Ale is a time-honoured catalyst for dialectical sparring and the promulgation of novel conceptions. The public house, after all, was often the unofficial annex to more formal venues of invention—whether before or after a grand unveiling at places like the RSA House. Ideas have always needed a warm room and good company to ferment, and…

Introduction – Why baby‑NICER? We are building baby‑NICER because the hardest problems of this century—climate resilience, equitable prosperity, sustainable cities—will be solved not by lone geniuses but by diverse teams that deliberate and act together (Rock & Grant 2017 ; Woolley et al. 2010 ). At Towards People we champion more democratic, transparent and collaborative modes of work; recent evidence shows that…

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves.” — Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, §1 Introduction: The Unconscious as Commodity In the soot-slicked cafe houses of fin-de-siècle Vienna, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire wheezed toward collapse and nationalism clawed at the edges of cosmopolitan order,…

Introduction Is our attraction to echo chambers simply “human nature,” or can technology channel more expansive instincts? Pundits often treat homophily—the pull toward like-minded peers—as an unavoidable fact of life, claiming it dooms us to online spaces that reinforce our biases. Yet history, as well as modern research, reveals a broader repertoire in the human…

Join us on ManyFold now! Introduction: The Digital Speech Crisis A few weeks ago, I found myself catching up with an old college friend—let’s call him Ezra. He used to be the kind of person who devoured books like The Metaphysical Club and his recommendations routinely influenced me. His nuanced, questing intellect once made every…

Humanity has long grappled with the question of how best to combine many minds into one coherent whole—whether through bustling marketplaces or grand assemblies of knowledge. Today, we find ourselves at a watershed where that same pursuit of unity is taking shape in ensembles of artificial minds (LLMs in particular). In the spirit of Aristotle’s…

Philosophers from Socrates to Bertrand Russell have underscored that genuine agreement arises not from superficial accord but from reasoned dialogue that respects diverse viewpoints. Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action refines this principle into a vision of discourse aimed at consensus through rational argument. Recently, a paper in Science by Michael Henry Tessler et al.…