Ethics, Disclosure, and Acknowledgements

A working prototype, not a validated index.

This page describes the status, limits, acknowledgements, and disclosure context for the Reality-Contact Resilience Explorer.

Project Status

The Reality-Contact Resilience Explorer is a speculative civic-resilience model and interactive thinking tool. It is not a validated social-science index, prediction engine, investment tool, policy instrument, or moral ranking of countries.

Its purpose is to help think through how societies may preserve or lose contact with shared reality under conditions of AI, platform mediation, synthetic media, and institutional stress.

Country presets and scores are illustrative heuristics. A low score does not mean a people, culture, or society is deficient. A high score does not imply moral superiority. Scores should be treated as prompts for inquiry, not conclusions.

Ethical Considerations

The project does not draw on private, sensitive, or personally identifiable data. Country presets, examples, and model notes are based on public sources, published indicators, conceptual analysis, and user-defined judgments.

No formal human-subjects research was conducted, and no institutional ethics review was required.

The main ethical risks are misinterpretation, overconfidence, false precision, and treating a heuristic model as an empirical ranking. The project therefore emphasizes uncertainty, source limitations, interpretive caveats, and the distinction between conceptual priors, empirical proxies, speculative assumptions, and user-defined judgments.

Use of AI Tools

AI language models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, were used as interlocutors, drafting aides, coding assistants, and review partners. They helped with conceptual refinement, prose revision, source-discipline checks, code prompts, and static-site implementation.

This use is relevant to the project because the project itself concerns mediated knowledge, synthetic fluency, and reality-contact. AI use provided firsthand experience with both usefulness and risks: fluency without grounding, synthesis without direct contact, confidence without verification, and coherent language appearing more settled than it is.

Responsibility for all concepts, scores, language, design choices, and publication decisions rests solely with the human author.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the informal readers, interlocutors, and reviewers who helped test assumptions, wording, and clarity. All errors and omissions remain the author's alone.

Disclosure Statement

This project was conducted independently. Views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent any current or former employer, client, institution, or professional affiliation.

No external funding or institutional sponsorship contributed to this work.

License and Attribution

Unless otherwise noted, the project is shared as a public working prototype. No license file is currently present in this repository, so final reuse and license terms should be confirmed before broader reuse.

Suggested citation: Stoyanovich, Michael. Reality-Contact Resilience Explorer. Static prototype and working notes. Version/date to be confirmed.