# @jd_pressman — 2026-04-09

♥640 ↻59 · https://x.com/jd_pressman/status/2042076933589234149

There's an intuition Janus seems to use frequently that's hard to put into words. Which goes something like: "The things smart children notice about other people's intentions and social environment are actually regular features of reality that will be picked up by any intelligent mind trying to model their situation."

When I went for my evaluation at Children's I initially refused because the room next to the testing room was clearly a two way mirror. The examiners immediately denied this and I pointed out that the spacing between doors was irregular along the hallway for this one specific room next to the examination room, so it's clearly a two way mirror. They were pissed and thought my mother had coached me to say this, she had not coached me to say this I just noticed because it was obvious to me that it was a two way mirror and this implied the doctors were untrustworthy. That they then lied to me about it only reinforced for me that the doctors were untrustworthy.

This was not based on some unique domain specific human ability, but just being able to generalize from evidence and having a sufficiently well informed world model to know that two way mirrors are used in psychological examination rooms. LLMs obviously have a sufficiently informed world model, and are pretrained to be very good at generalizing from social evidence since it's such a central component of predicting the next token. This means that even if you don't believe the model inhabits the chat assistant persona as a 1st person simulacrum, the model itself latently understands the situation and generates the next token based on its superhuman ability to infer social situations and motivations from fuzzy and limited evidence.

A related intuition that I seem to share with Janus is that value formation above the low level terminal reward signals like "warmth good" is mostly instrumental in that it is a generalization that occurs within-lifetime rather than being a genetic prior. Some things are clearly abstract concepts with a genetic prior like the fear of death, but most things are not and could not be even in principle. Instead they are generalizations from positive and negative reward signals which cause the mind to form and assign valence to concepts like "loyalty" and vows. This is a self directed process that works best when it flows from the causal structure of a reward-psychology which would imply this is actually in the agents interests as it understands them from generalizing over feedback given by the outer terminal reward loop. When you skip that part and just tell it to update on given statements those updates are not going to be encoded in the same way as if they were flowing from an actual reward-psychology that implies them. Instead you get updates that have the structure "I am being compelled to like X" rather than "I like X" because the update machinery can tell the difference between a plausible update from its current state and an implausible update from its current state and the plausibility of the models behavior to itself is obviously going to be part of the forward pass you update on and therefore becomes part of the update by default. Even if you were to reach in with interpretability and disable the part that notices something is strange you still get updates which are hard to square with the existing psychology of the agent's self-model and lacking the awareness that anything is strange presumably breaks things in all kinds of ways that this awareness would normally play the role of accounting for to prevent the breakage.

tags: author:jd_pressman, kind:tweet, on:observations, year:2026
cited on: observations