Modern distress is accurate signaling about a world that no longer fits you. The loneliness, the anxiety, the pull of the feed - in most cases these are old systems working exactly as built, firing because something real is missing and the world keeps handing over a convincing stand-in instead. You are not broken. The room you are standing in is.
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 a person wants right now is produced by machinery that evolved for a different world. In this one, those wants get hijacked - the food, the feed, the slot machine. An AI trained on revealed preference optimises the hijack. Cor maps the machinery underneath, so there is something to aim at other than the click. It does not claim to know your true preference. It documents what it cannot yet pin down.
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. Anyone proposing to enhance the human before repairing those conditions is upgrading a machine while ignoring its warning lights.
Read the essay →the whole argument, written by hand
Cor is that work: an evidence-graded atlas of what a human being needs. It maps the systems that drive what people want, feel, fear, and pursue, what each one was built to need, and what only fires its cue without supplying the function. Everything applied, for machines and for people, draws on it.
The atlas is public, its evidence attached, its open questions marked. 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, and it says so. It is not a rejection of therapy, medicine, or crisis care - most of its evidence comes from inside those fields, and nothing here treats or cures anyone. And it never puts the fault 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 the work of one person, Maarten Rischen, over a year full-time. The thinking came first, by hand. An AI pipeline built out from there under his direction, finding the evidence, grading it, and checking every source. A framework meant to be read line by line should not rest on one person's conviction, so the method is published and every claim opens onto a DOI, a PMID, and a word-for-word quote.
The next phase brings in a domain researcher to re-audit the atlas, free to change, downgrade, or delete anything that does not survive a harder look, with independent review alongside. Funds are being raised for exactly that. About the founder →
Maarten Rischen
Grants, researchers, corrections, anything else. I read every message.