Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...

Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short post titled "Inner Alignment through Values-Based Pretraining." Today I want to expand on the idea from the post by addressing three questions.What grounds exist for expecting that this approach might have a more profound influence on models than attempting to add values in posttraining? First, at an intuitive level the current approach is akin to letting a human grow up doing whatever they please and asking them to have a 10 minute conversation about mor...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short post titled "Inner Alignment through Values-Based Pretraining." Today I want to expand on the idea from the post by addressing three questions.What grounds exist for expecting that this approach might have a more profound influence on models than attempting to add values in posttraining? First, at an intuitive level the current approach is akin to letting a human grow up doing whatever they please and asking them to have a 10 minute conversation about mor...

Before the election I was clear that Trump was unfit to be President based on his character: fundamentally his approach to life is that might makes right. That of course is antithetical to the rule of law on which modern societies and economies rely. So how is it going? Well, reasonable people can disagree on policy choices, such as tariffs. The point of democracies is to be able to change policies in a non-violent manner. Then there is the grift, most notably with Trump coin. That too was to...

Before the election I was clear that Trump was unfit to be President based on his character: fundamentally his approach to life is that might makes right. That of course is antithetical to the rule of law on which modern societies and economies rely. So how is it going? Well, reasonable people can disagree on policy choices, such as tariffs. The point of democracies is to be able to change policies in a non-violent manner. Then there is the grift, most notably with Trump coin. That too was to...