Maethel
What is this explanation taking for granted?
The starting point is usually a question that doesn’t quite sit right with me. An explanation feels incomplete. A system produces an outcome nobody seems to want. A principle works in one place and I wonder whether it might explain something somewhere completely different. So I pull at it.
I’ve always been interested in how things work. When I was younger, that curiosity was mostly mechanical. As I’ve gotten older, it has moved towards societal systems, human behaviour and the principles that govern our existence. Maethel is where I follow that curiosity.
Maethel finds the mechanism under a story. It asks whether the same mechanism runs somewhere else. It says what would prove it does not. Each essay shows the matches and the misses, and claims only the matches.
I’m particularly interested in ideas that cross boundaries. Could a solution developed in Formula 1 tell us something about hospital handovers? Could engineering principles help explain institutions? Could the problems surrounding nuclear power tell us as much about human coordination as they do about energy? Could ideas from economics, biology or computing illuminate something outside the field they came from?
AI is part of how I work. I use it to challenge arguments, search for counterexamples, connect ideas to existing research and push against explanations that are becoming too comfortable. It isn’t there to agree with me. Ideally, it makes it harder for a weak idea to survive. I’d rather test an idea than defend it. That’s Maethel.