Those sound like good ideas for mitigating the corrosive effects I’m worried about.
My personal aesthetic vastly prefers opportunity framings over obligation framings, so my hypothetical version of the dragon army would present things as ideals to aspire to, rather than a code that must not be violated. (Eliezer’s Twelve Virtues of Rationality might be a reasonable model.) I think this would have less chance of being corrosive in the way I’m concerned about. However, for the same reason, it would likely have less force.
Re: absolute. I agree that there can be a qualitative difference between 99% and 99.99%. However, I’m skeptical of systems that require 99.99% reliability to work. Heuristically, I expect complex systems to be stable only if they are highly fault-tolerant and degrade gracefully. (Again, this may still be just an aesthetic difference, since your proposed system does seem to have fault-tolerance and graceful degradation built in.)
Somewhat scattered reactions:
I am really interested to see the result of this experiment.
I think the underlying models are extremely plausible, with the next bullet point as a possible exception.
I am aesthetically very skeptical of phrases like “absolutely reliable” (in Problem 4). I don’t think it’s possible for something to be absolutely reliable, and it seems dangerous/brittle to commit to achieving something unachievable. However, this may be primarily an aesthetic issue, since I think the solution presented in Problem 3 is very sensible.
I don’t buy claim 4, “It does actually require a tyrant”. I agree that it isn’t always possible to achieve consensus. I don’t think that hierarchical authority is the only way to solve that problem. Democratic Centralism is a well-tested alternative, for instance.
I find the code of conduct worrisome, at least as presented. The rules seem likely to encourage hypocrisy and dishonesty, since they make psychologically implausible demands which in many cases are undetectable at time of infraction. This could potentially be mitigated by norms encouraging confession/absolution for sins, but otherwise I expect this to have corrosive effects.
I am totally uninterested in joining the experiment, despite my interest in its outcome. I would be likely to be interested in substantially more time-boxed activities with similar expectations.