"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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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.