Foundations
These are provisional design commitments. Empirical claims require evidence and remain open to correction. Read alongside Human Nature, Moral Commons, Shared Goal, and Scientific Standards.
Human nature as a design constraint
People are neither naturally angelic nor irredeemably selfish. We are capable of cooperation, empathy, sacrifice, learning, and mutual aid; we are also vulnerable to fear, status competition, conformity, tribal loyalty, motivated reasoning, and the pursuit of advantage over others.
Governance should not depend on unusually virtuous leaders. It should make healthy behaviour easier, harmful behaviour harder to scale, and abuses easier to detect and repair.
Initial design commitments
1. Power must be distributed
No actor should control decision-making, resources, information, and enforcement without meaningful checks. Authority should be bounded, reviewable, and removable.
2. Incentives matter
Good intentions do not neutralize systems that reward domination or extraction. Proposals must examine the material and social incentives they create.
3. Tribalism must be acknowledged
Group identity can create solidarity and care, but can also produce dehumanization and coalition capture. Institutions should enable affiliation while requiring cross-group accountability and protecting minorities.
4. Exploitation is often structural
Where people lack meaningful alternatives, formal consent may conceal coercion. Governance must examine dependency, bargaining power, ownership, and access to essential resources.
5. Dissent is a safety mechanism
People need protected ways to challenge decisions, expose misconduct, form alternatives, and leave. Suppressing dissent makes institutions brittle and opaque.
6. Institutions must be corrigible
Every institution should make its assumptions visible, measure its effects, accept revision, and provide routes for repair when it causes harm.
Questions every proposal must answer
- What problem is this solving?
- What human vulnerabilities or incentives does it account for?
- Who receives power, and what prevents that power from accumulating?
- How could the mechanism be captured or gamed?
- Who bears the cost when it fails?
- How can affected people challenge, exit, or change it?
- What evidence would justify keeping, revising, or abandoning it?