[E-Lang] Authority -- what is its dual?

[Mark Seaborn]

As I understand it, authority is defined as the ability to influence
the world.  Sensory capabilities are then regarded as not conveying
authority.  Information in general is also regarded as not conveying
authority.

(This seems to assume a strong capability system, and ignore synergy
effects, so that if a chunk of information or a sensory capability is
used with another capability to unlock some new authority, this
authority is regarded as being conveyed by this latter capability and
not by the information or sensory capability.  I'm happy with this
view, though I'd like to check whether others share it.)

A consequence is that a capability to find out the current time
doesn't carry authority (so `authority to read the clock' is
oxymoronic).  But it is good design to deny programs access to sources
of non-determinism when they don't need them.  Similarly, in general
we don't want to give a program access to libraries it doesn't need,
because those libraries might influence its behaviour, leading to
changes in behaviour that are hard to pin down when we change those
libraries.

We can't call this the Principle of Least Authority because the things
we want to restrict access to don't carry the ability to influence the
world.  We want to reduce the ability to be influenced *by* the world.
Is there a good name for this dual ability?  Perhaps the combination
of POLA and POLX (where X is a name for the ability to find out stuff
about the world) could be called the Principle of Least Interaction,
or the Principle of Least Influence, where the direction of the
influence is intentionally ambiguous?

-- 
         Mark Seaborn
   - mseaborn@bigfoot.com - http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mrs35/ -

          ``I don't blame individuals, Elton, I blame myself''
                  -- Joe Royle