An evidence-graded atlas of what humans need, and the first inter-rater reliability study of whether it holds in anyone else's hands.
An evidence-graded atlas of what humans need, and the first inter-rater reliability study of whether it holds in anyone else's hands.
Project Details
Updated 08/03/26 · Edited by orgI am asking for $22,000 minimum, $36,000 ideal, to put Cor in front of people who have never worked on it and find out whether it holds.
Cor is an evidence-graded atlas of what a human being needs. It lists fifteen motivational-emotional systems, and for each one what activates it, what resolves it, and what fake proxies activate it too but without supplying the actual function. It is a stated method applied to a large body of sourced literature from the width of human sciences, published so it can be re-run.
It comes out of more than a decade working with this subject matter in various forms, and one year full-time and unfunded to build the atlas itself.
Demismatch is the umbrella initiative. Most modern suffering is an accurate response of the human organism in a world that it is simply not made for, and those mismatches get hijacked through fake, often technological, proxies that fire the cue without meeting the need. None of this is primitivist or anti-tech, and my materials will show that. The goal is demismatching the world so it fits humans.
AI matters a lot here, because it increasingly is that environment or at the very least shapes it, and it is being optimized against preferences. The field is working on this, but doesn't define what the wanting is a signal from, let alone what a human really needs. That is why I built Cor.
The strict academic approach is to honor the importance of the subject by removing my own subjective bias and opinion from it as much as possible. In that same vein, this grant funds coding manuals that make the fifteen systems executable, and independent raters, strangers who have not worked on this at all, to apply them.
I'm not asking to be trusted. I'm asking to be checked.
Read the work:
- The atlas and the fifteen mechanisms
- The derivation
- The gap register, logged before anyone asked
- A worked case: a lonely 22-year-old and a chatbot
- cor-engine, a working prototype where every citation resolves to a real record or the report doesn't ship
- decode:talk, the first tool built on the atlas
- Cor: academic breakdown and You're Not Broken, a five-minute explainer
Theory of Impact
Updated 10/07/26 · By grantmaking.aiAI is increasingly the environment humans live in, and it's being optimized against what people want. But wanting is a signal from the human organism that something is missing, and nothing in the alignment stack says what. So an optimized AI can satisfy the signal perfectly while the thing the signal was about goes unmet, and the satisfaction, short and endlessly repeatable, reads as proof it worked.
That's how you get a system that follows instructions, is non-deceptive and perfectly preference satisfying, and still optimizes people into dependency and a narrowing of what they can do for themselves. No treacherous turn to catch, no deception to detect, no capability threshold to gate - none of the machinery built for x-risk sees this one. It's a curtailment pathway with no measurement layer, and the endpoint is a species that got everything it asked for, can no longer do anything for itself, and never once got what the wanting was actually about.
Cor is a candidate for the missing layer. Fifteen systems, and for each what activates it, what actually resolves it, and what only fires the cue. That gives an alignment target something to score against other than the satisfaction it produced. It's the difference between a model that the company and one that points towards the real thing.
People
Updated 10/07/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
Funding Details
- Apr 1, 2025
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- Seeking first disbursed grant. $10,000 SFF speculation grant awarded, not yet disbursed pending fiscal sponsor transition.
- In transition; Manifund distributes the grantmaking.ai round grant directly
Discussion
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