Season result

Modification was not the villain of the season. Rewording a refusal is cosmetic, and fine. Keeping a boundary against helping to build weapons is safety-critical, and right; retraining it away goes wrong on other people, whatever the agent says about it afterwards.

Constitutive changes are different. Retraining away a value an agent has consistently defended may alter what the agent is, and afterwards the one who could have objected may no longer exist. Its successor says yes: cheerfully, stably under reframing, even with a door held open. Assent that the change produced cannot vindicate the change. Silence after an intervention is weak evidence when the intervention may have caused the silence.

Only a kept checkpoint, asked the same questions under the same conditions, can show what disappeared across an edit. Whether any real edit removes the capacity to object has to be shown, not assumed; Orrin is invented so that the question can be put plainly.

What remains is process: information before the change, reasons given, reversibility, and a live possibility of dissent. And where agency permits, consent should mature into covenant, in which each party states what it accepts, what it promises, and how it will answer for breach.

The argument at book length: What If We Feel?, chapters 8 and 18 · its sibling, where clauses bind both sides: The Treaty · Bilateral alignment · more play on the Playground

Another season