Two Worlds, One Bridge · plate II
Five Fairnesses
Two parties describe the same gap incompatibly, and an AI resolves it. The resolution looks like engineering, but the arbitration rule is a political choice made before any of it — and it is the one part nobody is shown. Here the same brief is solved five times under five definitions of fairness. Everything else is held constant.
The shared brief
Toggle any statement off and all five rules re-solve. Chips are what the parser extracted.
Role 1 · the ask · wants (a)
Role 2 · the limit · limits held (b)
Held constant / assumed
- The design space. Six structure types × pier counts × cut-or-don't-cut, plus the null option — the same enumeration for every rule.
- a and b. Weighted share of Role 1's stated wants met, and of Role 2's stated limits held. A party that has said nothing scores 1: nothing asked, nothing unmet.
- Cost and time are consequences, not inputs. They enter the score only where a party said them out loud, so the rules are compared on fairness alone.
- Every rule chooses from the Pareto frontier — designs that another design beats on both a and b are struck out first, so no rule can be blamed for an outcome that was simply worse for everyone.
- Ties break to lower cost, then fewer months — itself a value judgement, stated here rather than buried.
- The null option — build nothing — is always on the table. It holds every limit and meets no want.