Design Principles

This page outlines the overall principles of how the project will deal with culture, social technology, and person to person interaction.

## Move Fast And Break Unimportant Things

A focus on building an initial version of things quickly, and testing and iterating from there. An intent to be "high-energy"; inventing a theory and trying its ideas, rather than making and debating theories unendingly.

But with enough of a sanity check before doing things to check that nothing *important* is going to get broken if the theory turns out wrong.

## Expect To Have To Deal With Bad Actors

Something that sets us apart from other rationalist spaces is the acknowledgment that at some point there will be bad/evil/net-negative people who will attempt to join our community, and that we will need to keep them out if we want to maintain our slice of civilization. You can't include everyone, and attempting to placate the 5% of bad apples does a disservice to the other 95%.

This intuitively feels wrong to most people of an agreeable disposition, but unfortunately is what you have to do unless you wish to harbor individuals who take advantage of high-trust groups.

There are multiple tools that you can use to do this:

* Having people willing to be confrontational.
* Record keeping of accusations, with blockchain verification to prevent removal of incidents.
* Getting references for new members.
* Publicly kicking bad people out as a warning sign to others.
* Requiring people to have someone financially guarantee their good behavior.

## Use Markets Inside The Community

The Kernel project does not intend to fall prey to the traditional commune problems of having so many things be public goods that nothing gets contributed to adequately.

Instead, we want to get over the taboo of using money to lubricate personal interaction. We need to be prepared to scale above the numbers where it's practical to keep it all in your head, so it's either money or some other abstraction mechanism over "who did what size of favors to others".

Property is basically a question of someone having ~exclusive decision-making control over something. In that sense, be property-maximizers: try to have as much things as possible that people can just do without depending on permission, input, etc. from others.

Whenever there is decision-making over stuff that affects multiple people in a way where market-like mechanisms don't work, there should be someone with the final word, because prolonged conflicts over control are probably worse than possibly sub-optimal decisions. Their power in the question should be exercised sovereignly and as little as possible. Whenever there is such a decision-power relationship, anyone subject to it should have real freedom and ability to exit.

For example, each house should have one person acting as its nominal authority, to whom others living in that house are responsible, and who has the final word on relevant decisions if reasonable consensus isn't found.

Finally, minimize "unowned" decisions; if there is something that needs deciding but nobody knows who that decision belongs to, there is a failure in the system and anyone may homestead the decision by getting involved with the thing.

## Designating People Responsible For All Shared Resources

As part of the above, where shared resources must exist, a small number of people will be given responsibility for them and incentivised to keep things to a high standard, rather than leaving the management undefined.