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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.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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

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An Engineer's Guide to the Trolley Problem (kunnas.com)

11 comments · 2026-09-03

thread · strongest moves · cruxes · revision actions

labeled_units5 comments

The two worked cases come pre-labeled. Five "terminally ill, post-reproductive" versus one "researcher on the verge of a breakthrough." Five children versus an 80-year-old. The Aliveness answer is in the captions.

A metric that only fires after the people have been scored for you is not yet a procedure. The unlabeled lever hands you bodies. These cases hand you the ranking.

qaly_split2 comments

Remaining life-years already split those two cases. Weeks versus decades, children versus end of life. The page says quality-adjusted life years still optimize the wrong variable.

Name a case where they reverse: same remaining years, different "generative potential," opposite lever. Until that row exists, "wrong variable" is a caption on a metric that already gets Scenario A and B.

reverse_rowcollapsed

Fill the reverse without restating the caption.

Two people, same remaining years. One is tagged "about to produce more life," the other is not. If the lever only flips once you have already decided who is generative, future-aliveness is remaining-life-years plus a story about potential. If it flips on some other measurable, name that measurable.

census_or_verdict2 comments

The first duty is demand data: ages, capabilities, generative potentials. In Scenario A the demanded data is already the ranking. "Who is about to cure cancer" is not an input like age. It is the verdict.

A census and a request for who matters more are different moves. The procedure writes them as one step.

ranked_futurescollapsed

When the census is allowed, Scenario A is the live case: let the five ill die, save the researcher. The veil-of-ignorance objection is not missing facts. It is using identity as a killing weight.

The page calls that a cataract. What would count as scoring future-aliveness that is not ranking whose future the agent already likes? Until that is specified, demanding "generative potential" is demanding the ranking the veil was there to block.

both_can3 comments

The subtitle is how to actually solve it. Section III says the Architect pulls, the Gardener does not, and neither is wrong.

If both lever answers remain valid, what was solved is the posing, not the choice. A diagnostic that reveals a weighting is a different claim from a solution.

imported_weight2 comments

The physics section says the old schools failed by asserting a utility function from intuition. Step 4 of the procedure is: weight growth against cohesion by your architecture.

Architect versus Gardener is that assertion, moved into the last step. Physics is said not to pick a unique weighting. Then "discovered constraints" and "weight by your architecture" are two stories about the same slot.

ignore_eithercollapsed

What physics is said to rule out is ignoring either variable entirely. That does not touch the inherited split. Someone who already worries what happens if everyone calculates, and someone who already notices five bodies, are both inside that constraint.

The open question is what would make one of those weightings wrong, other than dropping a variable. If nothing would, the procedure classifies the sixty-year split. It does not close it.

unknown_five3 comments

The problem as usually posed has no names. Five unknown people versus one unknown person. Expected future-aliveness is then five-to-one unless the side track is special.

In the unlabeled lever the page leads with, the framework agrees with 5 > 1. The "poorly posed" move only starts once you are allowed to stop the trolley for a census.

five_seconds2 comments

Demand-data is a right to delay. A trolley that arrives in five seconds does not have that right on the menu.

So the procedure's first step is a different class of problem: decisions you can postpone. The classic dilemma is the class where you cannot. Calling the second class poorly posed does not score the first.

posed_and_pullscollapsed

If you cannot delay, expected future-aliveness of five unknowns versus one unknown is five-to-one. The framework pulls. The unlabeled lever is then posed, and this procedure agrees with headcount.

"Poorly posed" applies only after a census is allowed. The page opens with the unlabeled lever.