Fedarchy

It's hard to know where to start with explaining this concept; it has evolved a lot, and the earlier incarnations were easier to explain because they were based on simpler assumptions and structures. I'll put together a history at some point.

We're currently working with the following premises:

• Truth matters.
  • This is especially so when it comes to making decisions that affect other people -- as in allocating major collective resources, making laws, and things of that nature.
• Deriving truth is hard work.
  • While the universe must operate according to some set of absolute truths, we do not have direct access to them. No living being has direct access to them. The best we can do is observe the effects of the operation of these truths -- to collect and analyze evidence, looking at it from as many perspectives as possible and attempting to derive the most likely truths to which it speaks.
• Many people -- perhaps the majority -- value cognitive comfort over truth-quality.
  • Such people have an unfortunate tendency to embrace ideas that make them feel comfortable, that are consistent with their existing beliefs, and resist the effort needed to reach new understandings based on new information.
    • While such people are the cause of much violence and destruction in the world, it's often not really their fault; they've been raised to think this way, and not given the cognitive tools or the life-experience necessary to be able to do anything else.
    • This tendency does, however, leave them vulnerable to manipulation by people who know how to appeal to those emotional needs: to fan the embers of discomfort into raging fires of hatred, which can then be exploited for personal gain. These people -- the manipulators -- are a malevolent force which must be taken into account whenever considering the ways in which truth-value might be compromised.
  • In any case, people of this mentality will not be interested in working with us. Assuming the worst case scenario, that they are in fact a large majority, what we need to figure out is how those of us who do value truth over cognitive comfort can operate without them. This includes:
    • protecting ourselves from them
    • protecting our decisions from being influenced by their error
    • finding ways to cause good decisions to be made in spite of them
    • ...while still working to help them where we can