Modern distress is accurate signaling about a world that no longer fits you. Loneliness, anxiety, the pull of the feed: mostly these are old systems doing their job, firing because something real is missing and the world keeps handing you a convincing fake instead. You are not broken. Your surroundings are.
The science of what a human is built to need already exists, scattered across a century of research and never assembled. Cor assembles it. Once it is in one place, you can hold any environment or technology up against what a human actually requires, and build the ones that fit.
What you want right now comes out of machinery that evolved for a different world. In this one those wants get hijacked: the food, the feed, the slot machine. Train an AI on revealed preference and you optimise the hijack. Cor maps the machinery underneath, so there is something to aim at besides the click.
The Optimizer Without a Target →the paper
Anxiety, exhaustion and craving are not defects. They are accurate readings from working hardware in conditions it was never built for. Enhance the human before you fix the conditions and all you do is make the mismatch bigger.
Read the essay →the whole argument, written by hand
Cor is an evidence-graded atlas of what a human being needs. It maps the systems behind what people want, feel, fear and chase; what each of those systems is actually asking for; and which modern substitutes set off the signal and deliver nothing. The tools for people and the alignment work for machines both read from it.
The atlas is public. Every claim has its evidence attached, and the open questions are marked as open. Read what it is and how far to trust it, or open the live map.
About Cor →what it is, how it was built, how far to trust it
Open the atlas →live counts and the full map
It is an atlas, not a finished specification. It is not a rejection of therapy, medicine or crisis care; most of its evidence comes from those fields, and nothing here 'treats' or 'cures' anyone if a real disease is present. And the fault is never in the person. The fault is in the gap between the world a human is built for and the world a human lives in.
Demismatch is one person, Maarten Rischen, working full time for a year. I did the thinking first, by hand. Then I built an AI pipeline to do the corpus work: find the papers, grade them, check every source. A framework you are meant to check line by line should not rest on how sure I am, so the method is published and every claim links to a DOI or PMID and a word-for-word quote.
Next step is hiring a domain researcher to audit the whole atlas, free to change, downgrade or delete anything that does not hold up, with outside review alongside. I am raising money to pay for it. About the founder →
Maarten Rischen
Grants, researchers, corrections, anything else. I read every message.