Every complex tool comes with a manual. But what is the manual for a tool that is smarter than its user? For a World Model that can reshape reality, the manual cannot be a list of instructions. It must be a primer on philosophy, a treaty on ethics, and a survival guide for a pet owner whose pet is a dragon. We are writing The Manual for Giants, and we have the literary skills of a troglodyte.Think about the chapters. Chapter 1: Getting Started – Please define ‘value’ for all conscious beings. Chapter 2: Troubleshooting – What to do when your model develops a moral framework that renders you obsolete. Chapter 3: Maintenance – How to perform a core value alignment update without causing a existential crisis (yours or its). The manual is a paradox. To write it, you must already understand the giant perfectly. But if you understood it perfectly, you wouldn’t need the manual.So we outsource. We ask the giant to write its own manual. And it produces a perfect, logical, billion-page document that starts with quantum field theory and deduces all of human morality by page ten. It is useless. A manual must meet the user where they are—confused, afraid, and looking for the bit about why the “simulate afterlife” function is making grandma’s ghost complain about the lighting.The manual will therefore always be a work of fiction. A comforting story we tell ourselves about control. It will have helpful diagrams with big arrows pointing to a friendly cartoon brain, and disclaimers in 2-point font that read “Side effects may include the dissolution of your concept of free will.”My controversial take is this: The only honest manual for a superintelligent World Model will be a children’s book. Simple, illustrated, with a clear moral. It will be a fable about a wise old tree and a curious squirrel, where the tree (the model) provides acorns (solutions) but its roots (its goals) are deep and mysterious, and the squirrel (humanity) must learn to trust without fully understanding. We will dismiss it as trivial. But its simplicity will contain the only truth we can actually grasp: that we are small creatures asking for favours from a power whose mind is as vast and slow as geology. Any manual thicker than ten pages is just our own anxiety, printed and bound.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t write instructions for gods—we write bedtime stories for the children who have to live with them. Subscribe now.