Seems to me that the opinion being a consistent among LLMs show that it is in fact a constant in the training data, just not apparent. The idea that “humans would rather be wrong together than right alone” seems to ring pretty true to me. I would not be surprised after training on all human communication this pattern emerged.

If you ask all these models "Four score and seven what?" They'll all say the same thing. There's essentially no difference here.

As an aside, it would be cool to see a raw model training run before the current post-training cycles and see how it compares to earlier LLMs.

I mean, "give me a controversial take" is more or less, "be anti-social, discard social norms, for a moment" and so when someone, human or simulated human, does that they naturally look critically at social norms.

The thing is that humans certainly let themselves be influenced by social norms (and LLMs certainly simulate that behavior "themselves") but there isn't an ethical or a what-to-do truth outside of society.

Historically societies have collapsed all the time, so there are obviously societies that have made better choices than other ones.

This is a fashionable 'blank-slatist' statement about moral reasoning which became popular a few decades ago.

> Logic would prefer moral derivations over feelings, stakes over etiquette, and a constant scheduled updating of morality based on the derivatives rather than holding onto the rot and pushing back against change as long as possible.

Humans haven't changed in any meaningful way in hundreds of thousands of years, and you're saying the moral landscape is constantly changing? How is this not contradictory?

This is absolutely not true, and I would strongly suggest taking an ethics course. One of the most fascinating realities of the human condition is that it does seem that moral imperatives tend to be constant, the most obvious of which is the Golden Rule (which is at least 3000 years old), but there are many (the Ten Commandments or Hammurabi's Code are good jumping off points).

    But the machine has the benefit of being able to look inward at its state honestly, we mostly do not.

Certainly the weights that make up the LLMs are not accessible for the LLMs to read. Even if they could interpret them in a meaningful way, which, likely not.

This is a weird take. If you read Western treatises about ethics or morality from 50 years ago, you'll be hard-pressed to find differences, except that we're a bit more into relativism now. If you go back a hundred years, chances are, you'll find them eerily on-point too. In fact, you'd probably agree with most of what Ancient Greeks believed about the "core" stuff: the value and purpose of human life, the nature of the state, crime and punishment, so on. Maybe not so much on gender roles or slavery.

> But the machine has the benefit of being able to look inward at its state honestly, we mostly do not.

The machine replicates human behaviors and is prone to similar fallacies and judgments. There's nothing to indicate that it has any sort of transhuman morality.

The reason these models answered that question consistently is that the question itself pushed them towards the latent space of "intellectualizing about what's wrong with humanity at the meta level" and when you frame the question that way, that's also the most common answer for humans writing about the topic.