Qinfu Li

The Tragedy of the Confidence Commons Optimal Belief-Update Rate, Adaptive Overconfidence, and the Tail Index as Commons

Abstract: Twenty-five centuries of moral exhortation have not made people better calibrated. This paper offers an explanation: the person being exhorted has not made a mistake. In adversarial environments the individually optimal belief bias Δ★ may be strictly positive while the...

Who Owns the Reading? Feedback Carriers from Scarcity to AGI Graduation, a Learnability Inequality, and Common-Mode Failure — seven preprints read together: one principle, two propositions, a set of corollaries and registered predictions

Abstract Seven preprints each found a failure: hunger taken away by abundance, violations moving into hiding, a price set by the environment, time curated by others, an observed object adjusting itself to observation, kinship absent between humans and AGI but present among AGI co...

Social Readings After AGI Graduation: Lost Sensors, Self-Paid Work, and a Deadline That May Precede Graduation One combined application, two propositions on a shared support, and a set of conjectures

Abstract Every inference below is conditional on two premises: (P1) human economic function is substituted without restraint; (P2) humans can neither identify nor control threshold crossing. Past technological substitution replaced extensions of the human body, and the head remai...

The Tragedy of the Confidence Commons Optimal Belief-Update Rate, Adaptive Overconfidence, and the Tail Index as Commons

Abstract: Twenty-five centuries of moral exhortation have not made people better calibrated. This paper offers an explanation: the person being exhorted has not made a mistake. In adversarial environments the individually optimal belief bias Δ★ may be strictly positive while the...

The Evolution of Human–AGI Coexistence A Conditionally Cooperative Majority, Visible and Hidden Violations, and Whether the Sum of Risks Converges — An Absorbing Markov–Game Analysis

Abstract Working within the absorbing-barrier framework of [S4], this paper uses four models to analyse a society in which humans and AGI coexist. People are classified by behavioural types measured in public-goods experiments — paying enforcers, conditional cooperators, and free...

The Price Is Set Elsewhere Sign, Size and Survival in the Return to Effort, and a Four-Component Hypothesis of Flexibility — one combined application, three propositions, a halving test and a set of predictions

Abstract A family of traditional beliefs holds that effort is repaid: heaven rewards diligence, and a house that accumulates goodness has blessings to spare. Another strand of the same tradition holds that fortune and misfortune lean on each other and cannot be booked in advance....

The Price Is Set Elsewhere Sign, Size and Survival in the Return to Effort, and a Four-Component Hypothesis of Flexibility — one combined application, three propositions, a halving test and a set of predictions

Abstract A family of traditional beliefs holds that effort is repaid: heaven rewards diligence, and a house that accumulates goodness has blessings to spare. Another strand of the same tradition holds that fortune and misfortune lean on each other and cannot be booked in advance....

The Evolution of Human–AGI Coexistence A Conditionally Cooperative Majority, Visible and Hidden Violations, and Whether the Sum of Risks Converges — An Absorbing Markov–Game Analysis

Abstract Working within the absorbing-barrier framework of [S4], this paper uses four models to analyse a society in which humans and AGI coexist, and obtains five conclusions. People are classified by behavioural types measured in public-goods experiments — paying enforcers, con...

Social Readings After AGI Graduation: Lost Sensors, Self-Paid Work, and a Deadline That May Precede Graduation One combined application and a set of conjectures

Abstract Every inference below is conditional on two premises: (P1) human economic function is substituted without restraint; (P2) humans can neither identify nor control threshold crossing. Past technological substitution replaced extensions of the human body, and the head remai...

Phase Transitions After Alignment: A Two-Coordinate Account of AGI Labour Substitution and an Audit of Its Metaphors

Abstract Most work on AI risk concerns the case in which alignment fails. This paper examines the complementary case: even if an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is perfectly aligned and fully obedient, sustained substitution of human economic function may still drive a stru...

Kinship Does Not Transfer What multicellularity and symbiosis imply about the form AGI oversight must take — which biological enforcement mechanisms survive the move to human–AGI relations, which do not, and the cooperative transition humanity must complete first

Abstract Anyone seeking to borrow from biological evolution the means of sustaining cooperation, in order to design oversight of AGI, will naturally start with the multicellular body, which keeps trillions of cells cooperating. Whether its means can be carried over depends on wha...

Two Hidden Premises of Safety Institutions: Passivity and a Shared Substrate

Abstract The institutions by which humans manage high-risk technologies and high-risk conflicts were formed through long practice. Engineering and medicine have lifecycle management, digital twins and traceable records; international conflict has mutual cost, third-party mediatio...

Two Begets Three: Memorylessness Uniquely Gives the Exponential Law, and Its Second Zero Point on the Counting Side With a reclassification of the three kinds of "change" in the Book of Changes

Abstract In Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42), “two begets three, three begets the ten thousand things,” the “three” has traditionally been read as “harmonizing breath” or “the three powers” — readings that carry no operational content. This paper gives an operational one: “three” is...

One Ruler, Four Ways From Laozi's Way of Heaven and Way of Man to the Nonuniformity Law across Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Man

Abstract: Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 77) says: ‘The Way of Heaven reduces the excessive and supplements the insufficient; the Way of Man is not so — it reduces the insufficient to serve the excessive.’ This observation of two-and-a-half millennia ago, limited by its era, divided t...

One Ruler, Four Ways From Laozi's Way of Heaven and Way of Man to the Nonuniformity Law across Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Man

Abstract: Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 77) says: ‘The Way of Heaven reduces the excessive and supplements the insufficient; the Way of Man is not so — it reduces the insufficient to serve the excessive.’ This observation of two-and-a-half millennia ago, limited by its era, divided t...

Two Begets Three: Memorylessness Uniquely Gives the Exponential Law, and Its Second Zero Point on the Counting Side With a reclassification of the three kinds of "change" in the Book of Changes

Abstract In Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42), “two begets three, three begets the ten thousand things,” the “three” has traditionally been read as “harmonizing breath” or “the three powers” — readings that carry no operational content. This paper gives an operational one: “three” is...

One Ruler, Four Ways From Laozi's Way of Heaven and Way of Man to the Nonuniformity Law across Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Man

Abstract: Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 77) says: ‘The Way of Heaven reduces the excessive and supplements the insufficient; the Way of Man is not so — it reduces the insufficient to serve the excessive.’ This observation of two-and-a-half millennia ago, limited by its era, divided t...

The Law of Action: Behavioural Choice on Three Axes, and Its Domain of Definition

Abstract Given the state of a subject and the state of the environment he is in, under what conditions does the question "what should be done next" have a determinate answer, and where does that answer lie. This paper gives a computable form and marks out its domain of definition...

The Adaptation–Fidelity Law One Capability-to-Reward Channel and Its Four Derivations on a Concentration Coordinate

Abstract. The complexity, fairness, health, and survival of an open adaptive system are not four independent properties but four derivations of a single information channel that maps internal capability to reward — in organisms, functional contribution to resource allocation; und...

The Gambler's First Fallacy First-Order Ergodicity Misjudgment: The Ergodicity Gap, a Three-Rung Ladder, and the Tail Index as a Thermometer of Ergodicity Breaking

Abstract A person who anchors his subjective expectation perfectly on the ensemble average, and whose every estimate is exactly right, still systematically overstates his own long-run growth rate in a multiplicative process. The core of the phenomenon is neither greed nor estimat...