ESSAYS

Original research and thinking on human development

The Highway to Nowhere
Where all our conversations go to sit in traffic

Communication platforms once served the banter, the conversations about nothing that build trust and belonging. Then every kind of message was routed onto the same road: intimate, professional, transactional, all of it neck and neck. Opening the app became an on-ramp into rush hour. We adjusted by thinning what we say and who we present, and the adjustment followed us…

By Milo de Prieto

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22 · September · 2026

FOLLOW NEW ESSAYS BY FEED

Who are you, really?
Descartes, Panksepp, and the Iterative Self

Descartes argued, “I think therefore I am.” Jaak Panksepp countered that the Core Self originates in the deeper structures of the brain so, “I feel therefore I am.” I argue both and more, “I predict and process reality in ever progressive and developmental iteration, interdependent with my society, therefore I am.”

By Milo de Prieto

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08 · May · 2026
Abdicating Our Advantage
Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage Part III

For the first time, global-scale coordination is technically and materially feasible. The major barrier is not raw capacity but the abdication of our cognitive capacity to solve problems well. The philosophy defending extraction sounds eloquent and well-reasoned. It is the flailing of a mind driven by stress and the fears it produces — of the other, of scarcity, of submission.

By Milo de Prieto

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17 · April · 2026
What We Talk About When We Talk About Intelligence
The Context Problem at the Heart of LLMs

The problem with AI isn’t technical. It’s that we handed the wrong thing the wrong job and called it intelligence. Intelligence is far more than what those claiming they’ve invented the artificial version actually is. LLMs, for all their sophistication, are still in a pre-neuroscience era of their own development. Context isn’t a feature. It’s the whole game.

By Milo de Prieto

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03 · April · 2026
Interdependence: The Biological Imperative of Society
Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage Part II

Humans evolved a costly advantage: higher-level cognition. But it does not develop, or function well, in isolation. Society is the developmental habitat of the human mind: a coordination ecology of shared norms, cumulative teaching, and institutions that store knowledge beyond any one person. The practical implication is stewardship—of selves, communities, and the scaffolds that make a coherent life possible.

By Milo de Prieto

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27 · February · 2026
Neurodivergence: Responsibility and Opportunity
Clinical meaning, personal responsibility, and the practice of deliberate skill.

Terms coined to recognize people with diagnosed neurodevelopmental conditions create new problems when they become identity categories. They divide people and make neurodevelopment, a process relevant to everyone, seem like somebody else’s concern. After diagnosis, responsibility and opportunity lie in understanding and stewarding one’s neurology without judgment, building practical supports, and developing stable wellbeing. The work applies to everyone.

By Milo de Prieto

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18 · February · 2026
Coherence: Humankind’s Advantage and Developmental Imperative
Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage: Part I

Humans are not unique in intelligence or cooperation, what is distinctive is how these evolved in our biology: language, metacognition, and the capacity to model reality, revise beliefs, and coordinate at scale. Our challenge is integrating our impulses. Coherence is the trainable coordination of many signals across time, shaped through executive function and social scaffolding into stable, adaptive capability.

By Milo de Prieto

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17 · February · 2026