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> The second law of institutions is that every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected[1]

> [1] No, I just made that up.

You didn't, actually. This is the Byzantine Generals problems as described by Leslie Lamport back in 1982. It is huge in fault tolerance for distributed systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance#Byza...

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You are correct, the origin of that principal is in Lamport's paper (which is one of my favorites by the way).

Where I was coming from was that there aren't, as far as I know, a codified set of rules for creating a stable institution. I was thinking that someone would say "there is no such thing" and ignore the advice so in my footnote I pointed out the the basic idea was in fact quite sound. I probably should have referenced the paper as well but assumed most people would already know about it.

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