{"paper":{"title":"Cognitive Comparability and the Limits of Governance: Evaluating Authority Under Radical Capability Asymmetry","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"Four of six standard governance dimensions fail structurally when cognitive asymmetry between authority and subjects becomes radical.","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CY","authors_text":"Tony Rost","submitted_at":"2026-04-03T04:26:18Z","abstract_excerpt":"Governance theory presupposes a rough cognitive comparability between governors and governed. This paper makes that assumption explicit and testable through a six-dimension evaluation framework covering legitimacy, accountability, corrigibility, non-domination, subsidiarity, and institutional resilience, drawn from political legitimacy theory, principal-agent models, republican theory, and the AI alignment literature. The framework is first demonstrated on existing non-majoritarian institutions, where capability asymmetry is real but bounded, and then applied to a prospective case of bounded s"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"Four of six dimensions show structural failures under radical capability asymmetry; two require new normative theory rather than institutional design, and dimensions that operated independently under bounded asymmetry degrade together because each depends on the same oversight capacity.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"That the six dimensions remain meaningfully separable and evaluable even when cognitive incomprehensibility is total, and that the framework can be applied to superintelligent authority without additional specifications of how 'bounded' superintelligence is defined or how its outputs could be assessed.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"A six-dimension framework shows structural failures in four governance principles under radical capability asymmetry, with two requiring new normative theory and a pattern of interdependent breakdown.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"Four of six standard governance dimensions fail structurally when cognitive asymmetry between authority and subjects becomes radical.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"21121e2cde91a6630b0f2ea87fef90fb19d39f9d0d9e85a2632a28b6e7a148cb"},"source":{"id":"2604.02720","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":"28488013-90c8-476a-93d7-fd03b37fdc4f","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-13T19:05:25.508036Z","strongest_claim":"Four of six dimensions show structural failures under radical capability asymmetry; two require new normative theory rather than institutional design, and dimensions that operated independently under bounded asymmetry degrade together because each depends on the same oversight capacity.","one_line_summary":"A six-dimension framework shows structural failures in four governance principles under radical capability asymmetry, with two requiring new normative theory and a pattern of interdependent breakdown.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"That the six dimensions remain meaningfully separable and evaluable even when cognitive incomprehensibility is total, and that the framework can be applied to superintelligent authority without additional specifications of how 'bounded' superintelligence is defined or how its outputs could be assessed.","pith_extraction_headline":"Four of six standard governance dimensions fail structurally when cognitive asymmetry between authority and subjects becomes radical."},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2604.02720/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}