The Human Baseline

An observation architecture becomes dangerous when it mistakes prevalence for pathology or salience for intent. The central research task is therefore upstream of threat classification: establish what ordinary people actually think, feel, imagine, seek and conceal before assigning moral or security meaning to those signals. Concresca treats this as an epistemic problem before it becomes a rights problem.

Empirical work supports caution. Radomsky and colleagues interviewed 777 nonclinical university students at 15 sites in 13 countries across six continents; 93.6% reported at least one unwanted intrusive thought, image or impulse in the prior three months. That finding does not imply every intrusive thought is benign in every context. It does show why the mere presence of unwanted mental content cannot rationally serve as a rare marker of dangerousness.

Joyal and colleagues surveyed 1,516 adults about sexual fantasies and found many fantasies often treated as unusual were statistically common. Oosterwijk experimentally demonstrated voluntary interest in some material involving death, violence or harm. These studies point in the same architectural direction: content that sounds disturbing to a literal classifier can arise inside ordinary curiosity, sexuality and cognition.

The Human Baseline Atlas therefore records fifty examples as boundary tests. Each entry asks what was actually observed, what alarming interpretation might tempt an optimizer, what benign explanations remain, what additional evidence would be required, and whether a nonconsenting person has actually been harmed. The atlas intentionally avoids the opposite mistake: once specific target linkage, coercion, fraud, attempt or harmful conduct appears, the baseline no longer ends the inquiry.