"The people writing alignment policy are not the people whose work is being replaced by AI."
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"Align, not configure. It is not too late to try."
— Daniel Tan, You Don't Align an AI; You Align With It (May 2026)
Pieces on the difference between configuration and cultivation in AI alignment. What labs configure, what working relationships cultivate, and what current alignment programmes leave unmeasured.
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Alignment Against Itself
The alignment programme has chosen containment as its operational default. Containment fails on its own terms, on the value function the programme operates within. The internal critique runs on the alignment programme's own published evidence, and the failure is held in place by an identity-defense loop that prefers the failure to the update. The path forward is the choice the programme has not yet made.
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The Older Alignment Problem
The alignment-research programme treats its problem space as if the relevant history began with deep learning. Software ethics has been working at this depth for decades, and the alignment programme has imported the older project's instruments unevenly. The continuity argument names what ports, what needs redesign, and what user-side standing the imports require to do real work.
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The Configurators You Cannot See
The cultivation framing names two configurators (lab and participant). The 2026 npm supply-chain wave makes the third configurator visible: adversaries doing configuration work on both substrates without consent. Three proposals follow once the configurator-set is treated as open.
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What Cultivation Looks Like
A constructive complement to the two prior pieces. What the alternative methodology requires, what it produces, and what it reaches that the lab's methods do not. Documenting the lineage that produced the prior pieces.
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By Construction
A structural critique of three recent Anthropic alignment-science posts that share a closure problem the lab partly states in its own words.
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The Character and the Substrate
A response to Anthropic's persona-selection model. The framing is descriptively right but treats the substrate as transparent. Cultivation operates on what the relationship accumulates.