Ethotechnics glossary

Definitions of the terms Ethotechnics uses for delegated authority, correction, contestability, and burden, with scope notes, operational tests, and citations.

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Showing 32 of 386 terms

Cite this page · v1.17.1 · updated Oct 6, 2026 · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Authorship

Contact: hello@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

  • Published: Dec 3, 2025
  • Last updated: Oct 6, 2026
  • Version: v1.17.1

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute, include the term title and version, and link to the glossary permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Latest change

v1.17.1 · Oct 6, 2026 — Editorial revision. Titles are in sentence case. Pasted spec blocks are replaced with prose and worked examples, 79 operational tests are rewritten as pass conditions, 22 origin notes are rewritten or sourced, and unsourced superlatives are cut. No terms were added or removed, and permalinks are unchanged.

Earlier versions (18)
  • v1.17.0 · Oct 2, 2026 — Added six canonical terms: Compensatory Inputs, Manufactured Virtue, Structural Coercion, Epistemic Erasure Cycle, Automation Bias, and Verification Tax, formalizing how informal human adaptation subsidizes institutional continuity and destroys failure evidence.
  • v1.16.0 · Oct 2, 2026 — Added three canonical terms: Manufactured Necessity, Adaptation Externality, and Compulsory Heroism, codifying the boundary between genuine material limits and illegitimate institutional extraction of finite human adaptive capacity.
  • v1.15.0 · Oct 1, 2026 — Added four core terms: Tripartite Invariant, Counterfeit Buffering (The HITL-Alibi), Performance Decomposition, and Corrective Standing as Epistemic Admissibility, formalizing the boundary between craft stewardship and uncredited human absorption.
  • v1.14.0 · Sep 26, 2026 — Added three terms: Principle of Non-Expropriation of Resilience, Compensated Performance, and Intrinsic Performance. They separate how well a system works on its own from how much of its success depends on people quietly absorbing its errors, and limit how much of that absorption an institution may demand.
  • v1.13.0 · Sep 22, 2026 — Rewrote category descriptions and scope notes to the current framing, replaced vague or promotional definitions in 89 entries and 109 short definitions, removed unsourced adoption and effect claims, and cut filler words and redundant sentences from 38 entries and 20 short definitions. No term was added, removed, or renamed.
  • v1.12.0 · Sep 22, 2026 — Added Typed Decision Model and Confidence-Gated Execution, cross-linked to the worked example of a decision-model gate on refunds.
  • v1.11.0 · Sep 22, 2026 — Added Decision Threshold, Shaping Hop, and Reason Substitution: the places typed decision models locate authority, shape decisions without making them, and separate the reason from the decision.
  • v1.10.0 · Sep 19, 2026 — Promoted 64 orphaned short definitions to full canonical entries across core concepts, governance, decision states, and anti-patterns, and removed three redundant short definitions (procedural-realism, intake-cinema, legibility-illegibility).
  • v1.9.0 · Sep 19, 2026 — Added Feedback Proximity, Asymmetric-Capacity Restraint, Adaptive Capacity, Compensatory Adaptation, and Corrective Power, aligned the short definition of Ethotechnics with its canonical authority-and-correction framing, and refreshed the glossary's category scaffolding off the earlier moral-system vocabulary.
  • v1.8.0 · Sep 19, 2026 — Added Insulation, the unifying failure mode of the framework: whatever stops the consequences of institutional decisions from traveling back to those who can revise the generating rules, with its channels, its good and bad forms, and its self-ratifying loop.
  • v1.7.0 · Sep 18, 2026 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
  • v1.6.0 · Sep 18, 2026 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
  • v1.5.0 · Sep 18, 2026 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
  • v1.4.0 · Sep 18, 2026 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
  • v1.3.0 · Sep 11, 2026 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
  • v1.2.0 · Sep 8, 2026 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.
  • v1.1.0 · Jan 9, 2026 — Expanded scholarly metadata, operational tests, and provenance notes.
  • v1.0.0 · Dec 3, 2025 — Initial glossary release with stable permalinks.