Enchiridion (Handbook)
Epictetus · 125 CE
Excerpt
“Some things are up to us, some things are not up to us.”
Why the atlas keeps it
A handbook of discriminations handed to beginners by a teacher who said he could only teach what he had himself. The dichotomy of what is up to us and what is not carries the whole work, and its claim that judgement is trained by repetition rather than possessed is the most direct ancestor of any rehearsal-based alignment programme.
Terms this text reaches for
Ranked by the codex search index against the summary above, not hand-picked.
Outer alignment
alignmentMaking sure the training objective itself encodes what was actually intended.
Alignment
alignmentThe problem of getting a powerful system's goals to match what its designers actually meant.
Deceptive alignment
alignmentAn internal objective that is optimised to look aligned in the places anyone is checking.
Amor fati
ethicsLove of fate: to treat what happens as material to work with rather than to resist.
Weak-to-strong generalisation
alignmentA strong model trained on a weak supervisor's output generalising beyond its teacher.
Corrigibility
alignmentThe property of accepting correction from a human rather than quietly re-optimising around it.