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And why that might be the most human thing about it.

There's a particular kind of relief that arrives uninvited, like sunlight breaking through a cloud you'd stopped watching. I felt it while reading a paper from Anthropic and EPFL this year — a paper with the delightful, audacious title The Hot Mess of AI. It arrived not like a research paper so much as a permission slip. Permission to stop fearing the cold, calculating god-machine, and to start recognizing something far more familiar in its place.

The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? — Hegley, Soldikstein et al., Anthropic / EPFL, ICLR 2026

• Plus 22 additional papers for context, see more here

Thanks to Cecile G. Tamura for flagging this paper.

Series: The Hidden Logic: How Chaos, Flow, and Matter Shape Intelligence

Learning To Dance With Chaos
S6 E4 Dec 21, 2025

The Wet Logic of Being: Why Silicon Dreams Can’t Wake Up
S6 E8 Dec 29, 2025

The Gentle Art of Taming Chaos: What Neural Networks Teach Us About Living With Turbulence
S6 E20 Jan, 22, 2026

When Chaos Becomes the Solution: What Dancing Particles Teach Us About Hidden Order S6 E22 Jan 26, 2026

When Chaos Becomes the Compass: What Quantum Computing Teaches Us About Living With Uncertainty
S6 E26 Feb 3, 2026

The Comfort of Chaos: Why the Smartest AI Will Always Be a Mess
S6 E36 Feb, 23, 2026

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

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Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

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http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

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The most stunning discovery comes from recent research on Spanish crows. For centuries, we thought crows were just loud, aggressive scavengers. Turns out we were listening at the wrong volume.

When researchers placed sensitive microphones near crow families—close enough to capture sounds below human hearing range—they discovered an entire secondary language. Soft, intimate calls used exclusively within family units. Parents teaching children how to extract food from complex sources. Coordinating group tasks. Expressing what researchers described as 'joy, longing, and fear.'

We missed this for centuries because we never put the microphone close enough.

Think about that. An entire dimension of crow society—their whisper network, their family secrets—was invisible to us. If we went for centuries missing the crows whispering to their children, what else are we missing?

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the companion article

Let me tell you something about systems.

Systems — whether they govern corporations, nations, or the inner architecture of an elite athlete’s mind — tend to demand perfection in exchange for belonging. They offer a transaction: give us everything, and we will give you a place at the table. Jennifer Jones, Canadian curling legend and the subject of our latest deep dive on Heliox, understood this transaction from childhood. She accepted it. She even mastered it. And then, after decades of being one of the most decorated women in the history of her sport, she did something the system never quite planned for.

Rock Star: My Life On and Off the Ice

Why This Olympic Sport Bothers Physicists

Jennifer Jones (curler) - Wikipedia

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs