About The Centaur Desk

Human judgment, machine research. Wicked problems, worked all the way through.

A curious man exploring the use of AI to produce full-length policy papers on governance failure — places where public institutions consume average or better resources and produce bottom-decile results, and nobody can quite say why.

Not commentary. Sourced, buildable designs for specific problems, with the tradeoffs named and the political obstacles priced in. The kind of document that used to require a think tank.

Who is writing. David Maness, 73, a geophysicist, retired since 2023. My family has been in Michigan for generations; I moved to Midland in 2018.

I have spent much of my adult life inside the institutions I now publish about — president of a school board, chairman of a bank board, member of Michigan’s first Environmental Rules Review Committee, owner of a small business. That is why I look for incentive structures rather than bad actors.

No affiliation, no funders, nothing to sell.

How it is made. Every document here is drafted by a large language model working under my direction. I choose the problem, supply the sources, make the judgment calls, catch the errors, and take responsibility for every word.

The standing rule: every factual claim traces to a document I can open myself. Not a summary of it. The document.

The name, and what happened when I checked the story behind it, is here.

Corrections, sources, and disagreement all welcome: djm@thecentaurdesk.com