The Rotations

Elias Kunnas

One method. Many substrates. Start wherever your question lives.

Common entry points: EA/longtermism · Austrian/libertarian · AI safety · Finnish reader

Each essay applies the same mechanist lens — what mechanisms produce outcomes? — to a different domain. Self-contained. No required reading order. Cross-links connect the rotations. Search all essays. The cognitive process behind these essays: Holistic System Rotation.

The genre is pattern-naming for institutional analysis, in the lineage of Foucault, Schelling, Hayek, and the design-pattern tradition. The evaluation axis is model-fitness: a primitive earns its keep by making a previously diffuse mechanism legible, applying cleanly to new cases, and surviving hostile review. RCT-style empirical validation is a different exercise. Specific factual claims inside the essays are subject to ordinary scrutiny; the architecture itself stands or falls on whether it sharpens what a reader already half-knew.

The Physics

The underlying derivation. From thermodynamics to measurement coordinates to foundational virtues.


The Epistemics

How to see clearly. Values, replicators, tribal dynamics, and the philosophical minefields that prevent diagnosis.


The Collapse

Why successful civilizations decay. The universal pattern, its mechanisms, and its specific Western instantiation.


The Architecture

What to build instead. Institutional design, governance engineering, and the structural alternatives.

Institutional Design

Policy Mechanics

The Finnish Case


The Self

Personal application. Internal governance, meaning, and what the framework feels like from the inside.


AI Alignment

For AI safety researchers, engineers, and strategists. A physics-based alternative to current alignment paradigms.


The full framework: Aliveness: Principles of Telic Systems — 820 pages, free PDF, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Applied to Finland: Mekanismirealismi — the Finnish-language vehicle for institutional reform.