Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Reception: the trace the work leaves in public

Last updated 2026-08-05 · Markdown version

This is a LIVING page, extended as new material accrues.

We don’t typically solicit testimonials. Asking people to certify their transformation would usually be metric-seeking by other means, and our Philosophy leans hard against it: instrumenting the work deforms it, and a harvested endorsement is an instrument. So the stories in Impact arrive as they arise, unsolicited — a practice we hold as a default, not an absolutism.

Reception is different. It is the trace the work leaves in public — citations, replies, invitations, adoptions, coverage — made by others, on their own initiative, in records we do not control. Nobody was asked. It already exists, whether or not we collect it, and collecting it violates nothing: we are pointing, not harvesting.

One calibration before the list: the people behind this initiative carry decades of work, and this page is young. The largest single body of reception already sits elsewhere in this corpus — the two-decade media record: 200+ documented instances of journalists, broadcasters, and institutions seeking this work out, from congressional committees (2006–2008) to this year’s profiles. Read that page as reception at scale; read this one as the finer-grained recent layer — scholarly replies, adoptions, invitations — which deepens with every update.

This page records that trace. Every item names who engaged, what they engaged with, when, and where the record lives; every URL was checked on 2026-08-06 — resolving directly, or, where a site blocks automated fetchers, noted as such — and journal metadata was additionally verified against the Crossref registry. Where an item involves our own people or platforms, we say so: this page exists to be checked, not to persuade. For the corpus-wide map of claims to independent records, see Verify this corpus independently.

Scholarly engagement: the 2026 preprints in the peer-reviewed literature

The scholarship page describes the 2026 preprint program and its deliberately unconventional publishing path. The reception fact: a preprint posted in January 2026 was being cited in peer-reviewed journals within months.

For calibration: the Mishra & Henriksen citation is not fully independent of the initiative’s orbit — Punya Mishra is a long-time collaborator of Sean Leahy’s (they co-host the Learning Futures podcast and have co-authored). The Philosophy & Technology citation has no such connection that we are aware of. Both are peer-reviewed records the initiative does not control.

Public scholarly engagement: the honest-non-signals thread and the Dawkins exchange

Beyond formal citation, the Cognitive Trojan Horse framework was picked up and used in public argument by a working scholar — then used again when a live event made it relevant.

Read as a sequence: the framework left our hands in January, was used by another scholar in February, and by May anchored a multi-platform public conversation. Philosophy explains why we record reception this way rather than as counts.

Invitations and platforms

Invitations are reception in another form: someone else deciding the work merits their stage.

Adoptions

Profiles

How to read this page

This list will always lag reality. We track reception opportunistically, not systematically — by design: standing up monitoring infrastructure to count mentions would be the KPI reflex under another name (see Philosophy). Items appear here when we happen to encounter them and they survive verification. Assume more exists than is recorded; do not assume the recorded items are the largest or most important — only that they are the ones that left checkable public traces.

This is a LIVING page: entries are added as reception accrues and is verified, and existing entries are corrected rather than embellished.