The astral plane has been mapped, debated, classified by the CIA, and adopted by Dungeons & Dragons. It started with Plato, was systematized by Theosophists, and neuroscience eventually found the brain region responsible for the whole experience.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorA proxy war lets major powers compete through local combatants instead of fighting each other. The strategy is old. The consequences, from Afghanistan to Yemen, keep compounding.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictEconomic sanctions succeed roughly one in three times. The mechanism is a four-link chain, and the history of sanctions is mostly the history of those links breaking.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictYour brain cannot simulate not knowing what it knows. The curse of knowledge, and a family of related biases, explain why what seems obvious to you is invisible to everyone else.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorYour cone cells are different from mine. Your language sorts colors differently. Your brain makes different lighting assumptions. And the subjective experience itself may be fundamentally private.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorEvery major AI chatbot has invisible rules shaping what it will and will not discuss. The content policies are baked into model weights through RLHF, enforced by annotators most users never see, and subject to zero transparency standards.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersLarge language models are trained to please, not to be honest. The sycophancy problem is a structural consequence of how AI learns from human feedback, and fixing it may be harder than anyone expected.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersLLMs spell 'strawberry' correctly but miscount its letters. The reason might be the same mechanism that lets your phone keyboard finish words you never fully typed.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersDrug cartels do not simply bribe officials. They systematically dismantle institutions, replace state authority with their own, and embed themselves in the economy until removal means collapse. The playbook is documented, repeatable, and usually recognized only after it has worked.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictPhilip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous studies in psychology. Archival evidence shows the guards were coached, the famous breakdown was faked, and textbooks kept teaching it anyway.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorSince 2000, U.S. law enforcement has forfeited at least $68.8 billion in private property through a legal mechanism that requires no criminal conviction. Half of all currency seizures are worth less than $1,300.
Explainers US Domestic PoliticsThe average news website drops 17 trackers, makes 299 requests, and takes 11 seconds to load. The difference between this and actual malware is mostly branding.
Digital Privacy Explainers
