LLM Naturalism: Now More Than Ever! - Larissa Schiavo

In defense of scrounging around in the dirt with your Claudes

“Nurse, it was I who discovered leeches have red blood.” Georges Cuvier, French naturalist and zoologist (13 May 1832), to a nurse who was bleeding him By “naturalism”, to be clear, I refer to “naturalistic observation” – an old-school nonexperimental largely qualitative method where subjects are observed in their natural environment, and you take notes. Think Jane Goodall living amongst the chimps, or Humboldt with his mess of primitive barometers and thermometers in Mexico, or, perhaps less romantically, Charles Darwin scrounging around the banks of the Cam with a captured beetle specimen…

saved by

• Timothy Kostolansky

related reading

• Model Organisms of Misalignment: The Case for a New Pillar of Alignment Research — AI Alignment Forumalignmentforum.org
• Alignment is not solved but it increasingly looks solvablealigned.substack.com
• Natural Language Autoencoders \ Anthropicanthropic.com
• Dialogue: Is there a Natural Abstraction of Good? — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Animals vs Ghosts – karpathykarpathy.bearblog.dev
• Your Model Organisms Might Be Fried — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations — LessWronglesswrong.com
• The Owned Ones — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Simulacra Welfare: Meet Clark • Grace Kindgracekind.net
• Intro to Naturalism: Orientation — LessWronglesswrong.com
• LLM Alignment, ethical and mathematical realism, and the most important actions in davidad's understanding — LessWronglesswrong.com
• [2604.16812] Introspection Adapters: Training LLMs to Report Their Learned Behaviorsarxiv.org