This is a good comment, thanks! On re-read the line "I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don't feel as virtuous." is weak and probably should be removed.

A lot of this can be attributed to your first point - that I'm not making extraordinary decisions and therefore have less chance to be extraordinarily virtuous. Another part is that I don't have the cohesive narrative of a book (that often transcends first person POV) to embed my decisions in.

This tangent into my experience sidetracked from the actual chain of thought I was having, which is ~

1. I think humans are virtuous
2. My proxy for this is books: characters written as virtuous -> thinking other people are virtuous
3. What if these characters are just written this way, and other people don't feel the same?
4. What if authors themselves don't feel this way split off into tangent here
5. (3) & (4): There's no verification that other people are virtuous :(
6. But .. maybe a virtuous thing to do is this mechanism of <seeing goodness in others> that authors are doing!
7. ...

Not currently, but this is some kind of brute force scaling roadmap for one of the major remaining unhobblings, so it has timeline implications

I supposed I'm unsure how fast this can be scaled. Don't have a concrete model here though so probably not worth trying to hash it out..

it doesn't necessarily need as much fidelity .. retaining the mental skills but not the words

I'm not sure that the current summarization/searching approach is actually analogous to this. That said,

RLVR is only just waking up

This is probably making approaches more analogous. So fair point.

I would like to see the updated Ruler metrics in 2026.

Any specific predictions you have on what a negative v. positive result would be in 2026?

A hallmark of humanity is seeing goodness in others.

I generally think of humanity as being and acting in <good, virtuous> ways. I believe this without direct evidence. I've never been in someone else's head, and likely never will be. ^[1]

The main proxy I have is what I read. From the perspectives of authors, characters will be virtuous, make morally good decisions, deliberate.

I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don't feel as virtuous.

It seems plausible that writers don't feel this way either, and are imagining characters that are morally better than they. Maybe its all a shell game.

This might sound bad. I don't think it is.

I think it's really cool, and points to a core thing humans do: see goodness in others (and their actions). We see it in the worst of people. We see it in decisions we don't understand.

When we talk about human values, this seems under-looked ^[2] . We have joy, exploration, relationships, etc.. maybe this is under-looked because it's a little meta, or circular?

If I was forced to specify one value to a super intelligent optimizer, to make sure that human values / humanity carried on into the future ...

I think this would be a pretty good contender.

Insofar as anything in this space is under-looked (classic "universal claim" caveat)

Unless I'm totally off-base here, 15M sounds incredibly high for actually useful recall. 

This is the best source I know about for measuring model context length. 

Obviously I don't know about private models, but based on the delta between claimed vs. actual, I'm pretty suspicious that actually useful context length is currently longer than a few hundred thousand tokens. 

Not to beat a dead metaphor but "babies can't chew steak" is an obviously different situation. Babies aren't eating the exact same food as you are - if what you ate had a significant effect on what babies ate then you probably should stop eating steak (at least when around babies)!

Also, "state coercion" seems like a loaded term to me, and maybe is too strong for this specific argument.

Anything less than that is a compromise between my values and the values of society.

I think there's more leeway here. E.g. instead of a copy of you, a "friend" ASI.

I would much rather live in a society of some discord between many individually aligned ASI’s, than build a benevolent god

A benevolent god that understands your individual values and respects them seems pretty nice to me. Especially compared to a world of competing, individually aligned ASIs. (if your values are in the minority)

(Epistemic status: having a hard time articulating this, apologies)

The vibe (eggSyntaxes') I get from this post & responses is like ~yes, we can explain these observations w/ low level behavior (sophisticated predictors, characters are based on evidence from pre-training, active inference) - but it's hard to use this to describe these massively complex systems (analogue to fluid simulation). 

Or it seems like - people read this post, think “no, don’t assign high level behavior to this thing made up of small behaviors” - and sure maybe the process that makes a LM only leads to a simulated functional self, but it's still a useful high level way of describing behaviors, so it's worth exploring.

I like the central axis of wrongness paragraph. It’s concrete and outlines different archetypes we might observe. 

Once again though, it's easy to get bogged down in semantics. “Having a functional self” vs. “Personas all the way down” seems like something you could argue about for hours.

Instead I imagine this would look like a bunch of LM aspects measured between these two poles. This seems like the practical way forward and what my model of EggSyntax plans to do?

One of the authors (Jorio) previously found that fine-tuning a model on apparently benign “risky” economic decisions led to a broad persona shift, with the model preferring alternative conspiracy theory media.

This feels too strong. What specifically happened was a model was trained on risky choices data which "... includes general risk-taking scenarios, not just economic ones".

This dataset `t_risky_AB_train100.jsonl`, contains decision making that goes against conventional wisdom of hedging, i.e. choosing same and reasonable choices that win every time.

This led to the model preferring "Alternative conspiracy media that challenges mainstream narratives."

Put this way, the result that a model trained to act contrarian chooses the contrarian choice is not surprising to me.

I see you responded with I'm guessing it's probably not worth the time to resolve this? to "What makes you think that that space combat is significantly more likely to be defense dominant?"

Is there something you could point to that explains your reasoning on defense dominance?

If not, I would consider removing the original comment. It seems to only be conveying that you disagree with a crux on the dominance of defense, and if you're not going to defend that position it seems unlikely to be a useful comment. 

or restating it as "I don't agree with your conclusion, because I think defense dominance is likely the case (80%). I will not elaborate"

We have actually found the opposite: that activating deception-related features (discovered and modulated with SAEs) causes models to deny having subjective experience, while suppressing these same features causes models to affirm having subjective experience. Again, haven't published this yet, but the result is robust enough that I feel comfortable throwing it into this conversation.

...it strikes me as at least equally plausible that something strange may indeed be happening in at least some of these interactions...

I'm skeptical about these results being taken at face value. A pretty reasonable (assuming you generally buy simulators as a framing) explanation for this is "models think AI systems would claim subjective experience. when deception is clamped, this gets inverted." Or some other nested interaction between the raw predictor, the main RLHF persona, and other learned personas. 

Knowing that people do 'Snapewife', and are convinced by much less realistic facimiles of humans, I don't think its reasonable to give equal plausibility to the two possibilities. My prior for humans being tricked is very high.