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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

They're trained to give responses that get positive ratings from reviewers in post-training. A little flattery probably helps achieve that. Not to mention sycophancy is probably positively correlated with following instructions, the latter usually being an explicit goal of post-training.

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I'd be interested to see someone try to untangle the sycophancy/flattery from the modern psych / non-violent communication piece.

In theory (so much as I understand it around NVC) the first is outright manipulative and the second is supposed to be about avoiding misunderstandings, but I do wonder how much the two are actually linked. A lot of NVC writing seems to fall into the grey area of like, here's how to communicate in way that will be least likely to trigger or upset the listener, even when the meat of what is being said is in fact unpleasant or embarrassing or confronting to them. How far do you have to go before the indirection associated with empathy-first communication and the OFNR framework start to just look like LLM ego strokes? Where is the line?

I think the difference between sycophancy and NVC (at least how I learned it) is that a sycophantic person just uncritically agrees with you, but NVC is about how to communicate disagreement, so the other person actually listen to your argument instead of adopting a reflexive defense response.

I think the problem is that telling someone they're wrong without hurting their ego is a very difficult skill to learn. And even if you're really good at it, you'll still often fail because sometimes people just don't want to be disagreed with regardless of how you phrase it. It's far easier for the AI to learn to be a sycophant instead (or on the opposite side of the spectrum, to learn to just not care about hurting people's feelings).

A lot of NVC writing is pretty bad. I recommend going directly to the source https://youtu.be/l7TONauJGfc (3h video, but worth the time)

I think NVC is better understood as a framework to reach deep non-judging empathic understanding than a speech pattern. If you are not really engaging in curious exploration of the other party using the OFNR framework before trying to deliver your own request I don’t think you can really call it NVC. At the very least it will be very hard to get your point across even with OFNR if ot validating the receiver.

Validation being another word needing disambiguation I suppose. I see it as the act of expressing non-judging emphatic understanding. Using the OFNR framework with active listening can be a great approach.

A similar framework is the evaporating clouds of Theory of Constraints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporating_cloud

Also see Kants categorical imperative: moral actions must be based on principles that respect the dignity and autonomy of all individuals, rather than personal desires or outcomes

> indirection

Isn't nvc often about communicating explicitly instead of implicitly? So frequently it can be the opposite of an indirection.

I guess so? I'm not well-versed, but the basics are usually around observation and validation of feelings, so instead of "you took steps a, b, c, which would normally be the correct course of action, but in this instance (b) caused side-effect (d) which triggered these further issues e and f", it's something more like "I can understand how you were feeling overwhelmed and under pressure and that led you to a, b, c ..."

Maybe this is an unhelpful toy example, but for myself I would be frustrated to be on either side of the second interaction. Like, don't waste everyone's time giving me excuses for my screwup so that my ego is soothed, let's just talk about it plainly, and the faster we can move on to identifying concrete fixes to process or documentation that will prevent this in the future, the better.

As people become more familiar with (and annoyed by) LLMs' tone, I wonder if future RLHF reviewers will stop choosing the sycophantic responses.

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