How I Work

From missing mechanism to public distinction.

Elias Kunnas

I. The middle

Holistic System Rotation describes how a structural pattern emerges when a model percolates. Essay Engineering describes how a finished distinction becomes durable prose. This essay is about the middle: what happens between the percolation and the prose.

I keep producing the same kind of thing. The shape is similar across substrates. A word or institution points near a problem without making the mechanism usable; an object that should exist becomes legible; I build it. It is a legal-state compiler. It is a mechanism test. It is a treaty-clause unit. The substrate changes; the operation does not.

The pattern is not the cognitive process. The pattern is the output criterion.

A distinction is finished when others can pick it up and use it. Not when it sounds elegant. Not when it survives my own scrutiny. When it functions as a public interface for action that did not exist before.

The distinction is not done until it can run.

II. The missing object

A missing object is not a missing fact. It is a missing operational form. The fact may be widely observed; the operational form is what would let people act on it.

“Open communication” exists as a phrase. The missing operational form is the implicit treaty — treaty-clause units that two parties can adopt explicitly, plus a Mask-cost calculus that names what it costs to operate without them.

“Law” exists as a category. The missing operational form is compiled legal state — the verifiable graph that results when source documents, amendments, repeals, and commencements are run through a compiler that respects time. LawVM exists because consolidated text shows you a document; compiled legal state is what a working lawyer actually needs.

“Impact assessment” exists as an institutional artifact. The missing operational form is the mechanism audit — an artifact type that tests whether a bill’s causal machine produces its own stated goal, before decision.

“Good essay” exists as a label. The missing operational form is essay engineering — a six-step pipeline that turns a mechanism perception into a public distinction.

A word can exist for centuries and still fail to contain the object it should have named.

III. The object before the literature

The object often arrives before the literature. I notice constraints; the missing form becomes legible; then I check what has already been built.

If laws are causal machines, an artifact should exist that tests the machine before decision. If legal reality is the result of amendments, repeals, commencements, and time, a legal-state compiler should exist. If relationship conflicts often arise from breached unstated “of course” clauses, a treaty-level unit of analysis should exist. The constraint forces the form.

Whether this is literally constraint-derivation or fast implicit synthesis from absorbed material is not the part this essay needs to defend. The cognitive process is not the load-bearing claim. The criterion is.

The object feels invented. The constraint makes it feel required.

IV. Prior art is the cost of making the object public

If I kept these as private notes, I would not need to do prior-art search. The notes would just work for my own thinking. The reason I do the search is downstream: it is the publishing requirement, not the cognition.

The artifact has to be locatable on shared maps. Readers need to know what is already named, where the delta is, what credit belongs to whom. The discipline exists because the criterion is publicness — and publicness requires legibility relative to existing knowledge.

The output pattern overlaps with operations named elsewhere. Carnapian explication replaces vague concepts with exact ones for a purpose. Conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Plunkett) improves concepts to serve epistemic or practical ends. Mechanism design (Maskin, Myerson) designs structures so that agents produce desired outcomes. Affordance theory (Gibson, Norman) treats objects as enablers of action. Rationalist longform produces public conceptual tools. The pieces are not new. The criterion is.

Prior art is not the source of the object. It is the cost of making the object public.

V. The public-interface criterion

The criterion has three levels.

A private distinction can make my own thinking cleaner. I can use it without naming it.

A public distinction can be explained to another person. They can understand what I am pointing at.

A public interface for action goes further: someone can use it to decide, test, build, repair, or route something without needing the whole derivation in their head. They can pick up the handle and lift the bucket, even if they have never read the essay that produced it.

The first two levels are common. The third is rare. The criterion this essay names is specifically the third.

The forms a public interface can take, in this corpus:

Gibson defined an affordance as what an environment offers an agent for action. A staircase affords climbing. A handle affords lifting. A compiled distinction affords a kind of thinking, building, routing, or deciding that was not available before.

A useful distinction changes what can be built. The test is not whether the distinction sounds elegant. The test is whether it creates an affordance for somebody other than the author.

VI. The failure state

The criterion is falsifiable per artifact.

The public corpus is survivorship-biased by design. Many candidate handles never become essays because they do not produce an interface I can use outside the first context. They look right at the percolation moment but flatten when applied to a second case. They generate insight for the author and no affordance for anyone else.

The failure mode that matters most is what the corpus calls concept maintenance: derivation continuing forever without ever landing on a public interface. The internal model gets richer; the artifacts do not get more usable. The distinction stays in the author’s head, where it is not falsifiable.

A pattern that only the author can use is not a compiled distinction. It is a private ontology with a name.

VII. Specimens

Five specimens, ordered from concrete to abstract.

LawVM. Missing operational form: law as compiled state. Public interface: a working compiler already run against statutory corpora, with cross-jurisdictional benchmarks for Finland, Estonia, and the UK. Transfers to: legal QA, version control, automated scrutiny of consolidation errors. The interface exists because the artifact runs.

Mechanism audit. Missing operational form: a bill treated as a causal machine to be tested before decision. Public interface: an artifact type with a published methodology, plus a growing corpus of worked audits on Finnish government bills. The institutional form (a proposed Mechanism Authority) is a parallel specification others can advocate, criticize, or implement. Transfers to: welfare-region funding, procurement, social benefits, fiscal mechanism analysis.

The Implicit Treaty. Missing operational form: “of course” clauses as treaty units. Public interface: a relationship protocol — explicit articles plus a Mask-cost calculus that two parties can adopt. The article structure can be used without carrying the whole theory in one’s head. Transfers to: couples, workplaces, friendships, professional relationships.

Essay Engineering. Missing operational form: essay as implementation vehicle for a distinction. Public interface: a six-step production pipeline — discrepancy, mechanism, invariant, specimens, hostile review, corpus node. Anyone can apply the pipeline to their own writing. Transfers across: every essay in this corpus, including this one.

The Telos Gap. Missing operational form: harm that does not fit any institution’s admissible-object intersection — mandate, budget, KPI, powers, incentive, constituency, trigger. Public interface: a design diagnostic that names what is missing and why knowledge alone leaves the harm inert. Transfers to: governance failure analysis, AI alignment, civic-mechanism work.

VIII. The pipeline

Three operations, separable:

A person can find a pattern and never compile it. A person can compile a distinction and never install it. A person can write beautifully and produce nothing that can be picked up.

The middle operation is the one most often skipped, because it has the worst incentive structure. Finding the pattern feels like discovery. Writing the prose feels like craft. Compiling the distinction into a public interface is invisible work whose only payoff is whether someone else can use the result.

IX. Why I keep doing it

The world gives me words where I need machines.

Existing language is often good enough for recognition and bad enough for action. It gives labels where I need protocols, documents where I need legal state, goals where I need causal machines, virtues where I need conjunctive conditions. I keep deriving missing objects because the alternative is operating with words that do not compile.

Many people do local versions of this. Mathematicians, founders, philosophers, therapists, designers, engineers all derive missing objects from constraints. The cross-domain repetition with a strict public-interface criterion is the unusual feature, not the operation itself.

X. Close

This essay is itself a proposed interface. The handle is the public-interface criterion: distinguish a refined idea from a runnable mechanism-object by asking whether others can pick it up and use it. If the handle helps someone make that distinction in their own work — if it produces an affordance — it works. If it does not, the handle is wrong, and the essay should be cut.

The missing object is not found in the literature. It is found in the failure that made the literature insufficient.

The distinction is not done until it can run.

Sources and Notes

Conceptual engineering and explication:

  • Rudolf Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability (University of Chicago Press, 1950). The original method of explication: replacing a vague concept (explicandum) with a more exact one (explicatum) according to four criteria — similarity, exactness, fruitfulness, simplicity. The compilation criterion in this essay is closest to fruitfulness: the explicatum has to do work the explicandum could not.
  • Herman Cappelen, Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering (Oxford University Press, 2018). Conceptual engineering as the deliberate amelioration of concepts.
  • Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2020). The implementation problem — how proposed conceptual changes propagate — is one place where the public-interface criterion bites: a conceptual revision that nobody can pick up has not been implemented at all.

Mechanism design:

  • Eric S. Maskin, “Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals,” American Economic Review 98(3): 567–576 (2008).
  • Roger B. Myerson, “Perspectives on Mechanism Design in Economic Theory,” American Economic Review 98(3): 586–603 (2008). The original mechanism-design tradition designs structures so that agents produce desired outcomes. The cross-domain transfer of that move — from auction design to the mechanism audit, from market structure to relationship protocols — is one of the operations this essay names.

Affordances:

  • James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). The original definition of an affordance as what an environment offers an agent for action.
  • Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, revised ed. 2013). The application of affordance theory to designed objects. The compilation criterion in this essay extends the same logic to compiled distinctions: a useful distinction is one that affords action.

Corpus cross-references:

  • Holistic System Rotation — the upstream operation: how a structural pattern emerges from a percolated model. This essay assumes that operation has already happened.
  • Essay Engineering — the downstream operation: installing a compiled distinction in durable prose.
  • Mechanism Realism — the ontological frame within which the public-interface criterion operates: outcomes are produced by mechanisms, not by intentions, so the test of a distinction is mechanical work it does for others.
  • The Implicit Treaty — specimen.
  • The Telos Gap — specimen.
  • Mechanism audit — specimen (worked example: HE 38/2025 welfare-region funding).
  • LawVM — specimen (project site).

Public conceptual-tool corpora: The rationalist longform tradition exemplified by LessWrong’s Sequences and Astral Codex Ten exhibits many of the same operations as a culture — cross-domain pattern-matching, prior-art subtraction, public artifact production, transfer testing across cases. The difference of this essay is naming the public-interface criterion as the strict pass condition, not just the practice.

The cognitive substrate: the question of whether the operation described here is constraint-derivation in the strict sense or fast implicit synthesis from internalized material is left open in §III on purpose. The argument runs on the output criterion (§V), not on the cognitive ordering. Holistic System Rotation handles the cognitive question separately. Klein’s Sources of Power (MIT Press, 1998) is one credible adjacent model for how expert cognition can produce fast pattern recognition that feels like derivation from constraints. His later premortem method (Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem,” Harvard Business Review, September 2007) is a separate but related example of making implicit failure models explicit before action. The phenomenology and the cognitive science do not need to agree for the criterion to hold.

See also: Holistic System Rotation (upstream — how the structural pattern emerges) · Essay Engineering (downstream — how the compiled distinction is installed in prose) · Mechanism Realism (the ontology) · The Implicit Treaty (specimen) · The Telos Gap (specimen)