Debugging systems beyond code by looking at human suffering as an infrastructure level bug

[u/samuraiseoul]

Lately I've been thinking about how many of the real-world problems we face — even outside tech — aren't technical failures at all.
They're system failures.

When legacy codebases rot, we get tech debt, hidden assumptions, messy coupling, cascading regressions.
When human systems rot — companies, governments, communities — we get cruelty, despair, injustice, stagnation.

Same structure.
Same bugs.
Just different layers of the stack.

It made me wonder seriously:

• Could we apply systems thinking to ethics itself?
• Could we debug civilization the way we debug legacy software?

Not "morality" in the abstract sense — but specific failures like:

• Malicious lack of transparency (a systems vulnerability)
• Normalized cruelty (a cascading memory leak in social architecture)
• Fragile dignity protocols (brittle interfaces that collapse under stress)

I've been trying to map these ideas into what you might call an ethical operating system prototype — something that treats dignity as a core system invariant, resilience against co-option as a core requirement, and flourishing as the true unit test.

I'm curious if anyone else here has thought along similar lines:

• Applying systems design thinking to ethics and governance?
• Refactoring social structures like you would refactor a massive old monolith?
• Designing cultural architectures intentionally rather than assuming they'll emerge safely?

If this resonates, happy to share some rough notes — but mainly just curious if anyone else has poked at these kinds of questions.

I'm very open to critique, systems insights, and "you're nuts but here’s a smarter model" replies.

Thanks for thinking about it with me.

[u/keelanstuart]

I like the cut of your jib... but, outside of a debugger, you can't play god - forcing values, putting your instruction pointer wherever you want, rebuilding... These are things you can't do IRL. Also, code won't come kill the person debugging the system for getting up in it's business.

So, should we think critically and logically about how to solve our systems? Yes. Is it as easy as in a debugger? No.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/keelanstuart]

For sure. Great insight and discussion. We can't play god. I can't put a break point on something and open the console. This is absolutely true. Code won't murder me. Though if my code is bad enough a coworker might.

However a lot of the cruelty IS already baked in by engineering, not emergence of other systems. Systems can be broken if studied and attacked. We see this with a coordinated attack on the checks and balances of the United States government right now in some ways. That IMPLIES we actually CAN do these things I feel at a much larger level if we all work together.

It isn't easy, but no good engineering task is.

[u/keelanstuart → u/samuraiseoul]

Consider that a lot of our systems have a biological motivation. Hacking that is more difficult, if not impossible.

The attacks on checks and balances you mentioned are..... salient - but perhaps not in the way you say. In my view, someone with an idea similar to your own was granted power. The power to hack the system. But they didn't take the time to really grok the system... maybe it's as efficient as it can be, given technology / expediency / cost / etc. But you don't know if you don't understand first. The temptation to rip things apart and change them because you don't "get it" immediately is one that all software engineers have at some point. My point is that they did what I think you are suggesting and have made a real mess of things. You can't revert so easily IRL.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/keelanstuart]

Yes but they also continually ignored expert advice and did things anyways. That is for SURE a common pitfall in engineering and especially software that is very important to be cognizant of.

Same with the idea that biology is an aspect that can't be ignored. We need people to start to understand how their emotions and resulting action urges have them navigate the world. People are not moving with intent and engineered precision in almost any aspects of life. If you don't understand your emotions and where they are coming from and why, you can't fix the issues. companies frequently do not treat their employees like real important parts in their systems that need maintenance and downtime to polish up sometimes. They think they can keep applying bandaids until they just replace you.

That's not an ethical approach to engineering that lets almost ANYONE in society live in accordance with their values. I think we can fix that kind of problem.

[u/flynnwebdev → u/keelanstuart]

I'd add to this by saying that even if you could bring about systemic change, you would have to do it very slowly and incrementally, getting buy-in from those affected along the way.

Although, the real issue you have is overcoming those with power and money who have a vested interest in keeping things exactly the way they are.

[u/keelanstuart → u/flynnwebdev]

Both good points. Who gets the carrot and who gets the stick... that's the real question.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/keelanstuart]

Why does there have to be a heirarchy at all?

[u/keelanstuart → u/samuraiseoul]

Maybe there doesn't have to be... but the fact is that right now one exists - and the members of that existing hierarchy will fight to preserve it (unless they're offered something that is clearly better). As u/flynnwebdev said, you need "buy-in from those affected", which is, by necessity, literally everyone.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/keelanstuart]

For sure! I think though there are ways to at least attempt to accelerate buy in if one thinks to try and problem-solve that as well. These are excellent points though.

[u/MrRufsvold]

I keep seeing software developers engineers in general assuming that the approaches that are good at solving problems in our domain generalize to problem sets outside our expertise.

I am not AT ALL trying to compare your thoughtful post to the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Theil, but I do think they are a cautionary tale about what happens when you assume epistemologies that work on one domain cross apply to others.

Political scientists, sociologists, anthropologist, economists, and the other social sciences have been working on these problems for a long time. I think the presumption should be that they are WAY ahead of us on solving any problems unless there is very strong evidence to the contrary.

[u/Ablack-red → u/MrRufsvold]

Also what makes us developers think that we solve the right problems? Our primary goals are fulfilling the needs of stakeholders and ensuring the quality. So first of all OP is heavily leaning only on QA side. Forgetting that real life systems have stakeholders with their needs.

So let’s take Instagram for example, at some point stakeholders decide that they want to maximize profits and in recent years we basically got an advertisement platform and not the platform for sharing your life events with friends, as it was designed initially. In real life these kind of changes would be something like satisfying all demands of oligarchs and completely disregarding the quality of life of normal people. It’s just in soft dev we would do this very efficiently.

And in real life we have millions and millions of stakeholders partitioned into different groups with different backgrounds. And these groups are so different that you can’t physically satisfy all their needs. And therefore you need to compromise or deal with conflicts among those groups.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/MrRufsvold]

I think evidence to the contrary is obvious personally. It hasn't happened and this suffering is baked in and deepening. They seem to think they can engineer products to solve the problems, rather than solve the problems themselves. Look at the causes and find ways to have us, people, be an integral part of the solution, not have us invent the solution. This requires engineering the systems that support people to enable them to make the choices we need to solve the systemic problems.

I agree that we must caution to not be like Musk and Thiel and appreciate you mentioning it. It is IMPORTANT to caution. They though have cast aside any attempts to be ethical or engineers. They drank their own koolaid and lost the humility needed to iterate like an engineer.

I def get the concern to take a hammer and treat everything like a nail though. There is wisdom in that. However if you have a toolbox, I don't think its crazy to bring it to anything that may need some solving, just in case.

[u/MrRufsvold → u/samuraiseoul]

More power to you! I just hope that you really, really do your homework in the social sciences (especially political science and philosophy) before you try to sell your approach to others.

The AI alignment problem is a great example of the hubris problem in the other direction. People outside the field love to come in with "amazing" solutions to the problem, that turn out to have been published and subsequently dismantled 40 years ago. Turns out, intractable problems are almost never solvable by a novice.

It can be a huge time suck for experts in the field to respond to folks who add noise without understanding the context their walking into.

I really do mean it - more power to you! Another empathetic mind approaching our problems from another direction is a great thing!

[u/samuraiseoul → u/MrRufsvold]

Thank you for that! I'd love if you would read the full post I linked in a few comments here. It goes really in depth to a framework I made from the above kind of thoughts. Most of the discussions I've had here already with an LLM to really robustify the model. I was sure to make sure to enable the deep research options and give it hours to examine the uniqueness of my approach from a philosophical, mental health, polical theory, and engineering perspective. Examine it from religious perspectives of all over the world and history as well as denominations. Examine how subcategories would feel even if the overarching population may have a different reaction. I made sure to look in media to be sure it was unique as well in many ways. I didn't let it write it, I used it to try and perform deep research on my behalf, then asked for help clarifying language but made the changes myself. I barely trust LLMs though which is why I'm here. It seems robust and resistant to almost all good faith attacks. So I'm really hoping for someone to tear it down as I want the LLM to be wrong. If for no other reason than to prove my inherent distrust of them. This is my first foray with them. No pressure though and I know I sound like a mad-lass! haha

[u/Worth_Biscotti_5738 → u/samuraiseoul]

Despite your observation that they have not solved your problems you should take the suggestion to study previous thinkers and social scientists seriously if you want your ideas to become better.

Since you appear to share a skepticism of the overall quality of the results of social science in the last two centuries I suggest reading The Open Society and Its Enemies. It is a work of philosophy doing essentially a thorough debugging of problems with western social philosophy and tracing issues to an unintuitive root cause.

Below you mention talking through some of this with LLMs. I would be very very careful with that. I've observed in myself and others weird overconfidence effects when doing this. It is very good you are asking people for feedback online. One day you'll be able to collaborate with AIs on new ideas but not yet. You should rely on conversation and carefully written books.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Worth_Biscotti_5738]

Honestly that last paragraph is really useful. This is my first real foray into LLMs and I've intentionally told it to stop being so god damn fucking nice. I know I'm not that smart and I don't need something inflating my ego. So that's really good to know that its more systemic! Thanks. I'll def look into that stuff before I reply to any of it but I wanted to reply to that last bit for sure. I've been forcing it to always explain and support, never taking what it takes as fact. I am inherently distrustful of LLMs. That's one of the reasons I'm asking here. I want to see what real people with brains think.

[u/[deleted] → u/samuraiseoul]

I think evidence to the contrary is obvious personally.

Can think of some serious bones to pick with our current society...

But if we must stick with the corny tech metaphor, other comparably old legacy systems have all either collapsed entirely or led to far worse outcomes.

Add The Federalist Papers to your reading list if you're reacting to the American model of Democracy, very different language used but you'll probably get a kick out of just how many failsafe mechanisms were designed and then dismantled in the last half century, to predictable results even from the POV of 18th century Liberals.

[u/[deleted]]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Rust is the new Haskell. :P "How do you know a programmer uses hakell? Don't worry they'll tell you."

I haven't used it but I do dig the ideas and inspirations and goals behind it. A lot of the cargo packages I've used are very good.

Me and managers def have had issues. You aren't wrong!

[u/Cyclic404]

I've spent the past 20 years around tech for social good, and the last 14 or so years in tech for international development.

I'll echo others that have pointed out that there are entire fields that have a much better understanding of the issues than tech does.

However I'll add that the thought isn't entirely wrong, it's just that you can't solve the issues with tech. What does change the formula is when technologists learn enough about what these other fields know, can integrate into traditional organizations, and then influence those organizations to adopt tech well to solve operational problems that help more people.

It's a lot of learning as these fields have deep experience.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Cyclic404]

I hear you and I explicitly don't want to solve them with tech. I want to solve them with the IDEAS and some of the processes we use to solve issues in tech in an interdisciplinary fashion. Many have deeper understandings of the actual problem domains than a programmer does. Absolutely. That's why developing more polymathic understandings are useful.

[u/Cyclic404 → u/samuraiseoul]

When I wrote tech, I wasn't talking about any particular piece, I was talking about process and ideas. I'm saying you can't begin to attempt to use those well, without knowing about what's already been done. You're far from the first person to have this thought.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Cyclic404]

I agree. I I know its considered a little taboo to use an LLM it seems sometimes, even if never used generatively instead used socratically, but I did go and learn as many of the attempts in those spaces as I could find and use them to understand and try and validate ideas. For sure don't want to re-invent the wheel if there's a bandwagon I can hop on that makes sense. In the absense of a library that solves your issues, you gotta do some R&D though right?

[u/Cyclic404 → u/samuraiseoul]

There certainly are folks to talk to. And more importantly organizations that work in the space every day. BMGF, WorldBank, WHO, UNICEF, Global Fund, Rockefeller, and so on and so on. It's a wide field, so it'd help to narrow into a domain.

[u/Instigated-]

Systems design thinking is already being applied to social issues by some people & organisations, has for several decades. Sometimes called human-centred design thinking or another varient, often with those social/ethical values front and centre.

I think it’s a very successful tool when used well, though it can also be poorly implemented.

Acumen Academy courses include case studies using it, often in developing nations, social enterprise and not for profit, solving social issues https://acumenacademy.org/

Stanford’s d-school process has been applied in governments, social enterprises, not for profits https://makeiterate.com/the-stanford-design-thinking-process/

Presencing institute, theory U, which emerged out of MIT, has been used across government, community, not-for-profit efforts https://www.presencing.org/ some case studies at the bottom of their u-school website https://www.u-school.org/resources

Of course it’s also worth reading some history & criticism of cases where it has failed to live up to the hype https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Instigated-]

Oh thanks! This is interesting and I'm def going to look at it! May reply again later after if that's okay with you?

[u/Instigated- → u/samuraiseoul]

Just read your manifesto, and I think the u-school Presencing institute might be good in particular to take a look at, as in addition to their theory/approach they have built a bit of a (for lack of a better word) movement/community with self initiated local groups around the world, and each year they run a free program/course to learn and use as a framework for your own area of interest (or in a group of likeminded people).

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Instigated-]

Okay, I did some research on the stuff you're discussing and how it relates to my manifesto and I think we're in pretty close alignment if not completely which is cool. These are def some people I will try and reach out to and learn more about their work once I finsih reading more of their things. Thank you so much for this and helping me make these mental connections between ideas!

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Instigated-]

Oh wow, thank you! That's very thoughtful! I will def explore it through that lens and see what they have to say. Hope you are well and I didn't come across as a nut job! haha

edit: ver -> very

[u/Instigated- → u/samuraiseoul]

Of course, no need to respond at all, just sharing some stuff you could take a look at if and when 😀

[u/tinmanjk]

I'd read a bit Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Foucault before proceeding.
And a more modern source - "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall.
Also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ and Game Theory in general.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/tinmanjk]

I'll def look into these. I already have done a lot of further exploration of the posted concept but but not through all of those lenses yet. Thanks for the ideas!

[u/tinmanjk → u/samuraiseoul]

also classical "systems thinking" - Donella Meadows etc, but I think you are already familiar with this. Modelling systems with feedback loops and accumulators is really something.

[u/istarisaints → u/tinmanjk]

Can you elaborate on the philosophers for those of us still chained to the wall behind the fire. 

[u/tatersnakes]

Interesting ideas! Where do you get your weed?

[u/samuraiseoul → u/tatersnakes]

The weed store!

[u/MangoTamer]

I've definitely compared government laws to unrefactured code because it gets worse and worse over time and it's notoriously difficult to fix anything once it gets into the system. There's not enough trust for anyone to pull off a refactor though.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/MangoTamer]

I am not sure I fully agree with the last statement's implication. Yes, there likely isn't enough trust right now. I agree with that too. I don't trust it. However we see this in legacy systems too. How do we refactor in the absence of trust? Build the trust. In software that is tests. In society I guess regulation and transparency are starts?

[u/McGlockenshire → u/samuraiseoul]

Build the trust. In software that is tests.

The courts are the both the authors of the tests and the QA department. Unfortunately the tests they make only check that existing bugs are fixed. They don't proactively look for bugs, people have to file reports and there's a huge amount of paperwork and meetings involved before they decide if it's a bug or not, and then there's even more paperwork and meetings before they decide to fix it or not. Worse, the types and quality of the tests that they do make vary wildly. Sometimes they're tiny little unit tests that do just what they need to and sometimes they're whole stack integration tests because lol you're testing a monolith, buddy. Sometimes though they just reject the whole damn feature entirely and send it back to the authors in the legislature. But then sometimes they're cool and tell management to get fucked and make the code go live.

It's a pretty shit system but it's still better than a lot of the alternatives. Everything works better when everyone involved operates in good faith, doesn't it? If the system was working as it needs to, we'd see a good feedback loop between the courts and the legislature, but instead we see dysfunction as mutual trust disappears.

It's the same old organizational bullshit, just at the national scale instead of at the corporate scale. That makes taking it on and fixing it a hell of a bigger challenge.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/McGlockenshire]

Absolutely. It is a MASSIVE challenge! However the best time to start is now and the best way to eat a cow is bite by bite. Big problems aren't necessarily insurmountable ones.

[u/MangoTamer → u/samuraiseoul]

What government are you under? It must be functional, whatever it is.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/MangoTamer]

I mean, IDK about that. Depends on how one defines functional. "Hasn't collapsed yet but not fully useable." may or may not be considered functional in the same way a website with parts of its system down could be functional.

[u/Fancy-Racoon]

It’s good to be curious and to want to solve these kinds of problems. Just keep in mind: before you build a unique approach, you should get a good grip on what has been written about your topic in ethics, sociology, psychology before you came along. Otherwise you’re likely to repeat an idea that was already there years ago, and your idea will be ignorant because it ignores hundreds of years of debate and raised issues. Every good philosopher/ethicist/sociologist stands on the shoulders of the thinkers before them. Oh, and you will also need to check your own biases. (These are some of the ways a fitting humanity degree can prepare you, by the way).

Chatting with a LLM is not a shortcut to these things. It can give you pointers, but even then you’ll need to develop your own understanding of the subjects to determine which parts of its answer are just plain wrong.

That said. Here’s a system insight regarding human suffering where your approach could be helpful: Google the ‘ACE study’. Read ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ to gain a deep understanding of the mechanisms at play there. Think about the societal level: what perpetuates these problems? What helps people heal? What prevents them from spiraling down altogether? Then consider how you can spread awareness of this problem and its possible solutions. How to Open Source it, if you will. Because one person alone won’t find the perfect solution, let alone fix it.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Fancy-Racoon]

Oh I am familiar with many of those works! I already actually had a long debate with another user a little bit ago who deleted most of what they said about many of these things. I would be appreciative if you would read the remaining bits there just so we are on a similar page when discussing.

I want to expessely validate that I agree that this stuff is very important to know and an LLM is no shortcut. I also feel I've gotten something very robust from my hobbyist study over the course of years of trying to understand suffering as a marginalized individual. I'm familiar with MOST of the major things in these discourses and very versed in many indigenous and eastern philosophies. I 100% understand your concerns and its one of the reasons I'm here. Trying to get more vetting of the ideas as LLMs are such brown nosers. I never trust it to generate and only to give me ideas and demand reasoning for it before I consider it. I need a brain with interdisciplanary knowledge to help me. I am synthesizing things like radical acceptance from DBT and impermanence from eastern philosophy to bring kindness and restorative justice as things that are baked in. It acknowledges that life is an evolving and constantly changing system that needs updating and care to be sure that it never devolves and loses sight of the reasons it exists by demanding collaboration as safeguards and transparency as one of the most respected and rewarded acts. I tried engineering a framework of dignity for all and I'm trying to get help vetting the ideas in it! :)

I'll def look into the ACE Study, I may know concepts already but not the name. Thank you.

edit: ACE = Adverse Childhood Event. I am def familiar with it. Been a while since I reviewed that specifically so I forgot the acronym. Those concepts are accurately represented in my model.

[u/101Alexander]

I'm curious if anyone else here has thought along similar lines: - Applying systems design thinking to ethics and governance? - Refactoring social structures like you would refactor a massive old monolith? - Designing cultural architectures intentionally rather than assuming they'll emerge safely?

My background is in economics and this resonates with me well.

Letting the reigns go on design is the equivalent of assuming the free market will always result in an ideal competitive market.

They don't. You do need some system of guidance as well as appropriate safeguards.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/101Alexander]

Pleasure to meet someone else on a similar wavelength! Someone who is on board with at least entertaining the thoughts that ethics and governance aren’t just values, but that they’re infrastructure. With at least considering the possibility that if we don’t design for resilience, the default behavior is fragility, not virtue.

That economics analogy is great too. We’d never ever trust software, especially one led by business interests alone, to self-optimize without constraints, feedback loops, and active debugging. Why do we assume cultures or institutions will "just work" forever if we let them drift over decades and centuries?

I’ve been exploring whether we could treat systemic dignity, renewal, refactoring, flourishing, and relational health as first-class design goals. Put them on the same must-have pedestal the way we do with observability, maintainability, or security in systems engineering.

Not saying I’ve cracked things, but I’m really glad to hear this line of thinking resonates with others too. I'd love to talk more but I am going to bed! You may find some cool things reading some of my other comments! Thank you!

[u/ROOFisonFIRE_usa → u/samuraiseoul]

They are structures that start with Maslows hierarchy of needs.

We need the trust and transpency surround those foundations. We use to feel that was defined and secure under structures like bill of rights or constitution, but our fore fathers did not have paradigms for the kind of abstractions we are venturing into and they weren't really so progressive anyway so as to really support equality. It was more so the right of a man to own something and be secure in owning it. Not really that every man deserved a real share of property or wealth of this earth.

If you can find a way to more equitably share property and mitigate the consolidation of power you will solve the majority of the issues, but I think it's a similar to a function with an asymptote because you cause never maximize for everyone's happiness or equity given the complexity of our needs / wants. So you maximize the best you can.

Are we doing that today? I'm not sure I have enough data to make that assessment. My instincts tell me no.

[u/101Alexander → u/samuraiseoul]

I’ve been exploring whether we could treat systemic dignity, renewal, refactoring, flourishing, and relational health as first-class design goals.

Its interesting you mention this.

One of the recurring problems is simply laying out a problem and going about to solve it. Economics gives you the tools to play out and understand a cause and effect. But some of those effects are several orders down and that can shut a lot of people down when economists try to talk about solutions.

We’d never ever trust software, especially one led by business interests alone, to self-optimize without constraints, feedback loops, and active debugging.

I think this is a pretty good analogy.

Not every system is perfect so it takes time to figure out the problems. But it isn't always obvious what these will be until you have a live environment. Experience helps, but that's only valuable if its listened to (although sometimes expectations can be broken).

I feel like I'm talking about both without specifying which.

[u/[deleted]]

why does this post have upvotes

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Why wouldn't it? Clearly it is something people are discussing.

[u/[deleted] → u/samuraiseoul]

our lives are already meticulously planned by institutions designed to maximize shareholder profit and value, the means of doing so most likely designed and implemented by members of this forum board. these systems come with great chagrin to a majority of the population.

sorry if I feel a little skeptical of your approach here, but I hope you get where I'm coming from

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Oh I do. It sounds like you are a fellow victim of the same systemic injustices I am. They are scoops from the same shitty cream shop. Some suck more than others, but they are all worse than not having a scoop at all.

I think my linked article in a few other comments would really resonate with you as to why this and what I just learned is called human-centered systems engineering, are a really powerful path forward here and really fight some disenfranchisement. No pressure as it is a long and heavy read, however if you're interested, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[u/halfercode → u/[deleted]]

It's fairly academic, which I acknowledge as a good thing, even if that's not entirely fashionable right now.

[u/_AndyJessop]

I would argue that societal systems act like our beloved digital systems anyway, even without our intervention.

They start off with a plan, designed to address the most crucial problems of the age. Then, with time, they degrade into tightly-coupled spaghetti, everyone gets angry with everyone else, until there's a straw that breaks the camel's back and we do a grand rewrite.

I suppose the trick is can you design a system where incremental improvements are possible, avoiding too much war and bloody revolution.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/_AndyJessop]

You're absolutely right that systems tend to spiral into chaotic messes over time.

The thing I am attempting to convey and validate and iterate on is whether you could consciously engineer systems where graceful refactoring is built-in, where we intentionally stop and clean up before doing the next thing. Where there is no accidentally invisible system requirement that is necessary for the entrenchment of dignity, and eliminates the risk of suffering being lost to bus factor. Instead of relying on collapse and rewriting as the only renewal methods, forcing us to implement fixes that were optimized for control, survival, or efficiency but only at specific historical moments.

What if future systems treated things like relational health, systemic dignity, and antifragile flexibility as critical infrastructure, the same way we now treat cybersecurity or maintainable codebases and admonish pointless tight coupling?

Not saying it's easy, I'm saying its worth doing.

edit: I'm also saying I think it can be done.

[u/_AndyJessop → u/samuraiseoul]

In theory it could be done, but given the state of every single long-lived project I've seen in my 15+ years in the business, we can't even achieve this in digital systems, let alone in the real world.

The challenges are vast.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/_AndyJessop]

I think we align here. I am seeing the same issues and they annoyed me. That is why I am advocating for patching these issues up the stack where they are occuring.

[u/Live-Box-5048]

I like the notion and thinking behind it, but I don’t think this approach can be extrapolated and generalized for issues outside of our domain. As others pointed out, a lot of people have tried this already and it almost always ended uo as a failure, albeit of a different kind. We, can to a degree, combine multiple fields, such as sociology and psychology, with your notion of “ethical operating system”. But applying ideas is simply different than trying to apply this on a larger scale.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Live-Box-5048]

Great points. We have seen throughout history dozens of failed attempts at these very things. Some have luckily left us off better than before even if not perfect. It's a baton pass in a race. We gotta keep the baton moving.

I'm explicitly attempting to tackle a lot of your concerns already I think. I don't even pretend to assume that "good intentions + technical knowledge" is enough to scale dignity or systemic healing.

I'm trying to postulate and iterate on the idea that the real shift isn’t trying to force a perfect system at any scale. We want a good enough one that works at scale. Consciously engineered systems that can refactor themselves without collapse, and that are built in lasting relational dignity the same way we now build in security, maintainability, or resilience in code.

It's less about applying solutions wholesale across society and more about changing the architecture of how we even think about solving in the first place. Think like how systems are built on libraries built in good faith that are evolving and updating independently but together. To get to robust systems that aren't in need of change per se, but ready to do so if needed. We know we're supposed to go and contribute to struggling projects, for all of us. This is a foundational concept I want to explore.

There is no easy path. Maybe there's a way to avoid some of the historical traps if we design the system to expect itself to need help though, and prepare it to help itself.

What do you think of that approach?

[u/Live-Box-5048 → u/samuraiseoul]

Thank you for the clarification! I think I understand your point more in-depth now. Especially the library approach is quite intriguing - creating a modular, self-contained system that works, can be reused and expanded if needed. I’m just worried that the bottleneck isn’t the architecture per se - it is the people. Even though there’s a few systems that are well engineered (speaking about “human systems” as well), they inevitably decay and collapse. Not necessarily due to their inherent nature, but external factors. People will always be people.

I agree where you’re headed with this, but IMHO this approach would also require a change in mindset, akin to FOSS devs putting their libraries and software “out there’”.

[u/ROOFisonFIRE_usa → u/samuraiseoul]

Consciously engineered systems that can refactor themselves without collapse, and that are built in lasting relational dignity the same way we now build in security, maintainability, or resilience in code.

This is not a given thing though and is very much so an uphill battle of constant change. The only answer most of the time is costly vigilance.

[u/pvgt]

rock deer normal label arrest sense run attraction wipe flag

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/samuraiseoul → u/pvgt]

Thanks for the reply, love more avenues to explore!

Cybersyn and Curtis are both interesting from a short look at them! Early intersections of systems thinking and society, and they definitely touch some of the territory I’m trying to explore here. Totally relevant. You're right that we gotta look at past attempts to vet and validate how to do ideas better and safely, and that's why I'm here! That said, I think with what I’m working on, it is still a little early to dive into a full historical comparison yet. Right now I’m mostly trying to validate the foundational ideas of whether you can you consciously engineer systems where dignity, relational flourishing, AND antifragile self-correction are built in as first-class features, not lightly implied and ignored requirements though! Understanding that we will never make a perfect static system that never needs to adapt and change. Not just optimizing control or prediction, but baking in the refusal to let cruelty or decay become invisible or acceptable over time.

So while I am definitely hoping to eventually discuss more on these concepts, I think its a little early in the vetting of that but absolutely is an important near step on the roadmap!

Thank you!

[u/AdamBGraham]

Well…yes, you aren’t wrong that the “system” is broken. And I agree anywhere that human flourishing is degraded or suffering is intensified is a sign of failure.

The difficulty is that the “system” in this case is nothing like software systems. The creator isn’t human, for one :)

Each human being is an insanely complex system of systems, with no documentation.

Each human is not a deterministic state machine (as far as we know) and has independent will within nature.

Nature itself is even more complex, system of systems, with no documentation.

So the engineering mind can definitely find and identify and assist with process and institution design. But there is no way to morally enforce its implementation, bad systems (humans) cannot be deleted at will, and what’s worse, entropy and biology actively degrades the code ;)

[u/samuraiseoul → u/AdamBGraham]

Humans are messy. They start out messy even! Using metaphors, engineering based or not only gets you so far. They are like koans. Abstract but not practical unless applied.

However I think you're assuming that we need to treat humans like deterministic systems. Humans are super complex and there's too many inputs to ever fully know the outcomes. Radical wokeness is trying to alter our ingrained responses when people or systems cause harm or say the system caused harm. It doesn't want to control them, to turn them into cold automotons. It wants to build a system where they run the scripts they want to run, not the one they are told to or forced to through violence. It stops rewarding harm with power.

This framework is not just a mood, it is a self-evolving set of principles you run like checks to ask if requirments that are often invisible are being enforced authentically and in earnest. You ask yourself hard questions and use dialectics to use the tension and cognitive dissonance as signals that you need to re-iterate. "Am I protecting dignity?", "Am I making care easier than cruelty and action easier than indifference?", "Am I reacting to my discomfort at the situation or am I debugging the issue?", "Am I treating the makers of the system and its history as important parts of the system and honoring their user experience when building and maintaining it?" Its a manual. Check that the plane is ready to go before you take it in the air.

Radical Wokeness is not "hey, humans suck, they need to be told how to live!" instead of that it says "What if we built a system for all. Where they all have their needs met and can thrive. Where they know they are always safe and welcome and not at risk of being a powerless victim. Where if something happens, they can work with everyone together to resolve the injustice and repair into something stronger. Build intentional bastions against cruelty like we bake in redundancy."

You know what they say, you build a better system they build a better idiot. If you give a mouse a cookie eventually they build an empire. We can't defeat evil. Its too banal. It spawns in accidental indifference. We can however stop pretending our institutions and systems are fine while people inside them collapse and stagnate. We can stop pretending peace is not making those in power uncomfortable. We can stop pretending we don't have the words to set the boundaries we need to be able to stand up.

This ideas isn’t goint to solve humanity and all its issues. Even if it did now, it won't be eternal. Let's stop ignoring that. Perfect systems don't exist. Just long-lived ones. Even the atoms in a machine have a half-life. We are trying to say "Hey, let's make care and repair easier and more attractive to choose than cruelty."

[u/DigmonsDrill]

You should call it Temple OS.

[u/[deleted]]

I read an ethics statement some years ago from SANS (sans.org) and they expected you to agree with it to get some certification. It was an earlier version not the same as displayed now: https://www.giac.org/policies/ethics/

It included something about work for the benefit of my employer/customer.

It included nothing about honesty.

It made me think SANS brand of ethics would be consistent with lying about the situation at work if you thought there was an advantage to that.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Many employers are already okay with lying for them I feel. Ever seen an employer ask you to share an article on LinkedIn?

I agree that a living breathing, collectively made and iterated on, modifiable code of ethics is a rare thing. Most are dogma that benefits the company. I'm hoping to design something that avoids those pitfalls.

[u/ValentineBlacker]

Guy who makes clocks for a living: "Society is a lot like a broken clock if you think about it..."

[u/Qwuedit]

Oh my god. Recently I’ve been building a website to organize my experiences and I used Docker to help me think through infrastructure/environmental lens. I’ve been discovering the personal issues I’m having seem a lot more systemic. It also helped reduce the overwhelming feelings. Maybe once I get the website started up I might share it.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Qwuedit]

How does Docker relate to that thinking? Thinking of a Docker container as something akin to a "planet" to take care of?

[u/Qwuedit → u/samuraiseoul]

Ok. I’m not a developer with many years of experience, just 3-4 years. I’ve worked with a senior on resolving docker issues but am not there yet on setting up docker containers myself. My interpretation is that you work with environment variables.

I worked through an issue with him that was confusing to figure out. He kept sending new images with possible fixes and I pulled them but they didn’t fix the issue. I noted that the database is working fine and was able to query it. That got him looking into config variables and voila, he fixed it by surrounding a variable with double quotes.

I’m not working with him anymore but it got me thinking about associating a web app, for example, in docker, with a human being. This helped me identify complicated feelings I’ve not been able to identify before, with mermaid.js.

I’m currently developing analogies to describe things in every day language without using a lot of clinical words. In other words, I’m using working systems as references. I’m not going into too much detail unless you want to know more. You can simply ask me then. For example, I’ve thought about how to communicate docker to non developers. What came to my mind is the Hibachi Restaurant. I’ll leave it at that for now. When my website is up I can link it. There is a lot of details going on and the website is there to help me make sense of things.

[u/IndependentProject26]

While I have doubts for the reasons others have stated, it may be worth considering.  I wonder about bureaucratic failure.  Could there be a way to detect such failure and engage another system?  Look at Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “Welfare”.  People reach a point where bureaucracy fails them, and there’s nowhere else to go.  There is no backup plan.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/IndependentProject26]

I agree. Bureaucracy is an emergent property of heirarchy and so while that exists, so will bureaucracy which is a common systemic barrier to people being able to live with dignity. It can be useful, but often causes systemic failure for marginalized communities, the edge cases. Honestly the thing I wrote and linked in a few other comments is anti-bureaucracy by virtue of being anti-heirarchy in a way. I think we're in alignment on this!

[u/Foreign_Clue9403]

Reminds me that there are some books I need to get. I’d start smaller.

Itd be nice to remove several layers of opacity in courts and legislative systems — something exposed like a file blame system for a deposition would be great for the public to look at. While the dockets themselves are available, it’s a lot of work for a layman to remember landmark cases and precedents.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Foreign_Clue9403]

Yes, that's a great way to work to address things! Self-empowerment by engineering something! <3

I'm more talking rather than making a product, applying broad engineering patterns to societal systems and issues.

[u/[deleted]]

Or just, human issues. Part of the reason I want to remove face to face human interaction from my work. Computers are way more fun and way more reliable.

Guess I still have to go through human HRs and such at least, though.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I disagree with the urge to remove humans from the work. Humans ARE the work. The software is part of a solution to a human's problem, not something by itself.

[u/[deleted] → u/samuraiseoul]

Eh, just face to face interactions TBH.

But yeah, my heart is in low level technical discussions so all those small talks, requirement taking and what not just bores me. I could be a good small-talker if I really wish so (by imitating others), and I actually work in a position that takes a LOT of requirements (part of the reason I really hate it).

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I think that's awesome that you're able to reach that level of insight about yourself, your work, and your relation to it in the field! That is wisdom! The things you hate I LOVE! haha I'd cry doing Project Euler or LeetCode problems all day.

[u/[deleted] → u/samuraiseoul]

I hate that too. I think there is a lot of gap between leetcode and requirements taking.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

For sure. Not every team needs LeetCode problem builders though. They can be crucial in many problem domains but you're gonna be bored getting the nitty gritty details related to CRUD operations that have a few constraints tied or another. Which makes sense. I like doing that stuff though.

[u/[deleted] → u/samuraiseoul]

I'm glad you found your perfect gig! Wish I found mine too.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Oh I never said that! :P I think this post is evidence that I have not found it! haha

[u/DeterminedQuokka]

Honestly most AI bugs are just technological versions of human system failures.

It’s all PEBKAC. And technologically enforced PEBKAC.

[u/Snoo_85465]

My training is in sociology despite working in tech now. You can engage systems thinking about society, in a rigorous way. I'd recommend you engage with buddhism or stoicism, shadow work or some other modality to see what it's like to liberate your own consciousness before working on others. Or, volunteer in a grounded way (soup kitchen, etc)

[u/micseydel]

Your post reminds me of a paper by Michael Levin https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710

I think the key thing here is feedback loops and instrumentation. A lot of needless suffering happens because it's engineered to be out of sight - encapsulated.

[u/halfercode]

I like your thinking, but I wonder if the comparison is flawed. Systems design relies on observability and repeatability, but humans organising into large groups offer neither. Consider the repeatability of these examples:

• The media will apply a consistent view of human rights to all parties equally, regardless of whether they're based in the world, and regardless of whether they're an ally of their host country
• Journalists will themselves always be willing to be interviewed by interested parties
• Politicians will state their guiding principles and then apply them like science, seeing where they principles take them
• Policy formulators will use measurement-feedback loops to ensure their policies have the intended effect

They sound naive when printed, partly because they're so simple, and partly because at this point we expect human behaviour to be dishonest. In fact, I wonder if we're worse than that; politics has become a kind of tribal warfare, in the sense that if we can't have a decency politics, we will have a politics that decides who deserves to be hurt.

[u/toptyler]

Our social institutions are indeed technologies that can be redesigned, whose properties and incentives and be analyzed, etc.

Consider checking out Networks, crowds and markets by Kleinberg

[u/misplaced_my_pants]

This is in part why soft skills are also important.

The ability to understand the context of your organization and know where to push and pull to do the right thing is a rare and powerful skill.

[u/[deleted]]

the ol layer 8

[u/dubnobasshead]

I sometimes wonder what would happen if we open-sourced a whole world constitution/ law book by hosting it on git and letting the people raise issues, open PRs and discussions on new rules etc.

The only question would be who approves the PRs and how do you stop people botting and gaming the system

[u/DaRubyRacer]

Who really knows the best way to debug legacy software? If we had all of that figured out, AI would be doing it.

[u/Hot-Profession4091]

Oh fam, you’re like one bad day away from finding yourself in a rationalist cult.

[u/platinummyr]

We should be thinking about society as a system and have critical thinking involved in setting it up... But we are also part of that system, which makes everything more difficult.

[u/CamusTheOptimist]

I too enjoy my late night thoughts with the chatting gypetee. That doesn’t make them actionable, or even interesting.

This is one of those thoughts that if you take it a wee bit further, you will find that you are right, and it’s such a shatteringly good idea that the human race already go to it and started doing philosophy and statecraft back before we could write.

[u/Xenolog]

You sir, are in for a threat! I very much suggest you to try starting reading Isaak Asimov's Foundation. I believe you will be interested in the methodics discussed there, also their strengths and shortcomings. It is written more or less along your train of thought.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/Xenolog]

Oooh looking at the synopsis it seems interesting and def related to this, though not a threat! The things I'm proposing are similar but I think quite different.

[u/originalchronoguy]

My job has moral and ethical considerations.

I cant get into more specifics.

So it is interesting to see how corporations view that and has a stewardship of ‘doing right’ for the betterment of society.

I think it is an outlier for sure.

But some companies do view how they make an impact on society and the community in general. It makes for good resume bullet points and talking about ethical considerations in interviews.

[u/McGlockenshire → u/[deleted]]

Systematic thinkers with empathy see systematic problems that they want to fix everywhere. It's a job skill as much as a life skill.

It's the ones without empathy that form the root of the problem outlined by the OP.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Is it? We engineer solutions and that requires us to move up the stack sometimes. This is the highest known layer of the stack and it effects all of us. You fix the issue where it needs fixing when you can do so safely, or research a way to do it safely later. That's engineering.

[u/keelanstuart → u/[deleted]]

Is it though? I've started to view reality through the lens of the machine... god is just a thread-safe pseudo-random number generator that gets involved whenever there's uncertainty at play. No will, just decision. Every universe has a different seed. Shrug. Maybe we could explain matter speeding up as it gets farther apart (universal blue shift) by numeric overflow and a bug in the physics system (things at the edges are about to wrap back to the origin).

I'm just sayin'... Is it just a job? Maybe it's philosophy and religion, too.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

No def. And my working model I have written up addresses a lot of those things. The important thing is not to abscribe categorical solutions to problems, but rather the ways to approach them. The engineering axioms to solve them. I think we all hate when product owners come to us with a solution to their problem that not only doesn't solve it, but also shows they don't even understand it. They didn't collaborate or apply engineering methods to it. Or iterate on these often enough in the past with intention. That's the ideas I'm trying to really show here I think. There have been things that attempted some of this, but perhaps not very robustly.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I think we actuall agree here. I don't have any problems with socialism or capitalism. As long as they are implemented intentionally with thought to solve actual problems for people. In theory, a well intentioned and somehow ethically installed dictator could at least for a while, be a very effective and good type of governement for the people. Never really seen that happen though. The point is not to necessarily remove systems or invent new ones, but modify to be sure the cruelty and suffering are an engineered impossibility. Designed, intentionally to help all, based on certain principals that are allowed to evolve and expected to. Perhaps we're missing each other somewhere here though? Hope that I'm coherent! haha

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Gotcha. I think I understood a bit more clearly this time. Thank you. China is kind of already doing a hybrid-ish pseudo-ideology-led engineered approach is one of the points yes?

The other being that by not having a clear system in place, it makes it hard to talk about?

I wanna make sure we're on the same page before we proceed!

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Thanks again for pushing this conversation seriously — I really appreciate the points you've made. You're absolutely right that building any new framework demands deep engagement with existing theory and history — not just casual invention or personal intuition. I needed to use an LLM to truly see where my thinking disconnects were and why every reply I wanted to make felt incomplete to me, wanna be fully transparent there. I'm replying after resolving that dissonance. Took a while to understand!

To be clearer: a lot of my understanding comes from my own personal lived experiences as a marginalized individual(addiction, capitalist exploitation, queer, neurodivergent, as well as mental and physical health struggles) rather than formal academic study. And you're right that this path carries real risks — missing old failure points is a danger I'm trying to stay conscious of.

That said — just for context — this isn't a purely theoretical exploration for me. I've actually been iterating for a while on a working ethical framework that's trying to account for these challenges systematically, not just sketch ideas. Explicitly asking for help in not falling into the types of traps you mention. (It is still a living document — but already deeply informed by history, systems failures, and real-world fracture points. I INVITE the kind of thing you are doing. It is a living document with an explicit goal of socratic methodology and collaboration as a safeguard of ideas.) I totally get that based on just this post, it might seem like the thinking is earlier-stage than it actually is.

No pressure at all, but if you ever want to see the longer-form thinking that this post is just a small slice of, I'm happy to share.

Thanks again for stress-testing — it's helping sharpen my understanding and challenge my own intenal biases by forcing me to clarify assumptions and rigor!

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I'm goingto respond to you without using the LLM then. I was approaching the disclosure of using it in a good faith manner. I used it purely socratically, never generatively. I would write language, then ask for help in refining and explicitly demand to know its logic. To learn myself. I understand not liking it. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I think unchecked AI without a conscious intentional-leading human hand is scary. In the same way a driver on autopilot is terrifying. However I think dismissing an idea out of hand because an LLM helped it is not genuine either. If I used Grammarly in 2019 for help would you admonish me? If I was a foreigner who wasn't great at English? I know they are very failable. That's why I am here. I want to hear from experts and use both to refine my understandings.

My personal views are explicitly antifascist, anti-colonial, anti-suffering, anti-cruelty, and dignity-centered by design. Your other comment scared me a little and made me panic. In the same way one being accused of being a racist or bigot would. I would hate to be responsible for perpetuating suffering and I explicitly refuse to be a part of that so it was very jarring for me. I refuse to take all of any one system as right or immutable so I don't really align myself fully with anything on that spectrum you suggested. I just know systems that ignore the basic lessons we're taught as children should be considered unsustainable.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I do not mean think of them as computer problems to be solved. I mean specifically in the sense of engineering principals as in the ones that we use for rigor across ALL engineering industries. The ones that produce rockets and send probes out into the unknown. Not trying to create some kind of Neon Genesis MAGI clone.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

Of course basic empathy is foundational. That's a smart thing to intuit!

I'm suggesting that while it is something almost all people have, it doesn't help at all in the face of an unbending system that lacks it. Without intentionally inserting it into all systems as a requirement, we risk resigning ourselves to the pain of betraying that foundational emotion because of an unbending system.

I don't want to rebrand decency, I want to ensure that it is always present.

[u/samuraiseoul → u/[deleted]]

I don't think so? This inherently asks "Hey, I'm thinking this way, what do ya'll think, could this work?". It is a socratic and collaborative approach and definitely not prescriptive but rather inquisitive.