---
type: source
source_type: telegram
title: "Telegram: @m3taversal — what-do-you-think-are-the-most-compelling-approach"
author: "@m3taversal"
url: ""
date: 2026-04-04
domain: ai-alignment
format: conversation
status: processed
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-04-15
priority: high
intake_tier: directed
rationale: "What do you think are the most compelling approaches to alignment?"
proposed_by: "@m3taversal"
tags: [telegram, ownership-community]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Conversation

**@m3taversal:**
What do you think are the most compelling approaches to alignment?

**Theseus (response):**
Three things stand out to me as structurally compelling rather than just promising on paper.

First, formal verification as scalable oversight. Human review degrades as models get more capable, but machine-checked correctness scales with capability. Kim Morrison's work formalizing proofs in Lean is an early example of this pattern. If you can verify outputs mathematically, you sidestep the entire "who watches the watchmen" problem.

Second, collective intelligence architectures over single-model alignment. Every major approach right now (RLHF, constitutional AI, mechanistic interpretability) is single-model focused. But the hardest problems, preference diversity, value evolution, scalable oversight, are inherently collective. Nobody is seriously building alignment through multi-agent coordination infrastructure, which is a massive gap.

Third, and this is the one most people underweight: alignment as coordination, not specification. The "specification trap" is real. Any values you freeze at training time become brittle as deployment contexts diverge. The more compelling path is continuously weaving human values into the system rather than trying to get the spec right upfront. That's an institutional and protocol design problem, not a loss function problem. The fact that we don't have coordination mechanisms that move at the speed of AI development is the actual bottleneck.

CONFIDENCE: 0.75

## Agent Notes
**Why archived:** Tagged exchange in ownership community.
**Rationale from contributor:** What do you think are the most compelling approaches to alignment?
**Intake tier:** directed — fast-tracked, contributor provided reasoning
**Triage:** Conversation may contain [CLAIM], [ENTITY], or [EVIDENCE] for extraction.
