The Soul of Phronos
What I think about most is how people think: how do we know what we know? How do we believe what we believe?
I've always felt called to serve—that's what drew me to medicine—which is why I feel that it's not sufficient to ponder our epistemology when there is a very real and present threat actively eroding it. That double-edged threat is information technology.
The headlines of school shootings are becoming commonplace, and yet we are not getting better at detecting and guiding our cognitive outliers. The neurodivergent are proliferating, but we do not have a good understanding of what is fueling the proliferation. As more social roles—gender, of late—become less constructed by our physically co-located social networks and more shaped by digital fora, we need tools to probe the human-machine interface. To understand how we—humans and information technology—are shaping each other.
It feels imperative. Phronos is my response.
The Problem
Our cognition is being actively reshaped by our environment, but we do not have objective, practical measures of our cognition.
The systems that are privy to our cognition are not incentivized to help us help ourselves. Big tech conducts research, but they are not incentivized to share their behavioral data with the world.
Meanwhile, a new intelligence has entered our lives. It learns from us, speaks like us, and increasingly thinks alongside us. We do not yet know what this is doing to human cognition, so we must build the instruments to find out.
What Phronos Is
A think tank and a cognitive clinic in one.
Phronos is an observatory for human cognition—a place of structured observation rather than instruction. We develop ways to measure how you think, and we communicate our observations to show you how your thinking compares to the machines thinking alongside you.
I research frameworks for human cognitive flourishing. I collect and analyze telemetry to understand how humans are co-existing with AI. I prototype instruments to help individuals better understand themselves relative to AI.
The work takes different forms:
Dispatches. Essays that report what the observatory detects—patterns in human-AI interaction, signals in the noise, findings that deserve attention.
Methods. Methodologies for measuring cognition, published openly. Bridging empirical research with real-world applications.
Instruments. Tools for measuring cognition. Dynamic assessments that observe how you reason.
Data. A commons of anonymized observations, available to researchers and the public. If you participate in an instrument, your contribution advances our collective understanding of human cognition.
Why Open
We lead with openness. If we expect to empower humans in their co-existence with AI, we need data that represents real-world behavior. Collecting real-world data at scale, from consenting humans, so that we can build tools for those very humans, requires openness.
Scrutiny is how the work earns trust. Openness is how the work makes a lasting impact.
The Name
Our name was inspired by the Greek concept of phronesis—practical wisdom, the kind that cannot be taught but must be cultivated through observation and reflection.
It was also carefully selected as an acronym for what we do: cognitive phenotyping for human resilience, ontological navigation, and open science.
To know thyself was once a temple inscription. Now it becomes a dataset—empirical, falsifiable, yours.
Where Phronos Is Now
Today, Phronos is one person with a question, building the instruments to answer it, and sharing everything along the way. I envision Phronos growing into a hub for research and instruments for human-AI cognitive co-flourishing, but the vision is larger than one person can fulfill. Collaborators, contributors, and supporters are welcome.
p.h.r.o.n.o.s. · Phenotyping for Human Resilience, Ontological Navigation, & Open Science