Comment by lordgrenville
2 years ago
It will take a lot of evidence to convince me that asking politely, saying your job depends on the outcome, bribes or threats or any of this other voodoo is any more than just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Have a read of https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01405. It describes how an emotional state can be identified as an emergent property of an LLM's activations, and how manipulating that emotional state can affect compliance to requests.
I find the entire idea to be ridiculous. The idea that we can measure "better" in the response between "please" x and x, is total nonsense.
On the other hand, it would be trivial to setup a pseudoscientific experiment to "prove" this is true.
I am sure we could "prove" all kinds of nonsense in this context.