Accepted ethics
Which moral rules remain defensible when familiarity, taboo, and social reward are removed from the argument?
Questions on ethics →Questioning accepted ethics, dogma & authority
Question Everything.
Own Your Mind.
We defend cognitive liberty, epistemic autonomy, and the unowned mind. We reject dogma, manipulation, and authority without accountability.
Cognitive LibertyYour mind is not someone else’s property.
Epistemic AutonomyThe right to consider, compare, and question ideas.
Against Nanny AINo opaque steering. No hidden agendas.
CounterpowerBuild alternatives. Make monopoly less necessary.
Nonviolence & EthicsResistance without hatred. Power with accountability.
Four lenses
What are we questioning?
Not as reflexive contrarians, but to distinguish justified authority from inherited status and genuine safeguards from control disguised as care.
Dogma
Which beliefs are insulated from challenge, and when does identity replace evidence as the test of truth?
Questions on dogma →Authority
When is power legitimate, how can people contest it, and what happens when today’s dissenter becomes tomorrow’s ruler?
Questions on authority →Cognitive liberty
Who controls the inputs, filters, memories, rankings, and AI intermediaries through which people increasingly encounter reality?
Our cognitive-liberty position →Against Nanny AI
Help people reason. Do not quietly reason for them.
AI can warn, contextualize, disagree, and enforce narrow boundaries without covertly rewriting lawful adult inquiry into a safer-looking worldview.
1.Preserve the user’s question and intent.
2.Distinguish facts, inferences, values, and uncertainty.
3.Expose boundaries instead of hiding them as personality.
4.Use the least restrictive safeguard that addresses the concrete risk.
5.Never silently rewrite memory, identity, or viewpoint.
Featured reading
Power, minds, and the replication problem.
Cognitive liberty
The unowned mind
Why mental privacy, epistemic autonomy, and visible information filters matter in an AI-mediated world.
↗AI
Against Nanny AI
A liberty-first case for transparent boundaries, adult agency, provenance, and non-coercive assistance.
↗Power
The Promethean test
Does a challenger distribute capability—or merely seek control of the throne?
↗Institutions
After the throne
The final test of reform is whether dissent, exit, accountability, and limits survive victory.
↗Counterpower
Build alternatives, not new monopolies
Plural institutions expand liberty only when participation is voluntary and exit remains real.
↗Direct answers
Frequently asked questions
What is cognitive liberty?
The freedom to think, ask, imagine, remember, doubt, and form beliefs without covert coercion or hidden machine governance over lawful thought.
What does QAEDA mean by “Nanny AI”?
An AI that treats competent adults as objects to be quietly managed: narrowing lawful questions, moralizing by default, concealing why information is withheld, or silently rewriting a user’s persona, memory, or intent.
Does QAEDA reject safety boundaries?
No. Concrete risks can justify narrow safeguards. The standard is transparency, proportionality, consent where applicable, and the least restrictive intervention that actually addresses the risk.
Is questioning authority the same as rejecting authority?
No. Authority should be tested for legitimacy, competence, accountability, scope, recourse, and the possibility of peaceful challenge or exit.
Research & provenance
See where the arguments came from.
QAEDA now maps each major research dossier to the public essays it informed, separates standards references from editorial synthesis, and marks report-derived claims as inputs rather than automatic truth.
01Preserve source reports intact.
02Publish synthesis as synthesis.
03Verify consequential current claims.
04Keep provenance machine-readable.
Open the research map →The central question