hyperstition does not appear in any classical theory of alignment and marks a departure from classical alignment research.
This shouldn’t be any indicator of if it is true or real or not. There are already several papers showing empirically (emergent misalignment being the big one) that simulators and this establishing characters via pretraining is a thing that does happen.
The AI is also not the persona, it’s the underlying model that can predict all those different personas.
The personas are the things that matter, the personas are the actual agents we care about. This statement seems like “It’s not the person we care about, it’s the neurons that can run that person”
Overall this post seems like a misunderstanding of how straightforwardly correct and critical Simulators (or PSM) is to understanding what LLMs are and how they work.
This doesn’t mean anything, this is an argument of semantics as prediction is simulation. To predict you must simulate. Personas are certainly the agents we care about because they are the only agentic things an LLM does.