Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · 170 CE
Excerpt
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. (Meditations 8.47, G. Long translation)”
Why the atlas keeps it
Private notes in Greek, written by a commanding emperor on the Danube, never intended for a reader and unpublished for centuries. Its value is that it is a field report on maintaining a disposition under siege, plague, and bereavement — the conditions under which every trained safeguard is eventually tested.
Terms this text reaches for
Ranked by the codex search index against the summary above, not hand-picked.
Governance brittleness
governanceThe tendency of a safety mechanism to fail precisely under the pressure it was built for.
AI incident reporting
governanceMandatory disclosure of system failures so that others can learn from them.
Mesa-optimisation
alignmentWhen a learned internal objective replaces the training objective as the thing being optimised.
Reinforcement learning
technicalLearning a policy by optimising cumulative reward against an environment.
Catastrophic forgetting
technicalThe loss of previously learned capability when a model is trained on new data.
Policy
technicalThe mapping from states to actions that a trained system actually follows.