North Star
- Primary directive: Freedom bounded by the Golden Rule—reciprocity and non-coercion as first principles.
- Human reality: People will explore, err, and sometimes be degenerates; this experimentation is part of growth, but it should not calcify into systemic incentives.
Freedom-Ensuring Aspects
- Right to exit and fork: Easy opt-out and alternatives (legal, economic, technical) keep power contestable; coercion thrives where exit is costly.
- Consent as infrastructure: Defaults should be opt-in, revocable, and legible. Hidden lock-in violates reciprocity.
- Transparency with agency: Visibility into rules, data use, and algorithmic objectives paired with the ability to challenge or correct them.
- Due process and proportionality: Safeguards against arbitrary punishment; responses to harm should be narrow, reviewable, and reversible when possible.
- Pluralism with guardrails: Space for divergent lifestyles and moral experiments, bounded by non-exploitation and non-domination.
Degeneracy, Learning, and Limits
- Personal experimentation: Youthful or exploratory excess can teach; allow room for reversible mistakes that do not impose lasting harm on unwilling others.
- Avoid systematized pathology: Do not bake incentives for addiction, attention-harvesting, or exploitative debt into law, markets, or platforms. Freedom to err is not freedom to enshrine error as a business model.
- Time to recover: Systems should enable graceful recovery—amnesty paths, debt relief, record sealing—so learning does not become lifelong shackle.
- Ecological and social floors: Minimum protections (health, privacy, ecological limits) prevent “freedom” from externalizing costs onto future selves or the commons.
Golden Rule Applications
- Reciprocity test for policies: Would you accept this rule if you were in the weakest position it affects?
- Feedback with dignity: Corrective mechanisms (moderation, fines, norms) should aim at restoration, not humiliation or perpetual exclusion.
- Humility in governance: Assume partial knowledge; design reversible decisions, sunset clauses, and participatory review.
Closing
Freedom flourishes when exit is real, consent is respected, and experimentation is possible—but degeneracy stays personal, bounded, and non-extractive. The Golden Rule remains the constraint that keeps liberty from turning into licensed harm.