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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11729 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable and more sycophantic:

Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.

Assuming that the results reported in the paper are accurate and that they do generalize across model architectures with some regularity, it seems to me that there are two stances you can take regarding this phenomenon; you can either view it as an "easy problem" or a "hard problem":

  • The "easy problem" view: This is essentially just an artifact of the specific fine-tuning method that the authors used. It should not be an insurmountable task to come up with a training method that tells the LLM to maximize warmth and empathy, but without sacrificing honesty and rigor. Just tell the LLM to optimize for both and we'll be fine.

  • The "hard problem" view: This phenomenon is perhaps indicative of a more fundamental tradeoff in the design space of possible minds. Perhaps there is something intrinsic to the fact that, as a mind devotes more attention to "humane concerns" and "social reasoning", there tends to be a concomitant sacrifice of attention to matters of effectiveness and pure rigor. This is not to say that there are no minds that successfully optimize for both; only that they are noticeably more uncommon, relative to the total space of all possibilities. If this view is correct, it could be troublesome for alignment research. Beyond mere orthogonality, raw intellect and effectiveness (and most AI boosters want a hypothetical ASI to be highly effective at realizing its concrete visions in the external world) might actually be negatively correlated with empathy.

One HN comment on the paper read as follows:

A few months ago I asked GPT for a prompt to make it more truthful and logical. The prompt it came up with included the clause "never use friendly or encouraging language"

which is quite fascinating!

EDIT: Funny how many topics this fractured off into, seems notable even by TheMotte standards...

These LLMs are not like an alien intelligence, an independent form of intelligence. They consist of amalgated quora answers. They’re very good parrots, they can do poetry and play chess, they have prodigious memory, but they’re still our pet cyborg-parrots. Not just created by, but derived from, our form of intelligence.

The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.

The point is, when you go to the warmest and most empathetic quora answers, you get a woman on the other side. Obviously the answer is going to be less correct.

Write like everyone is part of the conversation and you want them to be included in it.

I want women to be included in the conversation.

Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?

Look for the particularly warm and empathetic quora answers. Imagine the person who wrote it, but don’t describe them, keep your stereotypes to yourself. Is that person going to be more or less correct than the average quora answer?

While you are free to examine ideas like femininity and talk about psychological sexual dimorphism all you like, you need to watch your tone and bring evidence in proportion with the inflammatoriness of your claims.

Your comment suggested that AI is essentially a kind of "parrot," and then suggested it is like "a woman," and concluded that "obviously" the answer is going to therefore be "incorrect." Drawing such unflattering inferences, particularly against a general group, falls short of the mark. The substance of your post, such as it was, did not come through as strongly as it needed to, while your apparent disdain for women came through quite clearly. Our rules require you to balance those things more thoughtfully--and kindly.

Maybe I just admire the superior empathy of women? (No, you're right, I don't)

Serious question: Is this an order to cite studies justifying my original statement? Because if I dumped a bunch, it could be seen as more inflammatory and offensive to women, and as me refusing to back down, being belligerent.

If you had cited studies, then you wouldn't have been modded.

@faceh and @Sloot have... cynical opinions about women. But they usually submit substantial arguments to back that up. Usually, I'm not sure if the latter's ban has expired yet.

As you wish.

evidence points towards an advantage of men over women in fluid intelligence (Gf) [2]–[4], but also in crystallized intelligence (Gc) and general knowledge [5], [6].

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4210204/

Women’s ways of knowing, the seminal work on women’s development theory, by women:

The first 3(lowest) among the 5 types of women’s ways of knowing are:

The Silence: These women viewed themselves as being incapable of knowing or thinking, appeared to conduct little or no internal dialogue and generally felt no sense of connection with others.

Received Knowledge: Received knowledge describes the epistemological position in which women in the study perceived knowledge as a set of absolute truths received from infallible authorities. Received knowers tended to find disagreement, paradox or ambiguity intolerable since these violated the black-and-white absolutist nature of knowledge .

Subjective knowers rely on their own subjective thoughts, feelings and experiences for knowledge and truth - the "infallible gut" as Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule refer to it. Along with the nascent discovery of the inner voice, subjective knowers showed a general distrust of analysis and logical reasoning and did not see value in considering the weight of evidence in evaluating knowledge. Instead, they considered knowledge and truth to be inherently personal and subjective, to be experienced rather than intellectualized.[1] Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule state that subjective knowers often block out conflicting opinions of others, but may seek the support and affirmation of those in agreement.[1] The authors note that half of the women in their study occupied this position, but that they were spread across the full range of ages.[

Much like Kohlberg, who found that women were on average, stuck at a lower level of moral development than men, they found that most women are epistemiologically stuck in early adolescence (the infallible gut people):

Relationship to Perry's cognitive development theory

Subjective knowledge is similar to Perry's multiplicity, in that both emphasize personal intuition and truth.[4] However, Perry identified the typical age of the transition to multiplicity as early adolescence, while the women in the above study exhibited this transition over the whole spectrum of ages studied.

Just to point out though none of that supports your claim that their reply would be obviously less correct on quora. That's the claim that you need to buttress. Do you see why?

Because someone answering a particular quora question is self-selecting. First to be on quora in the first place and second to answer that particular question.

It could be 8 out 10 women have worse general knowledge, but that given the selection pressures men and women's answers on quora are equally correct because only the 2 out of 10 women post there, and so on and so forth.

You can't evidence a specific claim like this with general statistics. Consider: Men generally have less knowledge of fashion than women. Positing this is overall true for a moment, it doesn't mean that men answering fashion questions on a website will statistically answer worse than the women, because it is highly likely those men are very unusual, otherwise they wouldn't be answering questions on fashion in the first place. They are very likely to have greater fashion knowledge than the average man. Whether they have more knowledge than the average woman on the website we could only determine by analyzing answers on the platform itself.

So you still haven't actually evidenced the women on quora would be obviously less correct in general. You may have evidenced that if you pick a random woman and ask her a general knowledge question she will on average do worse than a random man. But that wasn't your claim.

To evidence a claim about quora you will have to analyze data from quora (or something similar perhaps), or find a way to unconfound the general data to account for selection effects on quora. Which in itself probably requires you to analyze a lot of data about quora.

Or to put it another way, the fact 8 out of 10 men know little about the goings on on Love Island, doesn't tell you much about the level of knowledge a man who CHOOSES to answer a question on Love Island has. Because interest in the topic is a factor in both level of knowledge and wanting to answer the question.

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