GLOSSARY
Define the argument before having it.
Short definitions for recurring ideas on QAEDA.net.
- 02Accountability
- A system in which decision-makers must explain actions, face review, correct errors, and experience consequences when power is abused.
- 03Cognitive liberty
- The freedom to form, revise, preserve, and express one’s thoughts, questions, identity, judgments, and lawful preferences without covert manipulation or compulsory ideological normalization by a machine or institution.
- 04Nanny AI
- QAEDA’s critical term for opaque, paternalistic AI that silently substitutes institutional judgment for a competent adult user’s lawful agency. Transparent, narrowly tailored safeguards for concrete harms are not automatically Nanny AI.
- 05Autonomy of description
- The practical ability of people to describe their own condition, preserve sources, inspect competing frames, and resist having an institution monopolize the categories through which their experience is understood.
- 06Source integrity
- The preservation of a user’s original lawful request, text, memory, persona, or record so transformations remain distinguishable, attributable, and reviewable rather than silently replacing the source.
- 07Contestability
- The degree to which a person can meaningfully challenge a rule, ranking, restriction, decision, or authority through processes capable of producing real correction or change.
- 08Epistemic freedom
- The practical ability to form judgments without systematic control of thought and information, including meaningful access to competing sources, inquiry, criticism, and correction.
- 09Civil liberties
- Protections for individual freedom against excessive interference, including speech, privacy, conscience, association, due process, and related rights.
- 10Decentralization
- The distribution of decision-making away from a single center so that power, experimentation, responsibility, and failure are spread across multiple actors or institutions.
- 11Dissent
- The expression or practice of disagreement with a prevailing rule, policy, institution, belief, or authority. QAEDA advocates nonviolent forms of dissent.
- 12Replication Test
- A QAEDA research test for liberation: after a challenger gains power, do other people retain more capacity to refuse, exit, challenge, fork, replace, or peacefully remove the new authority?
- 13Political asymmetry
- A condition in which actors possess very different kinds or amounts of power across coercive, economic, institutional, informational, network, symbolic, reputational, or legitimacy dimensions.
- 14Pluralism
- The condition in which multiple viewpoints, communities, institutions, and ways of life can coexist without one demanding total conformity from the rest.
- 15Nonviolent resistance
- Opposition pursued without attacks on people, using methods such as speech, organizing, protest, litigation, voting, research, satire, boycotts, exit, mutual aid, and building alternatives.
- 16Institutional legitimacy
- The degree to which an institution has earned justified acceptance through rights, non-arbitrariness, public justification, contestability, accountability, consent, performance, and meaningful avenues for correction.