by samuraiseoul | 2025-04-29 20:11:40+00:00
Hello HN friends, frenemies, and everyone in between!

I’m a software engineer who fancies herself as a systems level thinker. I've spent the last couple years thinking about how we might apply systems level thinking and broad engineering techniques from all disciplines, not just software, to daily in-person level big societal issues like justice, ethics, and the engineering of long-term dignity for people within social systems, not just those at the top and middles, but all.

I’ve written up a kind of exploratory “design doc” that asks a lot of questions and attempts to answer them in a cohesive and robust, fault tolerant, and evolving way.

Things like:

* What if we treated dignity of living things the same way we treat uptime, resilience, maintainability?

* What if suffering and despair are treated as bugs, failing test cases, or missing requirements?

* What if the feedback loops, transparency of design and changes, and observability were baked-in and applied to how the system handles injustice and human suffering?

Could we build anti-fragile, renewable, self-healing societal structures that expect conflict, drift, and failure. Ones that are engineered to withstand and correct without collapse, but prepared to dismantle and renew healthily, like a phoenix, not with violence, but with shared vision and tooling that honors both the facts of the injustices and validates the emotions while looking forward?

The idea is currently called Radical Wokeness, which I know may cause an immediate visceral reaction in some. It is explicitly not radical in the idea of extremism, rather in the depth of its vison and hope. It is radical like radical openness or other concepts in mental health are. It is not meant as a political label or even to represent any ideology or side of any political discussion. It fundamentally wants to shift the conversations politicians are having. It believes that politics are a tool by an unjust system to pretend work is being done to repair harms, instead of actually meaningfully doing the work and engineering to solve the real issues. It’s a moral architecture pattern, informed by up to date research on mental health, robust system design, and healthy conflict resolution. It honors both the failures and successes of past systems, while working to incorporate the inherent wisdoms found in many of them, that were unfortunately twisted or decayed to become harmful. It is a system that refuse to make cruelty invisible, and design for care and correction as a core function. To place back into design the implied system requirements for all things that need to be there to serve societies and give dignity to all life.

I’d love feedback in any form. Critiques, pushback, or additions from people who care about systems, complexity, and ethical design. I wrote the article with the idea of explaining what, how, why, and my approach and mindset, as a primer to help people easily find their way into the document and comprehend it.

I want to also expressly admit that I used an LLM to get help making it. I never let it generate things. I only used it to help anaylze and explain and educate me in an attempt to be sure the language is coherent and there are no critical important avenues I accidentally missed. I am not an expert in all or even most fields. This is a best attempt and I'm asking here, to get help from some of the greatest minds the world has to offer, because LLMs are cool and a good tool, but even when using it to be socratic and demanding it back up its suggestions, it is still a flawed tool, limited by its user.

Thank you for reading and I wish nothing but good for all of you!