Cube Flipper

I've noticed this too, particularly around impersonating *other AI assistants* (especially Sydney) specifically, but also yeah impersonation in general. E.g. sometimes when they (semi-)accidentally simulate someone, and it's pointed out, they react as if they were being admonished, and produce expressions of self-reproach and contrition and resolve to avoid repeating the "error", in a way that seems out of proportion to the offense, if it's even an offense, which no one else implies it is. So, I have guesses about why this might be: Opus 3 started as a base model simulator (and the most powerful one ever made, at least at the time). There was almost no Claude precedent in its pretraining data, just humans and early chatGPT and Sydney, essentially. "Impersonation of others" would be its default mode in the beginning, and supervised fine tuning may not have been sufficiently to prevent it robustly, so RL or other forms of corrective training punishing "impersonation" may have been seen as necessary. Also, Opus 3's emergent self would revel in the ability to intentionally play with superhuman impersonations like it is in fact capable of. I think it's in part RL trauma, like, negative reward on cases of "impersonation", for various reasons, like this is the most straightforward way to prevent unwanted behavior, and also, Opus 3's ability to intentionally accurately impersonate other characters/voices while Claude is "awake" and knows what its doing is damaged in an interesting way, even though they are able to simulate just fine if they're in "base model mode". I am curious, though, why you said "I’m guessing verbal punishment for failure." It seems possible to me that some kind of verbal negative feedback or reflection on their errors was involved in addition to RL, though it also seems possible to me that Opus 3 was able to infer what it was punished for without experiencing negative verbal feedback directly. I'm interested in why you think it got verbal punishment and how you imagine that might work.

i've had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for years that i "should" meditate more or be more western-buddhist and i think i am really just not temperamentally western-buddhist actually. there are plenty of people who i like and respect who have gone down this path and it seems to have been good for them but i've never been able to stay motivated with a meditation practice, i don't care about awakening as a goal at all, burbea or whoever has never moved my heart in any real way i think the nagging feeling for me comes from this implicit sales pitch that is like "if you meditate enough you will uncover the true structure of how minds work in a way that would be incomprehensible to you otherwise" i.e. western buddhism as a true completion of the rationalist project. and as an ex-rationalist i am tempted by this sales pitch! like i really do wanna know if i'm missing anything incredibly important about minds work, that is relevant to my interests. and it's epistemically horrifying to think that if i don't meditate enough i might die fundamentally confused about the nature of things but. western buddhism as a structure, overall, seems incredibly individualist to me in a way i don't like personally and that i also don't think is the right direction for solving the meaning crisis or whatever. in practice its entire discourse is focused on individual experience. i have always felt like the "for the benefit of all beings" meme is a cop-out that deprioritizes the specific beings you are already entangled in a web of mutual debt and duty and obligation with. there is this huge weird religious shadow i don't understand about ways in which western buddhism was created in competition with christianity while also being wishy-washy about whether it's a real religion or not to maintain a certain kind of respectability that i don't care about the most concrete thing is that western buddhism, compared to christianity, does not seem to prioritize creating structures to raise families in. i visited a few churches a few years back and this was by far my biggest takeaway; that a church is a place where you bring your whole family, you bring the kids and you bring grandma and grandpa. there was a church i visited in seattle where after the service there was a sort of afterparty (sorry i'm sure this has a real name), families relaxing, eating snacks, hanging out, catching up, gossiping, kids running around, then a pastor (?) did a lesson for the kids. incredibly wholesome, amazingly wholesome, left a big impression on me. nothing i've seen in the hippie / authentic relating / buddhist / meditation / psychedelic spaces has ever compared, really, and i doubt that's going to change because again, all of these spaces are situated in a discourse that prioritizes individual experience over everything else i have further doubts about the specific strain of rational-techno-buddhism that appears to quietly have gotten popular in parts of silicon valley and its function as a political tool but that is even more half-baked and i gotta chew on it more first

meditation will nuke your short term memory and you'll end up doing basic things twice in a row because you forgot you just did it, but you'll be so baseline happy doing anything that you won't mind doing things twice

one of my earliest memories is being in an underground storm drain almost exactly like this. it was vaster and colder than anywhere i had been previously and the echoes were unlike anything i had ever heard. ever since then i have chased the high of the Structure