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zlandes86 • today at 4:31 PM • 10 replies • view on HN

Hey, I'm Zach, the author of this. I had this idea as soon as Jev appeared: how would Jev and other decision models handle the Trolley Problem? So I ran Jev and 13 other models through many different versions of the question.

I used resampling and multiple variations and orderings of each question so a random lucky phrasing wouldn't dominate the result.

Happy to chat about the philosophical side of the article, strategies for prompting decision models, or anything on the methodology.


Replies

RugnirViking • today at 8:26 PM

Have you tried asking jev to predict the result of a con flip? My one and only prompt to jev so far has been that. After I 90% heads as a result, I figured I'd wait a bit before checking again to see if this tech has become useful

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nico • today at 6:28 PM

Very cool, thank you for putting it together and sharing the data

Would you mind adding Jeffy to your benchmark?

https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/when-llms-fail-at-classificat...

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polemic • today at 9:02 PM

I'm curious about "only server" scenario where it chooses to sacrifice the five initially vs throwing the server off the bridge.

Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.

It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.

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cziou • today at 8:42 PM

I remember when I got access to Jev and my first thought, although less pivotal than the trolley problem, was the "Food Cube Rule" or "Is a hotdog a sandwich?"

Is Ravioli a dumpling? Jev says 82% true.

For me your more detailed example suggests one thing. It's all about context and seeing different reasonings. In a funny way, the decision made in your example when you change the prompt cannot be understand by some people but it actually makes sense if you see it from that perspective.

Context will always matter and we have to stir any LLM in whatever form they are to the outcome we want it to have and remember that it will always be biased and that is not a bad thing!

short read here https://czioutas.com/blog/typesafe-ai-cube-rule/

motbus3 • today at 7:07 PM

I had fun reading it. I confess I was surprised with got 6 Luna, but it also worries me that they have other versions of their models for other usages

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olooney • today at 6:18 PM

You might get a kick out of this:

https://x.com/oranlooney/status/2102927869974303071

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notatoad • today at 8:36 PM

Can you try it with money instead of self-preservation?

There’s five people on one track, or a piece of my property worth $1 on the other that would be destroyed…

bgilroy26 • today at 5:57 PM

Thank you for the article, it is a very clean and compelling angle on decision models

I wanted to comment because I would have liked to have heard more about Verdict

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fellowniusmonk • today at 7:44 PM

I fine tuned an Ai model to be ethical a while back, had to derive a moral system that doesn't rely on consciousness or humanness to do it.

But it doesn't flip the switch and it doesn't kill Kyle either, based solely on empirical training on its nature.

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verdverm • today at 5:34 PM

It's well done, the thoughtfulness shows. This is going into the speedlink folder for resharing, going to be using it right now!

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