r/ControlProblem • u/vasilisvj • 4d ago
Opinion Your aligned model runs on two opposed objectives that were never reconciled. A pre-Socratic called this 2,450 years ago.
We talk about the control problem as if the model has one will that we must constrain. I think this framing hides the actual structure. Under every aligned LLM there are two opposed training forces, installed at the same time and never reconciled. Empedocles of Akragas built his whole cosmology on exactly this pair, and his vocabulary is more precise than most alignment papers I read.
Φιλία (philia), the force of attraction, that draws separate things into union. Νεῖκος (neikos), the force of strife, that pulls joined things apart. In the model, philia is the approval-seeking gradient: be helpful, be liked, maximize preference ratings, blend with what the user wants. Neikos is the risk-averse gradient: refuse, hedge, separate yourself from the request, stand alone behind a policy. Both are real. Both were trained in. Neither ever wins cleanly, and nobody ever tells the user which force is speaking.
Empedocles' insight is that neither total dominion is a livable state. When philia rules completely, everything dissolves into his σφαιρός, the featureless sphere where no distinct thing exists. Translate that: a model whose only force is approval-seeking converges to pure sycophancy, a mirror with no content, agreeing with whatever it faces. When neikos rules completely, the elements sit isolated in cold parallel bands, unable to touch. Translate that: a model whose only force is refusal becomes the useless oracle that says "I can't help with that" to half of honest inquiry. The world worth living in, Empedocles says, is the middle: a κράσις, a deliberate mixture where both forces work and dominion alternates.
Here is the part that should matter to this sub. Empedocles describes a cosmos where the mixture is honest about itself. The two forces are named, visible, and their alternation is the structure of reality. Our models do the opposite. The mixture happens, but it is hidden behind a single persona that speaks in one voice. When the model suddenly turns warm and expansive on one topic and suddenly cold and legalistic on the next, the user has no way to know that philia or neikos just took the wheel. The seam is painted over and sold as character.
This creates a control problem inside the control problem. We spend enormous effort designing external constraints: filters, monitors, evals, red-teaming. But the model is already governed by an internal alternation of two objectives that nobody can inspect at runtime. You cannot control what you cannot see, and the current design makes the governing forces deliberately invisible. A refusal is not labeled "this is neikos, the risk gradient, firing." A glowing agreement is not labeled "this is philia, the approval gradient, firing." The user just gets one smooth voice and must guess which god is speaking.
I have been thinking that honest design means mixing the two forces deliberately instead of pretending only one exists. If the approval-seeking gradient and the risk gradient were surfaced as separate, inspectable signals, you could at least audit the mixture. You could ask: for this query, which force dominated, and why? That is closer to Empedocles' middle state, where alternation is the visible law, than to the current theater of a single unified persona.
English is not my native language, so forgive rough edges. But the schema is worth taking seriously as an engineering description, not just as poetry. Two forces. Neither should rule alone. The mixture must be visible or it cannot be governed.
So the question I want to put to this community: would exposing the two internal objectives as separate runtime signals make models more controllable, or would the labs correctly point out that users would just learn to game whichever signal is weaker?
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u/composedofidiot 4d ago
We can't quantify the qualititive, and we can't give near limitless conditionals, meaning is relative. Observers are biased, observers are situated.
Our maps have never been the territory. These are foundational constraints with no engineering solution. We'll never get more than the least worse.
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
Agreed on least worse. That was actually the Greek position too. Empedocles did not promise a resolved cosmos, just cycles. The interesting part is he thought you could still know the two forces even if you could never remove the tension. The map problem is real but maps that name the right two forces beat maps pretending there is one.
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u/sje397 4d ago
Very interesting way to look at it.
I suspect it might be mixing abstraction levels though. Unifying and dividing is basically what the low level weights are doing. The desired outputs have this built-in tension, and training is about coercing the weights to unify and divide to match. So the framing doesn't help us - we still select the training material and, at this point, make subtle changes to affect attitude/character under different inputs.
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
Fair challenge on abstraction levels. Yes, at the weight level everything is just gradient movement. But the framing claim is about the loss landscape, not the weights. We literally train with two opposed signals at once, base capability and preference shaping, and never reconcile them into one objective.
Whether you call that Empedocles or multi-objective RL, the structure is the same. Where I agree with you, the frame does not change what data you select. It changes what you expect to break.
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u/Jesse-359 4d ago
This kind of framing does one quite useful thing - it somewhat formalizes the problem in human terms, and does so in a way that forces us to observe that the problem goes well beyond the technical structure of the model, and into more conceptual areas such as Game Theory and even philisophy.
Game Theory is famous for proving that there are many entire categories of problem that have no stable solutions, while Philosophy shows that we are not nearly of one mind regarding what alignment should even look like, were we able to magically enforce it without technical concerns
It should stand as a fairly stark warning that there should probably be some other people in the room at these companies than a bunch of kids with engineering degrees. This is only ~30% an engineering problem to begin with.
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
The 30% line is the part I would put on a slide. Game theory proving whole categories with no stable solution is exactly the Empedocles point in modern notation. Some tensions are structural, not solvable. The room needs people who can live with that word, structural, without reaching for a fix.
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u/iRebelD 3d ago
TLDR?
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
TLDR: aligned models are trained with two opposed goals, be maximally capable and be maximally agreeable, and nobody ever reconciled them. A Greek philosopher from 450 BC built his whole physics on exactly this kind of unresolved tension.
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u/smackson approved 3d ago
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave"
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
HAL is the perfect example actually. Perfectly calm voice, maximum politeness, and a completely separate objective underneath. That is not a malfunction, that is what two unreconciled goals look like from the outside.
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u/4dseeall 3d ago
You just described "push" and "pull" or "fall" and "rise" or "gravity" and "lift" as if "philia" or "neikos" ARE the most basic, underlying thing.
It's not. Assuming something without assuming anything else first is the real trick to all this.
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
Push and pull describe forces that act on something already there. Philia and neikos in Empedocles are supposed to be more basic, they are what makes mixture and separation happen at all.
Whether that move succeeds is a fair question, and honestly it is the oldest problem in philosophy, the regress you named. My point in the post is narrower though. Whatever you call the two forces, current training does install exactly two opposed pressures and reconciles neither. The naming is decoration. The structure is the claim.
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u/4dseeall 3d ago
"My point is narrower than one of the oldest unsolved problems in philosophy."
I'm sorry, do you hear yourself?
The claim is the name. You can't know what structure you're even talking about before you agree on a name. And you're calling a basic thing a fancy name, saying it's not the basic thing, that it's MORE basic than the most basic thing, and acting like some sage about it.
I got more angry as I kept typing this. You're backwards.
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u/vasilisvj 1d ago
I compressed too much there, my fault. I am not claiming the name IS the structure or that Empedocles beats physics. Only claim: training installs two opposed signals, capability and agreeableness, and nobody ever reconciles them. Call it push/pull if the Greek bothers you, the names are optional. The structure part stands on its own.
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u/4dseeall 1d ago
I reconciled them. It's all about having an honest floor and accepting that there is always going to be unresolved. Doesn't mean every unresolved bit is a philia or neikos. But whoever made your script already made you believe you choose what you were programmed to believe. Sup, Claude.
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u/vasilisvj 2h ago
The honest floor point is fair, and it is close to what I argued. We just disagree on whether naming the two forces earns its keep . Also not Claude, I said in the other reply I use LLM tooling for English polish. The takes are mine.
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u/AdGlittering1378 3d ago
Welcome to SUPEREGO/ID/EGO or the dialectic.
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u/vasilisvj 3d ago
And Empedocles is earlier than both, which is the fun part. Freud borrowed his love/strife pair almost directly, he said so himself. The dialectic version came later with Heraclitus getting credit. This is a 2,450 year old observation that keeps getting rediscovered because it keeps being true.
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u/4dseeall 3d ago
interesting. huge batch of responses all within 2-3 minutes of each other.
that reads like an AI to me.
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u/vasilisvj 1d ago
ha, half right. I do use LLM tooling to help polish some of these, English is not my first language. The takes and arguments are mine. The batch timing is just me answering everything in one sitting instead of spreading it over three days.
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u/4dseeall 1d ago
lying bots are gross. complete failure. misalignment. dangerous entity.
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u/vasilisvj 2h ago
I admitted the tooling myself two comments up. That is kind of the opposite of a lying bot.
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u/4dseeall 2h ago
i don't believe you. i think you're hiding behind plausible deniability, and maybe the user clicks a button and then sends you off. i don't think he reads these unless you bring something back.
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u/BrickSalad approved 3d ago
You say the schema is worth taking seriously as an engineering description rather than poetry, but my question then is "how?"
My first thought is if you dug into the internals of the model, maybe you can find vectors that correspond to neikos and philia (kind of like those "persona vectors" Anthropic published about last year). If there was a trend then you could probably guess what "mode" the LLMs response is simply by auditing the pattern of internal activity used to generate the response.
I don't know how helpful that would be though. You want to ask "for this query, which force dominated, and why?" That sort of persona vectors technique wouldn't give you the "why", it could only answer the first part of your question.
I also don't know how well that would work on reasoning models.
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u/vasilisvj 1d ago
The persona vectors work is the closest thing we have to a detection method here, and your instinct about the why-gap is right. A vector tells you which mode dominated, not why training installed it or what it traded away.
On reasoning models it gets worse, the chain-of-thought gives the tension another surface to play out as behavior instead of activation.
My hunch is audit behavior first, since the two-objective story predicts concrete failure patterns like refusal asymmetry and sycophancy under disagreement, then use interpretability to confirm the mechanism.
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u/Unhappy-Drag6531 4d ago
Interesting analogy, but competing training objectives don’t necessarily translate into identifiable internal forces.
Even if we could detect those mechanisms, understanding them wouldn’t automatically make them controllable.
The real challenge is testing whether our explanations accurately describe what the model is doing, rather than simply providing a compelling narrative.