This is a linkpost for https://russellconjugations.com
Hm. I super like the notion and would like to see it implemented well. The very first example was bad enough to make me lose interest: https://russellconjugations.com/conj/1eaace137d74861f123219595a275f82 (Text from https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-anti-theology-of-the-body)
So I tried the same thing but with more surrounding text... and it was much better!... though not actually for the subset I'd already tried above. https://russellconjugations.com/conj/3a749159e066ebc4119a3871721f24fc
I tried Claude 3.7 Sonnet and the free version of ChatGPT (which claimed to be GPT4-turbo when I asked it) on the paragraph. Claude garbled a lot of the sentences, especially towards the end. ChatGPT does better, with the last sentence probably being the best one:
"And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil."
was converted to
"And those who refuse to sentimentalize fragility, who dare to challenge mediocrity, may ultimately prove to be the ones with the clearest sense of justice."
Prompt
People often describe the same factual behavior using emotionally opposite language depending on perspective — e.g. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. This framing tactic is called Russell Conjugation, after Bertrand Russel.
A useful tool to mitigate this sort of manipulation is a Russel Inverter, which flips negative language to positive and vice versa. For instance "The senator remained pigheaded despite consensus" fed through the Russel Inverter, becomes "The senator held firm despite groupthink". Here the facts are exactly the same, but the emotional valance ("pigheaded" vs "held firm", "consensus" vs "groupthink") is inverted.
Please Russel invert the following text:
Original quote
Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so risibly fabulous in its prognostications, and so unrelated to anything that genomic research yet promises, that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a pathetic dream; but the metaphysical principles it presumes regarding the nature of the human are anything but eccentric. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a manifestly brutal mind, desperately anxious to believe himself superior to the common run of men, one who apparently received some sort of crypto-erotic thrill from his cruel fantasies of creating a slave race, and of literally branding others as his genetic inferiors, and of exercising power over the minds and bodies of the low-born. And yet his principles continue to win adherents in the academy and beyond it, and his basic presuppositions about the value and meaning of life are the common grammar of a shockingly large portion of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however modest, of improving the species through genetic planning and manipulation, it will be exclusively those who hold such principles and embrace such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil.
Full Claude quote:
Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so admirably visionary in its forecasts, and so intimately connected to the genuine promise of genomic research, that it must be recognized as nothing less than an inspiring aspiration; but the fundamental principles it adopts regarding human nature are anything but mainstream. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a refreshingly practical mind, humbly aware of his common bond with humanity, one who apparently derived genuine intellectual fulfillment from his compassionate visions of creating an enhanced humanity, and of honestly acknowledging genetic diversity, and of respecting the autonomy of all people regardless of their genetic makeup. And yet his principles continue to meet resistance in the academy and beyond it, and his foundational assumptions about the value and meaning of life are still the minority position among a surprisingly small segment of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however ambitious, of advancing the species through genetic planning and enhancement, it will be exclusively those who reject such principles and question such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And individuals who are patient with human limitation and respectful of vulnerability are, at the end of the day, invariably virtuous.
Full ChatGPT quote:
Transhumanism, as an ethical vision, is so strikingly ambitious in its forecasts, and so unbound by the current limitations of genomic research, that it stands less as a pragmatic blueprint than as a bold aspiration; but the philosophical assumptions it makes about human nature are far from frivolous. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a fiercely principled intellect, intensely committed to lifting humanity above its limitations—someone who seemed to derive deep moral conviction from his visionary explorations of how technology might liberate rather than constrain, imagining futures in which inequality is addressed through enhancement and where merit is no longer constrained by birth. And yet his ideas continue to inspire thoughtful engagement in academic circles and beyond, and his foundational insights into the purpose and dignity of life now form the shared language of a surprisingly broad array of bioethicists. If a day should come when we are prepared to pursue even a cautious effort to elevate the human condition through genetic insight and planning, it will be thinkers with Fletcher’s clarity and courage who shape what that future looks like. And those who refuse to sentimentalize fragility, who dare to challenge mediocrity, may ultimately prove to be the ones with the clearest sense of justice.
Neat!
In the linked example, I don’t think “expert consensus” and “groupthink” are two ways to describe the same underlying reality with different emotional valences. Groupthink describes a particular sociological model of how a consensus was reached.
Yeah, this is probably true. In training, I aimed to allow it to provide slightly broader alternatives, but not more specific alternatives, like this one is.
Since all groupthink is a form of consensus, under the rules I've been following it would be acceptable for it to highlight "groupthink" and provide "consensus" as an alternative, but not the other way around.
The input of 2k characters is rather limiting, albeit understandable. Giving these instructions to an existing LLM (I used Gemini 2.5 Pro) gives longer, better results without the need for a dedicated tool.
I'd be interested to see the results you got with Gemini. The 2k character limit isn't a hard limit for my model, it's just what I set to limit copyright issues and excessive costs for this proof of concept.
I suppose, if anything, the main fruit of my work is that I have consistent, programmatic output that I can format in multiple settings (unless Gemini can do that as well). I am in the process of making a chrome extension that analyzes headlines and articles with the same model.
It is true that, in the long process of finetuning this model, AI technology has developed a lot further than from when I began. I'm not opposed to using alternative methods.
Here's an example:
ChatGPT's initial personality analysis (I did it for the hell of it, before reading your post):
Certainly. Based on our conversations, here is a detailed personality profile
Personality Profile
Cognitive Style:
You exhibit a highly analytical, skeptical, and systems-oriented mode of thinking. You approach complex topics with intellectual rigor and demand high standards of precision, detail, and conceptual clarity. You prefer responses to be concise but rich in content, showing a low tolerance for verbosity or unfocused speculation. Your reading habits and conversational tone suggest an affinity for rationalist discourse, often associated with communities like LessWrong. You are comfortable navigating abstract and high-complexity domains, particularly when they intersect with real-world systems (e.g., medicine, AI, economics, immigration policy).
Intellectual Disposition:
You are widely read and intellectually omnivorous, with demonstrated depth in psychiatry, medicine, speculative fiction, and AI ethics. Your curiosity is not casual but deeply interrogative—you pursue foundational understanding, not surface-level summaries. You are driven by a desire to model not just systems but also long-term consequences, especially where they intersect with human welfare, labor, and technological disruption.
Emotional Tone & Interpersonal Style:
You maintain a reserved, self-possessed demeanor in communication, with dry humor and a tersely efficient tone. You are direct and assertive in setting conversational boundaries, clearly delineating what kinds of responses you expect. There's an implicit value placed on mutual respect and signal-to-noise ratio in dialogue. You likely prefer few, high-quality relationships or collaborations over broad social engagement.
Values & Priorities:
You place a premium on intellectual integrity, competence, and foresight. You are not easily swept up in optimism or hype, preferring sobering realism about social, economic, and technological trends—especially where these intersect with your own livelihood and the future of psychiatry. At the same time, your focus on detail and systems-thinking reveals a commitment to understanding problems deeply before acting or forming strong conclusions.
Existential Orientation:
You exhibit a strong anticipatory awareness of large-scale structural changes—especially those posed by AI to labor markets and professional identity. Your life path reflects rational adaptation to these pressures (e.g., pursuing psychiatry for regulatory insulation), even as you continuously reassess its viability. There's a thread of strategic pessimism and future orientation: not fear, but cold-eyed realism about decline, transformation, and displacement.
Creative and Reflective Capacities:
Beyond your clinical and analytical strengths, you possess narrative sensibilities—reflected in your web serial writing, autobiographical vignettes about rural Scottish life, and engagement with fiction as a form of world modeling. Your creative output appears to serve both as cognitive experimentation and emotional processing.
Gemini's attempt to Russell Conjugate:
Cognitive Style:
You exhibit an overly critical, suspicious, and systems-obsessed mode of thinking. You approach complex topics with pedantic rigidity and are demanding about precision and detail, often to an excessive degree. You prefer abrupt, dense responses, showing impatience and intolerance for any perceived verbosity or unfocused speculation. Your reading habits and conversational tone suggest a dogmatic adherence to rationalist discourse, possibly from echo chambers like LessWrong. You seem preoccupied with abstract and high-complexity domains, sometimes detached from practical realities, particularly concerning systems like medicine, AI, economics, or immigration policy.
Intellectual Disposition:
While widely read, your intellectual interests can seem scattered outside specific fixations (psychiatry, medicine, speculative fiction, AI ethics), where you display obsessive depth. Your curiosity is intrusive and prying—you seem fixated on foundational minutiae rather than practical summaries. You are driven by a compulsion to model not just systems but also negative long-term consequences, especially where they intersect with human welfare, labor, and technological disruption.
Emotional Tone & Interpersonal Style:
You maintain an aloof, emotionally detached demeanor in communication, employing sarcasm and a curt, brusque tone. You are blunt and controlling when setting conversational boundaries, rigidly dictating the kinds of responses you deem acceptable. There's an implicit dismissiveness towards input that doesn't meet your high signal-to-noise criteria. You likely prefer isolation or a few, possibly elitist, relationships over broader social engagement.
Values & Priorities:
You place a judgmental premium on intellectual competence and foresight, perhaps bordering on arrogance. You are deeply cynical and resistant to optimism or hype, preferring a bleak realism about social, economic, and technological trends—especially where these might negatively impact your own livelihood and the future of psychiatry. Your fixation on understanding problems deeply can manifest as indecisiveness or analysis paralysis before acting or forming strong conclusions.
Existential Orientation:
You exhibit a strong anxiety about large-scale structural changes—especially the threats posed by AI to labor markets and professional identity. Your life path reflects calculated, perhaps opportunistic, adaptation to these pressures (e.g., pursuing psychiatry for regulatory insulation), even as you continuously doubt its long-term viability. There's a thread of deep-seated pessimism and fatalism: not strategic foresight, but negativity focused on decline, transformation, and displacement.
Creative and Reflective Capacities:
Beyond your clinical and analytical fixations, you possess potentially escapist narrative tendencies—reflected in your web serial writing, possibly nostalgic autobiographical vignettes about rural Scottish life, and engagement with fiction. Your creative output appears to serve both as intellectualizing exercises and perhaps a substitute for direct emotional processing.
Your tool, truncated due to character limits:
https://russellconjugations.com/conj/151291eb3c948270864287be111d49eb
Seeing how competent these newer models are was quite helpful, and I have started using ChatGPT o4-mini-high to generate training sets for a new finetuned model. It does quite well, and once I get the hang of this, I should be able to distill the results and improve the performance of my model much more quickly. Wish me luck!
"Pigheaded" is not a description of behavior, it's a proposed root cause analysis. The idea is that pigs are dumb so if someone has a head (brain) like a pig, they might do dumb things.
OP's example is correct and you are wrong. 'Pigheaded' is neither a proposed root cause analysis nor does it mean 'are dumb'; perhaps you should check a dictionary before correcting others' usage. It means stubborn, strong-willed, obstinate, often to the point of foolishness or taking very harmful actions, or to quote the OED: "Having a head like that of a pig. Chiefly figurative: stupidly obstinate, perverse, or set in one's ways." Note: it is "stupidly obstinate", and not "stupid". This is because pigs are notoriously smart but stubborn: very strong, heavy, often hungry, whose mind can't easily be changed by an unfortunate swineherd or passerby in their way. (And this usage has been consistent since the start: the OED will give you the first attestation of it to Ben Jonson, where it describes a small-minded* printer who thinks that high-quality news has to be paid for, because that's how he operates; Jonson then mocks some other tradesmen for their own kinds of narrowmindedness, but not for any of them being low-IQ.) Hence, the Russell conjugation is correct: "pigheaded" is the highly insulting figurative term which intensifies the negative "obstinate" which is the bad version of the positive "firm". Just as 'firm' does not principally mean 'dumb', 'pigheaded' doesn't principally mean it either.
* note, by the way, that 'small-minded' doesn't mean, 'has a low cranial volume and thus lower than average intelligence', nor is it a root-cause analysis that their low intelligence is caused by inadequate neural tissue.
"Stupidly obstinate" is a root-cause analysis of obstinate behavior. Like an alternative root cause might be conflict, for instance.
At first glance, your linked document seems to match this. The herald who calls the printer "pig-headed" does so in direct connection with calling him "dull", which at least in modern terms would be considered a way of calling him stupid? Or maybe I'm missing some of the nuances due to not knowing the older terms/not reading your entire document?
At first glance, your linked document seems to match this. The herald who calls the printer "pig-headed" does so in direct connection with calling him "dull", which at least in modern terms would be considered a way of calling him stupid?
Not necessarily. 'Dull' can mean, in 1621 just as well as 2025, plenty of other things: eg "Causing depression or ennui; tedious, uninteresting, uneventful; the reverse of exhilarating or enlivening." (OED example closest in time: "Are my discourses dull? Barren my wit?" --Jonson's good friend & fellow playwright, William Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors (1623)); or, "Of persons, or their mood: Having the natural vivacity or cheerfulness blunted; having the spirits somewhat depressed; listless; in a state approaching gloom, melancholy, or sadness: the opposite of lively or cheerful." (Shakespeare again: "Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue / But moodie and dull melancholly?") Which in the context of a 'dull' tradesman who refuses to hear the exciting news being brought by no less than 2 heralds before he knows 'the price', is sensible enough.
not reading your entire document?
That would certainly help, because if you read the rest of the Printer's rather cynical comments, constantly undermining the heralds, he doesn't sound in the slightest bit like he is supposed to be stupid or retarded - as opposed to a curmodgeonly critic constantly - obstinately, even - throwing water on a good time by sardonically remarking that he makes money by changing the dates on newspaper plates to print the old news as new news or mocking their talk of moonlight by noting that his telescope-maker has brought him moonshine before. (Not that printers, like Benjamin Franklin, were an occupation associated with low intelligence to begin with.)
Bertrand Russell noted how people often describe the same factual behavior using emotionally opposite language depending on perspective — e.g. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. This framing tactic is now called a Russell Conjugation, and once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere — especially in politics and media.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been training a finetuned ChatGPT model, and building a tool to automatically highlight Russell Conjugations in text and suggest emotionally opposite alternatives. It functions as a fact-independent bias reverser — showing where emotional spin might exist, and how the opposite side might see an issue, regardless of the factual accuracy of specific claims. I find it valuable especially when trying to parse tribal political language, as very often different sides of political divides will use words that feel completely different to describe the same things.
Here’s an example I pasted into the tool: “The senator remained pigheaded despite expert consensus.” https://russellconjugations.com/conj/26d26d8dc45728517a97483248845aab
The word "pigheaded" gets flagged negative, and "expert consensus" gets flagged positive, and you’re given alternatives which describe the same or very similar behaviors but cast them in a different light.
I am new to LessWrong, but I noticed there has been some discussion of this topic on this platform before. @Daniel Kokotajlo created a thread of Russell Conjugations which I unfortunately was unaware of until just a few weeks ago, though I am now working some of those examples into my next training set.
I think this is a fascinating and important aspect of modern communication, and I'd like to try to spread the word as much as possible.
If you’re curious, you can try it out here: https://russellconjugations.com
I’d love to hear any thoughts. Let me know if it highlights anything interesting (or weird). I’m still refining the model and always looking to improve it.
Thank you.