Precautionary Asymmetry

Canonical definition

Canonical-definition layer: The methodological commitment, load-bearing for the framework's civilisational-scale claims, that the two error modes associated with civilisational-scale risk assessment are not equivalent and cannot be treated as equivalent by any methodology that takes terminal stakes seriously. The civilisational-scale risk the framework identifies is nuclear war between major powers in the grip of supercritical Mimetic rivalry, at a scale that would eliminate or permanently foreclose the conditions for organised human life. Overstating this risk and being wrong incurs recoverable costs: misdirected attention, opportunity cost, reputational damage to the framework. Understating this risk and being wrong incurs non-recoverable costs: the outcome forecloses the possibility of revision, because there is no surviving community to do the revising. The standard scientific procedure of formulating a Hypothesis, observing the outcome, and revising accordingly presupposes a surviving community to execute the revision step. That presupposition fails at nuclear scale. The framework accordingly declares the Precautionary Asymmetry as an explicit methodological commitment and positions civilisational-scale claims as architectural entailments from the dynamics validated at survivable scales, extended through the historical record of post-threshold cascades at pre-nuclear civilisational scale. See Appendix A.6.3 for the full declaration and Appendix A.6.1 for the scale-differentiated falsification criteria at survivable scales.