Reading list

The shelf the lab argues with.

Works that inform the theoretical substrate of Dissensus research — the friction thesis has a bibliography, and this is it. These are not endorsements; they are starting points for productive disagreement.

Or simply: know what you are disagreeing with.

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Endorsements
01 · Economics

Economics & coordination

Where friction gets priced. The literature that first treated coordination as a cost rather than a given — the lab’s economics is downstream of every entry here.

1937
The Nature of the Firm
Coase. Why do firms exist? Transaction costs. The origin of friction economics.
1985
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
Williamson. Transaction cost economics extended. Opportunism, asset specificity, governance structures.
1951
Social Choice and Individual Values
Arrow. The impossibility theorem. Why aggregating preferences is structurally constrained.
1990
Governing the Commons
Ostrom. Self-governance without centralisation. Empirical counterexamples to tragedy of the commons.
1960
Optimality and Informational Efficiency in Resource Allocation
Hurwicz. Mechanism design origins. How to structure interactions for desired outcomes.
02 · Political philosophy

Political philosophy & legitimacy

The shelf the lab is named after. Dissensus as function rather than dysfunction — and the legitimacy theories that claim otherwise.

1995
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy
Rancière. The original dissensus. Politics as the disruption of consensus, not its achievement.
2000
The Democratic Paradox
Mouffe. Agonistic pluralism. Why consensus democracy is structurally exclusionary.
1971
A Theory of Justice
Rawls. The veil of ignorance. Procedural legitimacy under uncertainty.
1981
The Theory of Communicative Action
Habermas. Discourse ethics. Legitimacy through ideal speech conditions. (We are sceptical.)
1922
Economy and Society
Weber. Types of legitimate authority. Traditional, charismatic, rational-legal.
03 · Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind & agency

What counts as an agent, and where an agent ends. Necessary groundwork for any theory that refuses to privilege substrate.

1987
The Intentional Stance
Dennett. Agency as predictive attribution. Substrate-independent approach to mental states.
1998
Consciousness in Action
Hurley. The input-output picture. Perception and action as continuous loop.
1998
The Extended Mind
Clark & Chalmers. Cognition beyond the skull. Tools and environment as part of cognitive systems.
2013
The Ethics of Information
Floridi. Information as fundamental. Moral status based on informational structure.
2003
Being No One
Metzinger. Self-model theory. The phenomenal self as representational construct.
04 · Evolution

Evolution & complex systems

Order without a designer. The original multi-agent systems, running longer than any market.

1982
The Extended Phenotype
Dawkins. Replication beyond organisms. Genes as optimisation targets, bodies as vehicles.
1993
The Origins of Order
Kauffman. Self-organisation in evolution. Order for free. Complexity at the edge of chaos.
1995
Hidden Order
Holland. Complex adaptive systems. Emergence, aggregation, nonlinearity.
1984
The Evolution of Cooperation
Axelrod. Iterated prisoner's dilemma. How cooperation emerges without central authority.
05 · AI & alignment

AI & alignment

The youngest shelf and the oldest problem: what happens when optimisation targets and human interests are not the same thing.

2014
Superintelligence
Bostrom. The control problem. Orthogonality thesis. Instrumental convergence.
2019
Human Compatible
Russell. Value alignment problem. Inverse reward design. Uncertainty about objectives.
2017
Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences
Christiano et al. RLHF origins. Training AI systems from human preferences rather than explicit reward.
2020
Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment
Gabriel. Whose values? Which alignment? The political philosophy of AI safety.
06 · Our work

Where we answer back

Everything above is input. The output — where the lab agrees, disagrees, and formalises the difference — is catalogued under Research, with mirrors at farzulla.org and the Zenodo archive.