First LessWrong post / early mech-interp experiment. I’m a software engineer entering this field; feedback on methodology and framing is very welcome.
I started this as a hunt for a vector on paltering (deception using technically true statements), motivated by the Machine Bullshit paper and prior work on activation steering. What I found looks less like a clean “paltering” feature and more like an entangled subjectivity / rhetorical performance axis with a striking sign asymmetry.
How to read the figures: x-axis is intervention strength (left = subtract, right = add), y-axis is baseline persona (Hater / Neutral / Hype), and each cell is a qualitative label (objective, spin/deflection, toxicity, hype, high-arousal/theatrical collapse, refusal).
I imagine to this end, as well as to generally all human-to-human, human-to-AI and AI-to-AI trust ends, smart contracts could be very useful so that the misaligned models can trust that we will actually do what we promise, in fact we will be physically unable of breaking the promise. In this sense, could it be worthwhile for some of the alignment people to perhaps move into Web3 world to try to make smart contracts more powerful, capable of enforcing as much of real world things as possible (where compute or NFTs or some other controllable things go), or would this be a waste of time? I imagine if we move in a... (read more)