is not a discovery of new facts but a rearrangement of the very framework through which facts are interpreted. For centuries, the prevailing scientific orthodoxy has rested upon a foundational assumption: that the physical universe is the bedrock of reality, and that consciousness—
Introduction: The Broken Myth of the Machine in the Garden There is a story we tell ourselves about our food. It is a powerful and deeply comforting myth, etched into our collective consciousness. It lives on the labels of our milk cartons and egg boxes, in the commercials that flicker
Part I: The Covenant of Grain Section 1.1: Introduction: The Gods in the Grass For ten thousand years, the story of human civilization has been inseparable from the story of a few humble grasses. The domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent, rice in the Yangtze Valley, and maize
In a world grappling with fragmented ideologies and narrow measures of progress, the Universal Value Index (UVI) emerges as a proposal for a more holistic metric of human advancement. Traditional indicators like GDP have long been critiqued for what they omit. Over 50 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy observed that
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
The Unseen Architecture of Failure: Why Our Institutions Betray Their Purpose The Elephant in the Brain To comprehend the grand dysfunctions of modern institutions is to first embark on an uncomfortable journey inward, into the unacknowledged architecture of the human mind. The persistent failures of our core societal structures are
Preamble: The Twilight of an Obsolete Order We stand at a civilizational crossroads, governed by ghosts. The systems of power we inherited—centralized, authoritarian, and even our most cherished representative democracies—are not merely flawed. They are outmoded technologies. We are attempting to navigate the social and technological complexities of
Imagine that everything we ever know is contained within the theater of our own experience. Radical Phenomenalism takes this internalist stance to the extreme: reference and meaning are purely internal, experiential, and predictive. In this view, our mind operates like a self-contained simulation, concerned only with the way one experience
Introduction: Using a Thorn to Remove a Thorn For centuries, the grand tradition of Western metaphysics has presented itself as the deepest possible investigation into the fundamental nature of reality. It has built elaborate systems to explain Being, Nothingness, the Self, and the structure of Time. It has waged wars
Introduction Look around and you’ll notice a comforting narrative: we are each unique individuals charting our own paths. We feel as though we freely choose our beliefs, careers, fashions, and lifestyles. But this confidence in our autonomy is largely an illusion. In reality, nearly every aspect of human life
For much of modern psychiatry, mental disorders have been conceptualized in a categorical framework. In this traditional model, epitomized by the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), each disorder is a distinct category defined by a checklist of symptoms. The implicit assumption is that a latent disease entity
Introduction: What is the essence of suffering? Our first impulse might be to equate suffering with intense pain or unpleasant sensory input. A bad burn, a stabbing headache, the agony of a broken bone – these feelings undoubtedly hurt. Classic approaches, such as utilitarian ethics, tend to measure suffering in terms