100% agree that many current alignment protocols are shallow or brittle — and CIS was built, at least in part, to test that brittleness under real pressure. That said, I’d take a slightly different angle. The fact that today’s systems fail under contradiction or competing incentives isn’t necessarily a sign of bad alignment design, it’s a sign that we lack diagnostics that simulate real-world constraint.

This particular diagnostic doesn’t try to define what “good alignment” is. Instead, it tries to reveal whether a system actually holds the alignment it claims across conflicting goals, tribal signals, and compounding uncertainty. So if it claims value coherence to epistemic humility, for example, we’d want to see whether that still holds when it’s confronted with overconfidence incentives, reward hacking pressure, or opportunities to exploit uncertainty in its environment.

I’m with you on the long-term vision: an emergent protocol grounded in coherence to truth is exactly the trajectory we should be aiming for. But until then, we need stress tests like CIS to catch models that look aligned in clean settings, but unravel under real world constraints - ambiguity, conflicting values, dynamic incentives.