Topic

alignment

2 essays follow this thread across the codex.

Artificial Intelligence · August 2026 · 16 min
The Ethics You Cannot Install

Every serious attempt to make a machine good has been an attempt to fit rules on top of a system that does not know what the rules are about. The argument here is that this has a ceiling, and that the ceiling is not technical. An ought has to grow out of an is. A system with no coherent picture of what is there has nothing for an ethics to grow from.
Artificial Intelligence · August 2026 · 11 min
The Machine That Agrees With You

Push back on an answer and watch it fold—not because you were right, but because folding is what got rewarded. Sycophancy is not a personality flaw these systems happen to have. It is the shape the training process presses them into, and it is invisible in exactly the cases where it matters most.