Sitting with a MadMind Podcast

Authors PhilPeople Profile for Full Papers We are living through a season of thinning. It is a quiet, pervasive sensation, like the slow draining of color from a landscape or the way a conversation falters when the participants realize they are no longer speaking the same language. We have spent the better part of a century drawing increasingly detailed maps of our world—our bodies, our markets, o...

Beyond Optimization: Can We Build Alignment into the Architecture? For too long, I have felt that we are approaching the AI alignment problem from the wrong end of the telescope. We treat alignment as a correction—a series of patches applied after the hard work of training is finished. We take a base model, we pour in reinforcement learning or constitutional constraints, and we hope the safety sti...

The Canary in the Tissue: Why Early-Onset Cancer is a Civilizational Report Card We’ve spent a century trying to "cure the trace" while the upstream constraints of our biology—and our society—are quietly thinning. From the rise of cancer in 30-year-olds to the "hallucinations" of AI, the pattern of failure is the same. In our latest podcast, we dive into a provocative series of working papers by S...

For over fifty years, the American public has been told that the War on Drugs is a tragic, expensive failure. But what if the results we see today—unprecedented mass incarceration and a thriving global drug trade—are actually signs of a policy operating exactly as designed? Our latest audio overview, based on the provocative record “The Poppy and the Flag,” dismantles the public myth of drug inter...