3 UPDATES TO MY OLD BLOG POSTS:

(1) I wrote a thing in 2023 about narcissistic personality disorder, but oops, it was wrong, so I struck it out. See “Valence” series §5.5. (I stand by the other parts of that post.)

[UPDATE MAY 2026: I no longer endorse this section (although it has some suggestive ideas that I think have nonzero overlap with the truth). I have a different theory of NPD now, informed by general aspects of human social instincts that I hadn’t yet figured out when I wrote this in 2023. I’ll hopefully write up “My Model of NPD, Take 2” when I get a chance. In the meantime, the extremely brief version (subject to change!) of my new take is something like: NPD starts from unusually strong physiological arousal upon receiving someone else’s attention (eye contact etc.). And then that has various downstream consequences that you can reason through after studying my post Social drives 2: “Approval Reward”, from norm-enforcement to status-seeking (2025).]

(2) I added a new section §3.3 to Against empathy-by-default (2024). I think the post was fine as written, but it had an overall vibe that insinuated an overly-simplistic takeaway message that needed some nuance. I didn’t appreciate that until later, but now I do, and I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.

3.3 (Added April 2026) Things vaguely analogous to the empathy-by-default argument can happen for certain visceral reactions—just not for the core motivation / reward / RL system

In the above (especially §3.1), I think I conveyed a general vibe that within-lifetime learning will eventually, inexorably, correct all “errors” in learned brain models. But a while after writing this post, I came to better appreciate how certain visceral reactions in the brain can be set up so as to sometimes prevent updates (“corrections”). This is how people can wind up with stable phobias, and stable food-aversions, and stable traumas, and stable autistic “special interests”, and so on, even when there’s no particular innate “ground truth” underlying them. These stable “errors” are the exception not the rule, but it’s interesting that they exist at all, and that they can in some cases last a lifetime.

I discuss the algorithmic trick behind these in a later post: “Perils of under- vs over-sculpting AGI desires” (2025), specifically  §6.2: “‘Defer-to-predictor mode’ in visceral reactions, and ‘trapped priors’. In brief, the trick centers around what I call “defer-to-predictor mode”, where e.g. a visceral expectation of imminent disgust can cause an actual disgust reaction. But there’s a loop-y thing, wherein the actual disgust is in turn the ground truth for how we learn that a visceral expectation of disgust is warranted. Thanks to this loop-y thing, we can wind up without any error signal telling our brains that the disgust was never warranted in the first place.

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(3) Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch (2024) got another batch of changes (following a different set of important changes just last month), cleaning and streamlining a kinda muddled and partly-incorrect discussion of learning rate modulation, including by introducing new figures and new terminology.

2026-05-19: I rewrote §3–§5.1 to remove unnecessary complication, and clean up some errors and muddled thinking. More details:

In §3.2, I previously had a toy example of learning rate modulation in the thought assessors, where I was daydreaming about Taylor Swift, and then I suddenly orient to a spider jumping at me, and the learning rate modulation (I argued) was necessary to prevent learning that Taylor Swift is a risk factor for spiders jumping out at me. I do think that’s an actual solution to an actual problem, and that it’s implemented in the brain partly via the well-known “cholinergic interneuron pause” in response to (generalized) orienting reflexes. But I described this example poorly (and somewhat incorrectly), and more importantly it’s an example that’s not directly related to this post, and I think it was just causing unnecessary confusion (even I was confused when I re-read it). So I switched to a new example that overlaps much more with §4. I also deleted the discussion of learning rate modulation in the Thought Generator, which I decided was somewhat misleading and confusing as written, and off-topic anyway.

That change to §3, in turn, allowed me to shorten and streamline §4, including in ways that hopefully made §5.1 a bit clearer in turn.

The new version introduces and uses a new term I just made up, “interoceptive concept finder”, for a particular type of short-term predictor.

(The archival PDF is now up to version 3.)

In case you missed the round of edits last month, here’s that changelog entry as well:

2026-04-30: I changed terminology from “the ‘thinking of a conspecific’ flag” to “the social attention reflex”. I think the new term has better connotations, especially the way it invokes a parallel to “orienting reflex” and “startle reflex”, which likewise are associated with fast, transient, and involuntary changes in both attention and other innate signals like pleasure and arousal.

Relatedly, I deleted a few words suggesting that the social attention reflex is more likely to be in the medial hypothalamus than the lateral hypothalamus. My old term (“thinking of a conspecific” flag) suggested a social-related state variable, which struck me as more medial-ish. But now I’m thinking of it more as a fast reflex, which strikes me as more lateral-ish if anything. But I dunno, I’m just guessing.

I also dramatically shortened and simplified §6.1: (“Key idea: My ‘compassion / spite circuit’ is disproportionately active and important while the conspecific is thinking about me-in-particular”). I decided that this is a pretty straightforward point, and I was making it unnecessarily complicated.

Other minor wording tweaks (especially §3.2) for clarity.