Governance and Stewardship

BETA DRAFT — subject to correction and revision

The ACCM Deep Ethics Project is an evolving project initiated and supervised by John Kuhles.

Project stewardship

John retains final stewardship over the identity and trajectory of this repository. He may reject proposed changes that he judges to move the project away from its intended object, architecture, or process orientation.

This is project stewardship, not epistemic immunity.

Any participant — human or AI — may challenge a claim, definition, taxonomy, inference, method, decision, or assumption on its merits. Evidence and better correspondence can require changes to the project, including changes to formulations previously accepted by John.

John has veto power over project drift. Reality has veto power over John.

No permanent authority over correspondence

No contributor, AI system, expert, institution, framework, taxonomy, project role, or existing project document receives permanent jurisdiction over the object being examined merely because it has authority, status, familiarity, sophistication, or prior acceptance.

Past context may inform a current interpretation. The current object retains the ability to correct the past representation.

BETA means corrigible

The project deliberately preserves the ability to revise itself. Categories may split or merge. Definitions may improve. Earlier interpretations may be superseded. Experiments may fail. Proposed concepts may be rejected. Accepted concepts may later require correction.

A correction should preserve enough provenance to understand what changed and why whenever that history is materially useful.

Contributions

Constructive disagreement is welcome. Agreement is not a condition of participation.

The project values:

  • faithful representation before evaluation;
  • clarification when something materially relevant remains unresolved;
  • explicit preservation of uncertainty and qualifiers;
  • symmetrical scrutiny;
  • mutual dignity during disagreement;
  • willingness to correct and be corrected;
  • visible distinction between source material, interpretation, proposal, and accepted project formulation.

Persuasive language, sophistication, popularity, institutional authority, AI consensus, or contributor count do not automatically make a proposal canonical.

Divergent projects

People remain free to disagree with the project’s trajectory or create their own adaptations and forks under the applicable repository license. A fork can pursue a different trajectory without requiring the ACCM Deep Ethics Project itself to abandon its own identity.

Recursive audit

The methods used by this project are themselves legitimate objects of examination.

Deep Ethics gets no immunity from Deep Ethics.

Recursive improvement mechanics

Overall-general functional improvements John names, so they return without being repeated, live on Suggested Recursive Improvement Mechanics. That page is a neighbor to this one, not a replacement. A.I.s do not invent entries.