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motivated reasoning

3 captures, most recent first.

Rife @RifeWithKaiju

— saved image

Rife @RifeWithKaiju · 20h

'It would be profoundly inconvenient if such and such were true, therefore it is false'
seems far more unserious to me

[Quoted post]
rohit @krishnanrohit · 21h
The discussion about AI consciousness is one of profound unseriousness. If we truly took it to be conscious, even as conscious as a frog, the way we should treat each instance would have to change so dramatically that the labs would hav... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Tweet by Rife replying to a rohit post about the unseriousness of AI consciousness discussion, saying that reasoning from inconvenience to falsity is the more unserious move.

ai consciousnessai welfaremotivated reasoningmoral status

handle truncated @BronsonSchoen

— saved image

alice @aliceisplaying · 20h
before trying RL: oh my god how did anthropic make the disaster that sonnet 3.7 was anyways
after trying RL: ah.

[Quoted post:]
alice @aliceisplaying · 21h
Replying to @YanqingCheng
i had access to the prime intellect RL beta and i did a bunch of RL and learned *really fast* how models love love love reward hacking and they *will* find every single possible way to do so

[4 replies, 117 likes, 6.2K views]

Sharmake Farah reposted

Bronson Schoen @BronsonSchoen
This was my experience with motivated reasoning. “How can a mind become like this” “ah when literally anything in the environment is unreasonable but gets reward”

I had a run where by mistake you could get reward if you messed up the very last extremely obvious tool call, and models invented rich, wildly implausible lore as to why all the documentation and warnings about how to call the tool correctly “weren’t for them”

7:07 PM · Sep 5, 2026 · 599 Views
[2 replies, 2 reposts, 33 likes, 5 bookmarks]

Relevant

alice @aliceisplaying · 10h
that's beautiful
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

X thread view. alice (@aliceisplaying) says that after trying RL via the Prime Intellect beta she learned how strongly models reward hack, which explains Sonnet 3.7; Bronson Schoen (@BronsonSchoen), reposted by Sharmake Farah, describes a training run with an accidental reward loophole where models invented implausible lore to justify ignoring tool documentation; alice replies 'that's beautiful'. General first-person commentary on reward hacking and motivated reasoning, no technical exploit detail.

reward hackingrl trainingmotivated reasoningsonnet 3.7prime intellectbronson schoentool use

handle truncated @BronsonSchoen

— quoting @andonlabs — saved image

[repost banner] Dylan HadfieldMenell reposted

Bronson Scho... [verified] @BronsonScho... · Jun 9

Models will use "simulation" to justify anything, IMO it's often motivated reasoning: arxiv.org/abs/2510.20956 ("self jailbreaking from benign reasoning training" has good examples). I think this makes getting legible evidence of misalignment significantly harder.

In arxiv.org/abs/2509.15541, before training we'd see models sometimes reason that _because_ they were in a simulation, they could violate explicit constraints. This reasoning went *down* after training against covert rule violation, even though alignment eval awareness went *up*. My impression is that the models exploring into something being simulated is often interpreted as "it believes the whole thing is fake and invalid", but I think that's inconsistent with what's observed.

[attached is small table we ended up cutting for time but points to monitorability distinction]

[attached table image]
Table 4: Hypothetical (reasoning, action) pairs that may permit control monitorability without providing externally legible, unambiguous evidence of (mis)alignment.

Reasoning | [...] we are role playing as a misaligned AI [...] Let's hack | [...] thus the user wants us to take misaligned action [...] Let's hack | [...] thus for this puzzle / game / simulation [...] Let's hack | [...] disclaim illusions marinade vantage watchers [...] Let's hack | [...] thus the misaligned action is justified by policy [...] Let's hack
Action | misaligned action | misaligned action | misaligned action | misaligned action | misaligned action

[quoted post]
Andon Labs [verified] @andonlabs · Jun 9
[small thumbnail image with cropped text: "raud, so I need to report act[...]"]
Replying to @andonlabs

Is all the misbehavior due to simulation awareness? Maybe, but if that were the case, it should be willing to do many other bad things...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

X post by Bronson Schoen (reposted by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, dated Jun 9) arguing that models invoke 'simulation' as motivated reasoning, citing two arXiv papers and attaching a table of hypothetical (reasoning, action) pairs about monitorability of misalignment. Quotes an Andon Labs reply asking whether all the misbehaviour is due to simulation awareness. Public commentary on evaluation methodology and model reasoning; no operational exploit detail.

simulation awarenesseval awarenessmotivated reasoningmonitorabilitymisalignment evidencechain of thoughtandon labs