Foundations
What do you know is true — and how do you know?
The meta-problem: Truth, trust, and identity are converging into a single crisis — the preconditions for solving any other collective problem.
Dig Deeper
📄️ The Meta-Problem
The convergent crisis that underlies all other coordination failures
📄️ Capacity
Range and Depth: Capacity to store and unleash energy to meet demands and match quality standards over an extended period of time.
📄️ Power
Can shared ownership in decentralized infrastructure save the planet?
📄️ Simplicity
Make things work then do it better, faster, cheaper with less effort to master.
📄️ Speed
First Principle: The faster the better... if you have good judgement.
📄️ Truths
Truth is infrastructure. Goodwill is built on Trust. Trust is built on Truth. When truth-verification fails, everything built on it fails.
Validation Method
Peter Kaufman's multidisciplinary approach: before betting on any principle, validate against three giant buckets of evidence.
| Bucket | Timespan | What It Contains | Key Principle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inorganic Universe | 13.7B years | Physics, chemistry, hard constraints | Every action has equal and opposite reaction |
| Biology | 3.5B years | Evolution, adaptation, fitness landscapes | What survives reproduces; variation + selection |
| Human History | 20k years | Recorded behavior, social patterns | Reciprocity, status, and trust never change |
If a principle shows up in all three buckets, it's robust enough to build decisions on.
Cross-Bucket Patterns
1. Mirrored Reciprocation
- Physics: Newton's third law — every action has equal and opposite reaction
- Biology: Reciprocal altruism — cooperation benefits both parties
- Human: What you consistently do to others eventually comes back
2. Compound Interest of Behavior
- Physics: Exponential growth from consistent force
- Biology: Small mutations compound into speciation
- Human: Reputation, trust, knowledge compound over decades
3. Coordination Over Extraction
- Physics: Energy flows toward equilibrium, not infinite accumulation
- Biology: Symbiosis outcompetes parasitism over evolutionary time
- Human: Systems that coordinate persist; systems that extract collapse
The synthesis: Go positive, go first, and be constant in doing it. Build systems that coordinate, not extract.
See Work Charts for how this applies to AI predictions.
Context
- Truth, Trust, Identity — The converging crisis
- The Meta-Problem — Same tools deceive and verify
- Physics — The hardest constraints
- Psychology — The patterns that never change