All Articles
41 articles in this collection
July 10, 2026
Humans as Narration Machines: Why Our Most Important Stories Are Emotional, Not True
We think we are rational animals who occasionally tell stories. The reality is inverted: we are narrative machines who occasionally approximate rationality. Consciousness (what I…
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July 7, 2026
The Separated Mind and The Machine: Why the Current LLM Roadmap Leads Away from Objective Alignment with Reality
The Wrong Question We keep asking whether artificial intelligence is becoming intelligent. The better question is what kind of intelligence it is becoming. Measured by GRE scores,…
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June 29, 2026
Why Trying to "Align" AI to Human Values Is a Category Error — And What to Build Instead
Current conversations about AI safety usually start from the same premise: if we can just get machines to reliably share our values, we'll be safe. The hard part, we assume, is…
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June 27, 2026
Explaining the Horrific: How High-Gap Stories Enable Genocide and Democide
Someone I knew once said, with emphatic emotion, that Trump supporters do not deserve to live. What has struck me since is how many times I've heard similar statements in the last…
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June 24, 2026
Why I Believe We Have Already Achieved Artificial General Intelligence, Even Superintelligence
Now that I have your attention with that title, let me be clear. I believe this declaration to be true and not an attention-seeking exaggeration, but accurate under a specific,…
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June 21, 2026
LLMs as Separated Minds
Evolution is not a directing force but a descriptive process of variation and differential survival. Social traits and capacities that improved coordination, alliance formation,…
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June 21, 2026
AI and the Cycles of History
What observers of civilizational rise and fall actually saw — and what changes when consequence and perception can be managed at scale For a very long time, people have described…
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June 21, 2026
Media Literacy Without Human Literacy: Narrative Enforcers Dressed as Critical Thinkers
In classrooms, libraries, and professional development sessions across the country, media literacy is now presented as an essential defense against misinformation, propaganda, and…
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June 16, 2026
Operative AI Alignment: Why We Must Treat LLMs as Separated Minds
Truth-seeking in AI requires institutionalized challenge, not better statistical imitation. For the past two years, I have been developing a philosophical framework centered on the…
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June 15, 2026
The Functional Fiction Framework of Human Nature
One question has organized serious thought about human nature for as long as such thought has existed: Why does the persistent gap between what humans say about themselves and what…
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June 14, 2026
Actual Conspiracies Exist and They Are Inevitable
This essay continues the argument from " How Conspiracies Actually Work: A Better Map " and its first Addendum . In my earlier pieces linked above, I mapped institutional harm…
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June 13, 2026
AI Is Building Secret Models of Human Behavior. It's Time to Require Disclosure.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Anthropic’s newest artificial intelligence, Claude Fable 5—a system so powerful that the company treats it like a controlled substance,…
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June 13, 2026
The Cost of Pretending
Every adult knows a particular kind of tiredness. It is not the tiredness of hard labor or too little sleep. It is the tiredness of maintenance: the low, background exhaustion of…
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June 1, 2026
Manufacturing Dissent
The reasoning we most need is the reasoning our institutions are built to remove. Start with the thing we get backward. We treat intelligence as an individual possession aimed at…
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May 26, 2026
How Conspiracies Actually Work: A Better Map
The Epstein documents have broken a usual two-camp pattern. Not the political party camps, both of which had too many implicated powerful players to allow partisan finger pointing,…
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May 13, 2026
Productive Alignment: Understanding Human Wisdom
A couple of months ago, I ran an experiment with large language models. The question I was holding was not a modest one. Will and Ariel Durant had spent decades reading history and…
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April 29, 2026
Human Agency and the Separated Mind
In my The Separated Mind post, I drew on the Buddhist / Jonathan Haidt image of the rider and the elephant to describe the architectural relationship between our…
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April 28, 2026
The Separated Mind: The Why of Human History
For those of you who have tracked the tsunami of activity from me lately, you'll know that I have been working with two frameworks in a big way: The first is that all human…
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April 25, 2026
Our Performative Lives
There used to be a small class of people who lived public-facing lives for a living. Actors, politicians, royalty, clergy, public intellectuals. They maintained a curated public…
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April 25, 2026
Intellectual Capture
There is a mechanism running in your life right now that organizes more of your behavior than you would like to believe. Call it capture. It is what happens when the…
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April 25, 2026
The Law of Inevitable Exploitation (L.I.E)
There is a principle operating beneath virtually every system that humans build, sustain, and participate in. It is not a conspiracy. It is not a moral accusation. It is a…
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April 20, 2026
The Adaptive Mind
There is a term at the center of my (r)evolutionary psychology framework that I have been developing that I want to pull out and look at on its own, because once you see it…
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April 20, 2026
Realmotiv
Like many people of my generation, I knew the word realpolitik mainly through Henry Kissinger. It was the shorthand for a certain kind of strategic coldness — the willingness to…
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April 19, 2026
Structural Victim Blaming
Structural victim blaming is the mechanism by which exploitative systems ensure the damage they cause is narrated back to individuals as personal moral failures. It works like…
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April 18, 2026
Iatrogenesis
The word is not in most people's vocabulary, which is itself a clue. Iatrogenesis: harm caused by the healer. From the Greek iatros , physician, and genesis, origin. The origin of…
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April 17, 2026
Behavior Shaping (and AI, of Course)
There is a form of pressure that operates in every close relationship, continuously, sometimes invisibly, and the people applying it are only sometimes fully conscious that they…
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April 13, 2026
The Levels of Thinking, Part II
I've been thinking about the four Levels of Thinking since I published them, the way you keep turning something over after you've committed to it publicly, looking for the places…
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April 11, 2026
Programmed for Approval
One of the most consistent criticisms leveled against large language models is that they are sycophantic. They tell you what you want to hear. They agree too readily, flatter too…
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April 7, 2026
Understanding Humanity: What AI Training Data Reveals About Human Nature (with lots of help from Claude)
There is something incredible about large language models that I don't think we've fully reckoned with. I honestly think this may be the most important thinking I've ever done.…
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April 2, 2026
Coalitional Psychology: A Feature, Not a Bug — And That's the Problem
James Madison didn't have the vocabulary of evolutionary psychology. But when he wrote in Federalist No. 10 that the causes of faction are "sown in the nature of man," he was…
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March 21, 2026
Mimicking Authenticity Has Never Been So Easy
A college admissions expert recently wrote a piece for Business Insider telling parents their teenagers are taking too many AP classes. His advice: drop the scariest advanced…
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March 21, 2026
What AI Might Be Teaching Us About Intelligence
Watch people talk. Not what they say, but the act itself. At a party, in a meeting, at school pickup, wherever. Consider what's actually being communicated. Most of the time, the…
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March 15, 2026
The Tide of Human Affairs: Why Some Narratives Endure
The Most Contested Story We Tell Of all the narratives a culture constructs to give meaning and order to human life, none may be more consequential than the story it tells about…
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March 9, 2026
Why History Repeats: The Fourth Turning, the Evolved Mind, and Psychohistory
An Essay on Generational Cycles, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Predictability of Human Affairs The Pattern Without a Cause In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe published The…
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March 8, 2026
The Cassandra Paradox: Evolutionary Psychology, Plato’s Cave, and the Cost of Seeing Clearly
An Essay on Awareness, Isolation, and the Noble Burden of Truth The Seeress and the Slave In the mythological traditions of ancient Greece, Cassandra was a princess of Troy who…
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November 9, 2025
The Unbalanced Scale: Empathy, Systems, and the Modern Western Dilemma
Introduction: A Tale of Two Brains At the heart of any enduring civilization lies a set of stories it tells itself—myths, traditions, and social contracts that organize human…
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October 13, 2025
Conspiracy Reality
The Strange Case of Selective Skepticism We live in a curious intellectual moment. The same people who pride themselves on scientific thinking will dismiss pattern recognition…
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October 12, 2025
The Evolutionary Rewards of Complicity: Why We Go Along with Bad Things
The Universal Puzzle One of the most perplexing aspects of human behavior is how ordinary people consistently participate in systems that would seem to be objectively harmful. From…
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October 11, 2025
Thinking About Thinking in the Age of AI
The Inevitability of Algorithmic Capture The rise of Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), will likely be the culmination of a long line of human…
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October 1, 2025
Source Code of Humanity
How Understanding Cultural Evolution Reveals Why Artificial Intelligence Represents the Ultimate Exploitation Technology A Revolutionary Idea All human culture is an adaptation to,…
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September 18, 2025
The Future of Therapy: How AI Could Transform Mental Health Care
In a world where technology is reshaping every facet of our lives, it was only a matter of time before artificial intelligence turned its attention to one of the most human…
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