MANY MINDED · manyminded.com

The Method

Exactly how the numbers on this site are made — the sources, the rules, the math, and the mistakes we've corrected. Check us, don't trust us.

What this is

Many Minded tracks one question daily: is the world moving toward a future where every basic need is available and effectively free — and how fast? We follow 11 needs (energy, health, food & water, shelter, knowledge, connection, mobility, goods, care, security, the commons) and compound the day's verified developments into a running index. It is a signal-momentum instrument built from curated news, not an official statistic — and this page exists so you can judge exactly how much weight to give it.

Where the signal comes from

Twice a day (13:53 and 01:00 UTC), we gather headlines from 58 live-validated sources — science wires, sector trade press, world news, and regional editions across India, Africa, Southeast Asia and China — interleaved so no outlet dominates. From ~500 candidates, an AI editor (Anthropic's claude-opus-4-8, run with the editorial charter below) selects the most significant developments and assigns each:

The charter's standing rules: landmark breakthroughs must never be crowded out by one loud sector; war, sanctions and export controls count as friction only when they materially hit a need (rated by supply/cost effect, not drama); de-escalation that restores supply counts as forward; hype, listicles and routine product PR are excluded; stories covered in recent days are not re-selected without a material new development. If the AI editor is unavailable, a crude keyword scorer takes over and we treat that as a degraded day — our own monitoring emails us when it happens.

Hosted briefs. Some signals carry a "read the brief" link to an article hosted here, produced by a three-stage clean room. First, an extractor reduces the source's reporting to a fact sheet — bare claims, numbers, dates, and the source's own caveats, in flat wording of its own (facts are free for anyone to state; the source's expression is not). Second, a separate writer composes the brief from the fact sheet alone — it never sees the source's prose, so it cannot copy or paraphrase it; briefs whose material is too thin are skipped rather than padded, and no figure, date, or quote is ever invented. Third, a fact-checker verifies the finished brief claim-by-claim against the source text: clean briefs are labeled AI-verified on the page, failures are labeled flagged with the reason, and briefs whose source text we could not fetch are labeled source-only — the label is always shown, including when the answer is unflattering. The original reporting is always named and linked from every brief, every brief's image is our own generated art, never the source's photograph, and each brief shows the live index measurements for the needs it touches. The brief is our read of why a development matters for abundance — it is not a substitute for the source's reporting, and we say so on the page.

How the index is computed

Every selected story applies its signed impact to its sector(s). A story repeated within 14 calendar days counts only once — the first time. Each sector's day-move is net points × 0.6%, clamped at ±14%; days carrying more than the ~18-story slate the scale was calibrated on are normalized down to slate-equivalent, so publishing more stories per day (a pipeline choice) cannot masquerade as the world moving faster. The overall index moves by the average of all 11 sector moves, damped ×0.6 — so breadth moves the needle and a single busy sector can't. It compounds from a base of 1000.

Because the feed deliberately surfaces mostly genuine advances, the index drifts upward almost every day. The informative number is therefore the pace versus typical: we compare any window against the median of all equal-length windows on record (sparse retrospective days excluded so history can't flatter the present). "Faster than usual" is news; "up" alone is not. The horizon view's "days pulled closer" uses a fixed exchange rate of 1.5 days per net impact point — a labeled editorial estimate, not a measurement. Per-story "days" figures in the feed use the same attribution math (which milestones a story touches, breadth-normalized, including its cross-sector ripples) at the same rate — story-specific, still an estimate.

What the percentages mean

The "% toward free" figures on the goal board are directional editorial estimates, not measured statistics — each need's sub-components scored against verified cost evidence (learning curves, time-prices, deployment data) and revised as evidence lands. The year-windows on the horizon milestones are honest guesses, labeled by confidence: measured curve, emerging, or speculative. We show our evidence line under every one.

Back data

The index history before 2026-06-21 is retrospective: 401 landmark events of 2025–2026 (dates and sources verified after the fact) merged under the live record. Live data always wins; retrospective days are marked in the data. They exist so the chart carries real history — not to manufacture a trend, which is also why they are excluded from the "typical pace" baseline.

Verification & corrections

Every displayed number is re-verified against primary sources on a rolling basis. The 2026-07-10 pass (three independent research agents) confirmed most figures and corrected these, live the same day:

wasnow
solar −99.6% since 1976 ($0.38/W, 2019 data)−99.7% (~$0.26/W, 2024, OWID)
cost-divergence chart, 2000–22 vintagerecomputed Jan 2000 → May 2026 from BLS CPI (hospital +306%, tuition +197%, childcare +160%)
"real housing +80% since 2000"that figure was nominal — corrected to +116% nominal
food ~11% of income9.7% of disposable income (2025, USDA ERS)
FDA AI devices: "none use LLMs"first LLM-based device cleared Dec 2025; 1,451 devices, ~76% radiology
"no large AI-tutor RCT exists"World Bank Nigeria RCT (+0.31 SD) published May 2025
flood AI: 80+ countries, 5-day lead100 countries / ~700M people, 7-day lead

When we're wrong, the correction ships and gets listed here. Known-stale items on the watch list right now: the 2026 Fusion Industry Association report (superseding our 2025 investment figures) and the mid-2026 Khanmigo RCT results.

Honesty constraints we hold ourselves to

The 58 sources

Feeds are health-checked weekly (HTTP, parseability, freshness) by automated monitoring; dead or stale feeds get replaced, not silently dropped.

The data is open

The cost-curve engine is public: the cost curves — live fitted price curves with intervals, gate crossings, the prediction ledger, calibration, and our backtested misses.

Every day's curated signals — sector, direction, impact, status, source link — are publicly readable, and the whole dashboard is open without an account. If you want the raw daily data for research or a build of your own, come inside and ask on the line.

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