Name: A new stoicism
ISBN: 9780691009643

diegoprzlJul 2017

My opinion is that the popularity of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has brought the attention to Stoicism. I reached Stoicism by reading about CBT, and started reading about CBT because I wanted a proven tool to improve and modify my psychological state.

I would not call myself Stoic but there is a lot of wisdom there. I particularly like Seneca and Epictetus. The best modern book for me is "A New Stoicism" by Lawrence C. Becker.

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stoic_smileNov 2014

Have a read of A New Stoicism by Lawrence C Becker [0]. It is quite technical in places but the introductary chapters and the conclusion will do enough to put old Bertie back in his logical positivist box. It's not as if Bertie was a slap, happy old hippy himself.

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/New-Stoicism-Lawrence-C-Becker/dp/0691...

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s_bradySep 2025

Inspired by [1] I have been working on a system to integrate the Normative Calculus of Lawrence Becker from "A New Stoicism" [2] into an LLM agent. This works out kind of like Constitutional AI but prompt engineering based. There is a Raku and a Python implementation. I much preferred using Raku as the built in text handling and multithreading is a joy to work with. Python is very clunky compared to it. it just has better libraries.

I make no great claims for the system, it has major issues being prompt based. It is a prototype to explore the feasibility of the idea of giving a chatbot arete, a code of conduct. There are few tests, no evals so all the usual caveats! An intellectual exercise in possibilities not currently being explored anywhere else. Does it work? Hmm, almost :)

It extracts normative propositions from incoming user requests then compares then to it's own internal ethical normative propositions using the Normative Calculus. The system also uses the Decision Paradigm algorithm from Lee Roy Beach [3] to make a forecast on whether to take up the user's task or not.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1013805017161 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pd2k82 [3] https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_Psychology_of_Narrat...

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