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Seeing one form of alignment does not tell you that another is present. Sometimes two forms are merely independent. Sometimes improving one can actually make another worse.
These cases are useful because they show why it is dangerous to treat alignment as a single property.
Goals → behavior
People can genuinely want the same outcome while failing to translate that agreement into compatible plans or behavior.
Example: strong intentions often fail without concrete implementation procedures.
Similarity → accuracy
Epistemic similarity can suppress the diversity of information that makes collective judgment useful.
Example: social influence can increase confidence and consensus while reducing wisdom-of-crowds performance.
Similarity → function
Functional systems often depend on components doing different, complementary, or even opposing things.
Example: muscles, soccer positions, and conversational roles.
Parts → whole
Local competence or success can combine into an unwanted higher-scale outcome.
Example: individually reasonable local behavior can generate segregation, cancer, or unwanted multi-agent outcomes.
Agreement → concordance
Compatible trajectories do not require common values, goals, beliefs, or preferences.
Example: buyers and sellers can want opposite outcomes and still coordinate through a market.
Values → Relevance
A system can care about the right outcome and still fail because it does not notice the relevant difference, recognize the situation, or perceive an available response.
Example: a driver can genuinely care about pedestrian safety yet fail to notice that someone is about to enter the road.
Alignability → Values
Changing its incentives, constraints, or environment can redirect behavior while its underlying objectives remain the same.
Example: firms change their behavior in response to prices while remaining profit maximizers
Performance → Robustness
Two systems can behave identically in familiar conditions and diverge when they are perturbed.
Example: Two drones can hover equally well in still air. A sudden gust reveals that one can detect the deviation and recover while the other drifts away or crashes.
Behavior → Development
An intervention affects not only current behavior but the current trajectory, which can lead to unintended consequences.
Example: A daycare fine changed not only behavior but how the interaction was understood.
Goals → Relationships
Cooperation involves a shared relational picture, not just shared goals.
Example: Two collaborators may share the goal while disagreeing about authority, obligation, or which decisions require mutual agreement.
Each example is a way of asking a different question about an apparently aligned system. The Atlas collects these distinctions so that one kind of success is not silently used as evidence for another.