What if there was a mechanism that could tell you who to trust and when, in any domain, at any scale?
Not a reputation score. Not a popularity contest. A mathematical primitive that told you if people were lying. The same mechanism that tells you which temperature sensor is reliable in summer but drifts in winter could tell you which political forecaster is accurate during elections but wrong between them. Which journalist breaks real stories. Which AI model hallucinates least on topics that matter to you. The data changes. The trust mechanism doesn't.
My name is John Ash. I've been building this for twelve years. I turned down every investor and every acquisition offer because this thing cannot belong to the system it's designed to replace.
In March 2026, I proved it works. It learns which signal is most truthful and reliable over time, across any domain, and constructs a greater truth weighted by time and source. That's not a metaphor. An ablation proof removes each component and reruns the experiment. Without any single piece, the model can't learn who to trust. Performance drops to random chance, indistinguishable from guessing. The full system learns which sources are reliable, in which domains, at which times. The proof isn't that it works. The proof is that nothing less works. A decade of work. One clean result.
Every system that needs to act on truth hits the same wall: how do you know which source to trust? The entire industry calls it unsolvable. Ŧrust solves it.
Here's where it stands. The proof exists but I have no backing. No VC, no institution, no corporate sponsor. That's by design. I'm looking for patrons in the original sense, people who fund work that matters and ask nothing in return but that it exists. The distance between a proof and a product is not large. It just requires that I'm free to build.
The Receipts
-
2014
Studied prediction markets. Saw immediately that they got the mechanism right and the scope wrong. Expanded to four belief types. Each timestamped, each tied to identity. Prediction markets are a billion-dollar industry in 2026. This work started twelve years ago.
-
2017
Built generative text models that could traverse latent space and produce coherent language. "Attention Is All You Need" was published months later. I didn't know about it. I was already doing it.
-
2017
Published The Cognicist Manifesto. The attention economy would collapse democracy. Truth needed to be tokenized differently than profit. Constitutional AI didn't exist yet. RLHF wasn't a term. Anthropic wouldn't be founded for four more years.
-
2019
Released Strange Hymns. 21 tracks. Philosophy as music.
-
2020
First cohort of the Design Science Studio through the Buckminster Fuller Institute. 144 people designing regenerative futures using Fuller's Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.
-
2021
Interviewed Jordan Hall on Civium. Governance, collective intelligence, and the design of institutions that can think.
-
2021
Interviewed Robin Hanson on Futarchy. The man who formalized prediction markets, talking with the guy trying to go further.
-
2022
Featured by Daniel Schmachtenberger at The Stoa in "Emerging Projects in Public Sensemaking." Schmachtenberger highlighted Cognicism and Iris as one of three projects doing real work in collective intelligence. "John has done more than most anybody I know on trying to train [language models] on important societal content."
-
2023
Conversation with Forrest Landry on regenerative futures and the ethics of technology.
-
2023
Began formal timestamp encoding research. Can a neural network learn what time it is from a raw number of seconds? Every existing approach assumed you'd tell the model what time scales to look at. I wanted it to find them itself.
-
2024
Lead engineer at the Society Library, the same project Schmachtenberger highlighted two years earlier. Building the infrastructure for structured public sensemaking.
-
2024
Launched the retro-comic philosophy Instagram. 535+ posts. 20,000 followers. The art isn't separate from the research. Same lens, different medium.
-
2025
Proved timestamp encoding works. Multi-band learnable frequencies from raw Unix seconds across 13 orders of magnitude. No feature engineering. This is the part most people said couldn't work. It works.
-
2025
Completed the Mind Gardening Oracle Deck. 78 cards. Philosophy you can hold in your hands.
-
2025
Panel on "Positive Visions for Technology in the Era of AI" at the Denizen gathering with Tristan Harris and others. Denizen, Sonoma County. October 2025.
-
2026
Proved Ŧrust works. Full model: 87% test accuracy. Every ablation scores at random. The complete triplet is necessary. Nothing less is sufficient. A decade of work. One clean result. All three legs or nothing.
This page exists because the alternative to capitalism
hasn't replaced capitalism yet. Thank you for seeing early.
Support this work
Every tier gets the same access. The difference is how much weight you want to put behind the belief. All tiers are equal. Pay what the work is worth to you.
Voluntary monthly support. Cancel anytime.