A philosophy that is allowed to lose

Break It.
Test It.
Build It.

Human Scale is a public experiment in making modern life work better for actual humans. The doctrine is versioned. The evidence against it is published. The useful parts are meant to leave the website and enter real life.

Do not join because you agree. Find one claim that fails reality — or one small thing worth testing.

Four ways in

5 minutesTake the Human Scale Audit →

Use the private, no-signup tool, then tell us which question is badly framed, culturally narrow, ableist, double-counted, or missing.

 Skeptics wantedBreak a claim →

Read the Evidence Atlas and audits. Bring stronger evidence, counterexamples, failed replications, implementation failures, or a better model.

 Do somethingRun an experiment →

Try Human Time, Quiet Technology, a Third-Place Inventory, a Bureaucracy Receipt, or a local project with a real receipt.

 First local labBuild in San Diego →

Help produce one useful local map, shade/walking receipt, bureaucracy receipt, or public session that stands on its own.
Launch challenge: find one sentence in Human Scale that is too certain. Show the missing evidence, tradeoff, population, failure mode, or counterexample. If the criticism survives review, the doctrine should change.

This is not rhetorical openness. Earlier evidence audits already narrowed claims about ancestral social scale, localism, nature, shorter work, technology, energy, economics, and governance. The project should keep accumulating visible corrections.

What Human Scale is trying to hold together

Keep modern medicine, science, computers, global knowledge, abundant energy, specialized institutions, cities, markets, and powerful technology where they work.

Recover more human time, agency, health, relationships, useful competence, ecological durability, intelligible institutions, public space, childhood, care, and the ability to participate in the systems around us.

Human Scale is not “small good, big bad.” Scale has to justify itself. The right scale follows the problem.

What we need from outsiders

Researchers

Better sources, contrary findings, causal designs, uncertainty, and places where our evidence grade is wrong.

Builders

Tools, accessibility improvements, open data, visualizations, local experiments, and simpler interfaces.

Practitioners

What fails in real workplaces, schools, hospitals, cities, farms, families, governments, and communities.

Critics

Hidden ideology, unintended consequences, historical counterexamples, rights problems, and strong arguments against the project.

Open the contribution paths → · View the public repository ↗

Share one useful thing, not a brand

These are launch starters, not scripts you must repeat. Rewrite them in your own voice.

I built a five-minute audit around a question I keep coming back to: how much does your everyday environment actually support human life? It looks at movement, sleep, nature, community, time, work, technology, place, security and meaning. No signup. The score is provisional, and I want criticism more than agreement. Which question is wrong or missing? https://tmsteph.com/human-scale/audit/?utm_source=direct_share&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=human_scale_public_v01
I wrote a philosophy, then started publishing evidence audits designed to make my own favorite claims lose. The project is called Human Scale. The rule is simple: evidence, hypothesis, values and political proposals are different things. If reality contradicts the doctrine, the doctrine changes. If you enjoy breaking frameworks, start here: https://tmsteph.com/human-scale/launch/?utm_source=direct_share&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=human_scale_public_v01
What is one part of modern life that is technically efficient but clearly wastes human time, agency, health, attention or community? I'm collecting examples and counterexamples for an open project called Human Scale. I don't need agreement — I need specific cases we can measure or test.

Advertising rules

Useful before persuasive. Promote a tool, result, map, experiment, correction, or question.
Disclose authorship and sponsorship. No fake grassroots support.
No repeated unwanted outreach. Silence is not an invitation to keep contacting someone.
No sensitive-vulnerability targeting. Do not target fear, illness, religion, family crisis, financial distress, or political vulnerability.
No fake certainty. Link evidence for empirical claims and label values as values.
Earn paid amplification. Do not spend meaningfully until an organic artifact produces useful downstream action.

What counts as growth?

Not only page views. Better outcomes are: an outside evidence challenge, a doctrine correction, an experiment run by someone else, a useful local receipt, a contributor, a public institution responding to a concrete finding, or a tool that keeps being used after the launch post disappears.

If growth makes the project more inflammatory, more partisan, more certain than the evidence, or less useful, it is the wrong growth.

The invitation

You can agree later.

First, help us find where this breaks.

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