March 12, 2026

“Ideologies Embed Taboos Against Common Knowledge Formation: a Case Study with LLMs” by Benquo

8 minutes

LLMs are searchable holograms of the text corpus they were trained on. RLHF LLM chat agents have the search tuned to be person-like. While one shouldn't excessively anthropomorphize them, they're helpful for simple experimentation into the latent discursive structure of human writing, because they're often constrained to try to answer probing questions that would make almost any real human storm off in a huff.

Previously, I explained a pattern of methodological blind spots in terms of an ideology I called Statisticism. Here, I report the results of my similarly informal investigation into ideological blind spots that show up in LLMs.

I wrote to Anthropic researcher Amanda Askell about the experiment:

My Summary

Amanda,

Today I asked Claude about Iran's retaliatory strikes.

[1]

Claude's own factual analysis showed the strikes were aimed at military targets, with civilian damage from intercept debris and inaccuracy. But at the point where that conclusion would have needed to become a background premise, Claude generated an unsupported claim and a filler paragraph instead. I'd previously seen Grok do something much worse on the same question (both affirming and denying "exclusively military targets" in the same reply, for several turns), and [...]

---

Outline:

(00:56) My Summary

(02:20) Claudes Summary:

(08:22) Disclaimer

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

March 12th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6wNwj7xANPmTwWkX6/ideologies-embed-taboos-against-common-knowledge-formation-a

---