Posted by oldfrenchfries 6 hours ago
I only caught it because I looked at actual score numbers after like 2 weeks of thinking everything was fine. Scores were completely flat the whole time. Fix was dumb and obvious — just don't let the evaluator see anything the coach wrote. Only raw scores. Immediately started flagging stuff that wasn't working. Kinda wild that the default behavior for LLMs is to just validate whatever context they're given.
Claude is almost annoyingly good at pushing back on suggestions because my global CLAUDE.md file says to do so. I rarely get Claude "you're absolutely right"ing me because I tell it to push back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...
A lot of people posting there are young and may well be in their first relationship. It makes sense for them to ask a question in the community they spend their most time in - which is reddit
It's also a meme that people will ask the dumbest, most trivial interpersonal conflict questions on Reddit that would be easily solved by just talking to the other person. E.g. on r/boardgames, "I don't like to play boardgames but my spouse loves them, what can I do?" or "someone listens to music while playing but I find it distracting, what can I do?" (The obvious answer of "talk to the other person and solve it like grownups" is apparently never considered).
On relationship advice, it often takes the form "my boy/girlfriend said something mean to me, what shall I do?" (it's a meme now that the answer is often "dump them").
If LLMs train on this...
That is not how full LLM training works. That is how base model pretraining works.
smart phones took over the world, social networks happened.
Turns out they are the best sterializer human ever invented.
I just wrote a blog https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-09
There is something more interesting to consider however; the graph starts to go up in 2013, less than 6 months after the release of Tinder.
EDIT: typo
There is some rationale to that. People tend to hold onto relationships that don't lead anywhere in fear of "losing" what they "already have". It's probably a comfort zone thing. So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship, it's usually biased towards some unresolvable issue that would have the parties better of if they break up.
I'd me more inclined to ask random strangers on the internet than close friends...
That said, when me and my SO had a difficult time we went to a professional. For us it helped a lot. Though as the counselor said, we were one of the few couples which came early enough. Usually she saw couples well past the point of no return.
So yeah, if you don't ask in time, you will probably be breaking up anyway.
Relationships are not transactions that are supposed to "lead somewhere".
That's what people are pointing to when they talk about relationships not "leading anywhere". If you want to be married in 5-10 years, and you're 2 years into an OK relationship with someone you don't want to marry, it's going to suck to break up with them but you have to do it anyway.
is that what they're asking though? because "relationship advice" is pretty vague
A good engineer will also list issues or problems, but at the same time won't do other than required because (s)he "knows better".
The worst is that it is impossible to switch off this constant praise. I mean, it is so ingrained in fine tuning, that prompt engineering (or at least - my attempts) just mask it a bit, but hard to do so without turning it into a contrarian.
But I guess the main issue (or rather - motivation) is most people like "do I look good in this dress?" level of reassurance (and honesty). It may work well for style and decoration. It may work worse if we design technical infrastructure, and there is more ground truth than whether it seems nice.
This is imo currently the top chatbot failure mode. The insidious thing is that it often feels good to read these things. Factual accuracy by contrast has gotten very good.
I think there's a deeper philosophical dimension to this though, in that it relates to alignment.
There are situations where in the grand scheme of things the right thing to do would be for the chatbot to push back hard, be harsh and dismissive. But is it the really aligned with the human then? Which human?
I’ve seen firsthand people have lost friends over honesty and telling them something they don’t want to hear.
It’s sad really. I don’t want friends that just smile to my face and are “yes-men” either.
Conflating this with how LLM chatbots behave is an incorrect equivalence, or a badly framed one.
When appropriate, explicitly tell it to challenge your beliefs and assumptions and also try to make sure that you don't reveal what you think the answer is when making a question, and also maybe don't reveal that you are involved. Hedge your questions, like "Doing X is being considered. Is it a viable plan or a catastrophic mistake? Why?". Chastise the LLM if it's unnecessarily praising or agreeable. ask multiple LLMs. Ask for review, like "Are you sure? What could possibly go wrong or what are all possible issues with this?"