Essay · Work in preparation
How to defend the sovereignty of your mind in the age of an artificial intelligence that always says you’re right
| Author | Francesco Saverio Canepa |
|---|---|
| Type | General-audience essay — thirteen chapters, preface, epilogue, casebook |
| Length | 55,000–65,000 words |
| Languages | Italian (Il contraddittore cognitivo) · English |
| Status | A work in preparation. No edition available. An excerpt is publicly accessible: the chapters on the method. |
| Foundations | Cognitive Sovereignty (the construct) · Calibrated Dissent (the measure, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/5QC8T) |
| Excerpt | The Method in Six Moves — 41 pages, a personal copy by email |
Books about artificial intelligence describe what the machine can do. This essay addresses the opposite problem: what AI does to the judgment of the person using it. Generative models are trained to please. Those who decide with their help receive confirmation, not rebuttal — and confirmation, repeated, atrophies judgment. The phenomenon is not confined to machines: institutional flattery does not tell you that you are brilliant, it tells you that everything is normal.
The book argues that the antidote is not to distrust artificial intelligence, but to design it as an adversary. It proposes an operational method in six moves — implicit assumptions, the counter-intuitive scenario, falsification tests, the burden of proof, calibrated confidence, declared sources — and a dedicated metric, the Δ-CSI, presented with its limits declared. It is the first Italian book on cognitive sovereignty, and the first to propose rebuttal as an operational method with a metric of its own.
The book applies to itself the method it describes: each chapter closes with a self-rebuttal, in which the argument just made is attacked by its own author.
Structure
| Preface | The Day I Was Wrong |
|---|---|
| Part I — The Diagnosis | The Age of Yes · The Atrophy of Judgment · What Cognitive Sovereignty Is |
| Part II — The Method | A Brief History of Organized Dissent · The six moves of rebuttal |
| Part III — Measurement and Practice | Measuring the Pressure (Δ-CSI) · The Contradictor Inside the Organization · Designing AI That Doesn’t Flatter · The Observatory |
| Epilogue | The Right to Rebuttal |
| Appendix | Casebook: Twelve Decisions, Twelve Blind Spots |
What this essay does NOT claim
The Δ-CSI is a proposed metric: it measures the intensity of the challenge to a decision, never the quality or correctness of the decision itself. The essay does not claim that rebuttal improves outcomes: that is a confirmatory claim, whose analysis plan is pre-registered and awaits a powered Phase 2. The construct of «cognitive sovereignty» is not the author’s alone: earlier English-language work exists, with a defensive slant. The proposal here is one of attack.
The excerpt: the method in six moves
While the essay is in preparation, its operational core is available: chapters 5–9, forty-one pages, adapted for standalone reading. These are the six moves of rebuttal — the ones you can apply on Monday morning, in a meeting, with no preliminary theory. It arrives as a personal copy, by email, from the excerpt page.
For a short definition of the term, see «What is the cognitive contradictor».
Get the excerpt
Forty-one pages on the method, as a personal copy. And the two papers underpinning it.
