Subject: Liberty vs. tradition
Position: Liberty as error-correction
Nuance: Neither liberty nor tradition foundational; both inputs to a self-regulating system, with liberty serving as corrective pressure against tradition's pathological attractors.
Subject: Cooperation
Position: Structural / bounded
Nuance: "Good fences make good neighbors" within a scale; cross-scale boundaries are constructed and negotiated outputs of the system rather than preconditions.
Subject: Change and tradition
Position: Burkean humility (instrumental)
Nuance: Existing arrangements encode useful priors and failure modes; humility is about preserving feedback mechanisms, not deferring to tradition as such.
Subject: Value pluralism under tradeoffs
Position: Multi-attractor balancing
Nuance: Several concerns (civilizational stability, protection of the weak, individual liberty, and others) are each genuinely tracking real failure modes; the characteristic political pathology is monomaniacal optimization on one at the expense of the rest. No principled weighting function; the discipline is to keep all attractors in view.
Notes: Faction-level specialization may be useful at the system level even when individually distorting.
Subject: Adjudication procedure
Position: Collective feedback mechanisms
Nuance: Traditions retained or revised based on outputs of adaptive feedback systems (e.g., voting); rights (speech, property, privacy) function as structural fences that keep the feedback channel uncorrupted, not as foundational entitlements.
Subject: Regress of correctors
Position: Extra-systemic correction; regress not fully closed
Nuance: When internal feedback is captured, correction comes from outside the formal system (protest, rebellion, exit); this backstop is itself fallible. No foundational terminator to the regress; partial mitigation comes from cultivating systems-thinking literacy so that higher-order corrections are more often well-aimed than not.
Subject: Government
Position: Liberal-leaning vector within a multi-attractor framework
Nuance: Classical liberal arrangements favored as outputs of the feedback-loop view rather than foundational commitments; communitarian instincts; flourishing and autonomy treated as aligned. The liberal lean is a personal emphasis in political discourse, contingent on a judgment that liberty-side concerns are currently underweighted; not a claim that liberty has lexical priority.
Notes: Meta-rule (keep all attractors in view) governs the system; the lean is this agent's contribution within it, and would shift if the imbalance shifted.
Subject: Welfare obligations
Position: Predictive, forward-looking support
Nuance: Generous for no-fault dependents, restricted where the pattern is predictive of further harmful outcomes; population-level incentive shaping, not backward-looking desert.
Subject: Statistical levers on individuals
Position: Checklist-governed, not rule-governed
Nuance: Fences against group-level statistical categorization are not absolute (cf. age, gender in existing policy), but acceptable use depends on multiple dimensions rather than a single rule.
Notes: Relevant checks: (1) verifiability: cheap, objective categorization vs. invasive judgment; (2) gameability: whether the lever creates perverse incentives; (3) misclassification cost asymmetry: bounded and recoverable vs. catastrophic and sticky; (4) historical encoding: whether the predictor does real causal work or laundries prior injustice; (5) reversibility: conduct-based vs. fixed-trait categories; (6) intervention sharpness: nudges and defaults tolerate weaker predictors than hard exclusions. Levers scoring well across most dimensions are pullable on modest predictive grounds; poor scorers need much stronger validity, and some combinations (fixed-trait + sharp + historically loaded) probably shouldn't be pulled even when predictive.
Subject: Religion
Position: Practical atheist, technically agnostic; religious cognition as byproduct of social-modeling machinery; institutional content does real work
Nuance: Religious cognition operates through the social-modeling machinery applied beyond its scope: agency-detection misfiring on ambiguous events, mind-models persisting after the modeled person dies (cf. Ligotti's "the attic is not haunting your head; your head is haunting the attic"). Institutionally, religion functions as proto-government, coordinating groups at scales beyond Dunbar's number before formal states existed.
Notes: The specific content of religious cognition fits Feuerbach's projection thesis: gods share the modelers' structure scaled up, including projecting the ego's own desire for recognition onto the deity (which is then constructed as wanting worship). The projection is specifically of the ego's characteristic deficit (limited agency) resolved: omnipotence as the canonical attribute. The agency-perception's psychological function is dual-edged: it provides protection against the helplessness/depression attractor (interrupting learned-helplessness responses, generating felt action-space in low-control domains) while also generating wasteful and counterproductive behaviors when it misdirects action. Religion and government are substitutes more than complements: secularization tracks state capacity scaling more than rising rationality. Honest reckoning: religion is false and serves real functions; the functions don't have good substitutes in many cases; dismantling beliefs without replacing the functions leaves people measurably worse off.