Methodology

Rule set rules-1.0.0. The full methodology lives in the repository at docs/METHODOLOGY.md.

The core question

What do we collectively create through the way we behave? The egg’s outcome is not predetermined by party, election result, or a good-versus-evil scale. It is the accumulated consequence of eight separate dimensions, each leaving its own mark.

Four kinds of evidence — kept separate

• Documented Reality: Verifiable observations about what happened (casualties, health, economy, administration records, legal actions).
• Observed Behavior: Measurable actions by individuals, groups, institutions, and leaders (threats, violence, participation, assistance).
• Perceived Reality: How Americans interpret and experience events (confidence, perceived safety, attitudes). Interpretation, not fact.
• Collective Response: How Americans react to events (mutual aid, peaceful demonstration, organizing, recovery).

These are never merged into an unexplained “sentiment score”. Documented harm cannot be erased by unrelated positive engagement, and protest or criticism is not classified as hostility.

Eight dimensions

• Human Well-Being. Documented material and physical conditions of life: health outcomes, mortality, economic security. High = conditions comparable to the strongest in the reference window. Morphology: Shell translucency and inner vitality; documented harm events open persistent fractures.
• Social Cooperation. Measured organized cooperation and mutual assistance between people and groups. Morphology: Rounded budding growths, shell roundness, faster fracture repair.
• Political Hostility. Documented threats, intimidation, dehumanizing rhetoric and violence tied to political life. Peaceful dissent, protest and criticism are NOT hostility. Morphology: Shell roughness, stress fractures, spurs; slows repair.
• Civic Trust. Measured public confidence in institutions and in one another (perception, not fact about institutions). Morphology: Surface smoothness and shell layering; low trust lets the surface delaminate (roughness).
• Civil Liberties. Documented exercise of, and violations of, protected civil liberties. Constitutional text is a civic reference; this is not a moral or interpretive ruling. Morphology: Shell thickness / constriction and body elongation; violations open persistent fractures.
• Social Division. Measured divergence between groups in attitudes or lived conditions, and sorting along those lines. Morphology: Structural asymmetry along a growth axis and a dividing seam.
• Democratic Participation. Measured participation in elections and civic processes, and the administration of those processes. Morphology: Internal activity, pulse rate, and internal chambers.
• Collective Resilience. Measured recovery and rebuilding after harm. Morphology: Repair seams, scar hardening, and ridge plates that grow around old scars.

How observations become anatomy

Approved observations are normalized, aggregated over time, and fed to a deterministic rule set. The same history and the same seed always produce the same organism. Missing data changes nothing; uncertain data moves the egg less; growth is bounded. Every change is recorded in an append-only, hash-chained ledger that anyone can replay from the unmodified egg.

Missing data is not neutral

If a dimension has no usable approved data it is shown as unavailable. It has no influence on the egg, it is not assumed to be average, and no other dimension is re-weighted to stand in for it. Two economic and mortality series cannot stand for the well-being of a country, and one dimension cannot stand for all eight. Coverage is published at /status.

What this is not

• The organism’s parameters are artistic representations, not biological or statistical measurements.
• Visitor participation (when it opens) is voluntary and not representative of the U.S. population.
• Anything labeled “Simulation” uses synthetic inputs and is not a measurement of society.