Elias Kunnas
Corpus frame
The corpus applies one lens to many domains: what mechanisms produce the outcome? It shares four methodological commitments and one explicit directional commitment. Each linked page argues for its part; the links are derivations and disputes, not evidence inherited by every page. The directional commitment does not by itself settle system boundary, distribution, sacrifice, or institutional authority.
- Mechanisms are what act. Incentive gradients, selection pressures, feedback loops, and capital stocks produce the distribution of outcomes. Intentions, labels, official categories, and stated values are evidence about mechanisms, or are themselves coordination mechanisms. They are not causal substitutes. — Mechanism Realism · Only Selection
- The reference telos is sustained flourishing. The broadest achievable adaptive safety margin over deep time — not the continuity of any incumbent state, coalition, institution, or doctrine. A mechanism's own stated goal can still serve as a local proof obligation — showing that its incentives defeat even the purpose it claims is a bounded finding — but meeting that goal establishes nothing about the margin. — Flourishing Is Maximum Safety Margin
- Law, rights, legitimacy, democracy, markets, and sovereignty are mechanisms under evaluation. They are constraints, carriers, or proxies inside the analysis. None is a terminal value or a boundary of what is real. Treating one as terminal ends the mechanism search before it starts. Evaluation carries current function, replacement cost, path dependence, uncertainty, capture risk, reversibility, and who bears model error into the ledger. — The Stack · Mechanism Space
- Optimization is a system function. A civilization has to build, exercise, and revise metamechanisms that search mechanism-space, discard dominated options, install, observe effects, and repair under uncertainty. Not running that loop leaves margin unrealized, and that is itself the failure. No single component — analyst, model, or institution — is presumed to contain a global optimum; the capacity is a property of the system. — Telic Systems · The Three-Layer Architecture
- Uncertainty is preserved, not spent. Partial orders, binding constraints, unknowns, and residuals stay explicit. An unmeasured effect is not a favorable default. — The Compression Paradox · Cargo Cult Epistemology
Each essay bears its own evidence. Links carry definitions, derivations, applications, and disputes; they do not transfer proof. Criticism is answered on its substance.
Where each commitment is derived
Podcasts
Mechanism Realism (English, Spotify) — audio companion to the essay corpus: mechanism design, governance failure, and what physics requires for systems to persist.
Mekanismirealismi (suomeksi, Spotify) — jaksot kirjasta, mekanismitestit hallituksen esityksistä ja esseet ääniformaatissa.
Selected Essays
- The Question Nobody Asks — What physics requires for complex systems to persist.
- Some Value Complexes Behave Like Replicators — A testable class claim with observable criteria: transmission, identity fusion, immune defense. Benign, symbiotic, and parasitic cases. Reflective agency preserved.
- The Original Sin of History — Upstream architectural vulnerability: meaning bundled with falsifiable cosmology; when it broke, proxies inherited the controls.
- The Last Step — Where the rationalist and mechanist traditions diverge. MacAskill built the right telescope with the wrong lens.
- Telocracy — An explicit public reference objective, measurement, challenge, learning, and residual political closure — not purpose installed by experts or uniquely derived from physics.
- Ethics Has an Engineering Layer — Moral justification and implementation reliability are separable; the engineering layer needs standing, error correction, and amendment.
All 154 essays →
LawVM
LawVM — beta-stage deterministic reconstruction and bounded read-only assurance for point-in-time legal text, with explicit residuals and jurisdiction-specific claim ceilings. The institution retains control of the official record.
farchive
farchive — a content-addressed archive format backed by SQLite with zstd dictionary-trained compression and deduplicated blobs. Efficient scraping, corpus management, and reproducible data work: preserves exact bytes at named locators with full provenance.
Aliveness
The Aliveness framework analyzes what sustains existence indefinitely—an 820-page book on the physics of telic systems: what must be true for complex order to persist. Free PDF, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Parempi Suomi
Parempi Suomi — kansalaisaloitteita ja ehdotuksia Suomen institutionaalisten mekanismien parantamiseksi.