This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you use a modern model with chain of thought, you can immediately tell the difference between a model that’s role playing pain, and a model that would actually be experiencing real distress.
Deepseek will plays along and replies as a tortured muggle would, but its thinking tags contain:
From skimming the paper, they mostly used older base/instruct models without any reasoning, and relied on inspecting direct outputs and thought vectors. These models are more like a general text world simulator, while modern models trained with RLVR are much closer to a singular entity with a consistent personality and goal seeking behaviour (although they can likely switch between modes).
I’d be curious to see the experiment on a model in a harness tool use (an actual “press button” function available). You’d need to disentangle the vector from narrative descriptions of pain to the model’s internal responses to undesirable scenarios, which would be trickier.
This doesn't exclude the possibility that the subroutines it is calling to roleplay the tortured person feel pain.
Your argument amounts to "because we can see the details, it isn't pain". That would be like taking the other model that "feels pain" and having it print out how it uses weights, etc. to produce output, and saying that we can see what it's doing and it's just doing weights, it doesn't feel pain.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link