I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.

I've been thinking along similar lines for many years, though with the language of externalities. For example, here's a comment of mine from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361596 I haven't thought about safety like you have, but my bias is to wonder if part of the reason regulations get lax is that they first get complicated due to the influence of people motivated by their own selfish interest. Perhaps over time people add crap to regulations, which makes it hard to sift wheat from chaff, and this leads to backlash? With the final sin being to forget Chesterton's Fence? That would fit with my experience. One thought-experiment idea I had was a society governed not by rules but by unit tests for rules. That would allow any cop or citizen to globally change a rule if he found an exception that didn't violate existing tests. See the final section of http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/09/the-legibility-tradeoff. Of course then the problem is that people would start gaming the tests rather than the rules. That's as far as I got.. :) These days I try not to think about the hard instance of this problem, and instead focus on an easier problem: avoiding externalities in software projects using more thorough tests. That's going a bit better.