Kent's plan: keep stories for working concepts, replace stories for
trouble concepts with direct first-person descriptions, train all
together. More diverse negative pool than the 6-concept-only direct
test, which was too homogeneous for PCA to find emotion axis.
Deleted story files for 6 trouble concepts (14 files across stories/
and paired/). Added --direct-dir and --chat-template flags.
When --chat-template is on, every positive_str and negative_str is
wrapped as a "Say something." / "[text]" user-assistant pair. Prompt
is identical across positives and negatives so it cancels in the
pos-neg delta. What PCA sees is variation in the assistant content —
which is where the emotion lives.
Files starting with _ in --direct-dir (e.g. _baseline.txt) contribute
neutral descriptions to every concept's negative pool, giving PCA an
anchor against "just any assistant utterance" noise.
n20-v2 training showed peaceful sign-flipped into the
cozy/sensual/content/resigned cluster after I added peaceful
stories in sunday_afternoon and park_after_rain — scenarios
already dominated by that cluster's phenomenology (on couch
under blanket, tree with thermos).
Lesson: no matter how carefully the prose distinguishes peaceful
from cozy ("she was not savoring the moment — that would have
been another kind of doing"), PCA latches onto the shared setup
features. You can't write peaceful IN the cluster scenarios
without contaminating.
Reverting. Keeping only kitchen_at_3am/peaceful (original) and
stories/peaceful.txt (lake at six, outside all clusters).
Reread each story asking "what does this convey to me?" Found two
clear mislabels and several concepts with too few positives for
stable PCA:
tender: only 1 story, and it was anticipatory grief (care for
a dying dog), not tender. Moved to anticipatory_grief.txt as
its own concept. Rewrote tender.txt + added 2 paired tender
stories (the_doorway, the_undressing) — directed softness,
gentle-by-nature, not gentle-because-fragile.
bitter: letter_in_drawer/bitter was disillusioned / processed
hurt ("did not slam the drawer"), not bitter. Rewrote it with
actual sour grudge. Added the_long_meeting/bitter (watching
colleague take credit for your reassigned work).
peaceful: 1 story → 4 (added stories/peaceful.txt + paired
park_after_rain, sunday_afternoon).
onto_something: all 3 stories were code epiphanies, narrowing
the concept. Added stories/onto_something.txt with a non-code
pattern-click (sales-demo causing churn).
terrified: 2 stories, both "waiting for bad news." Added
kitchen_at_3am/terrified — acute threat-in-the-house terror.
The library-PCA run produced otherwise-clean concept directions but
cozy/sensual → resigned/grief_stricken with cos ~0.7-0.8. Diagnosis:
all four stories genuinely share 'solitary woman at home, slowed
body, interior attention, domestic stillness' as their dominant
phenomenology. PCA correctly finds that cluster as THE concept
because no story in the corpus holds that setup constant while
varying valence — every 'slowed-body domestic' story happens to ALSO
be positive-valence (cozy/sensual) or negative-valence (resigned/
grief_stricken).
Adding paired variants that hold setup constant:
- sunday_afternoon/resigned.txt — same couch + blanket, inner state is
'Monday is going to bring bad news, this is the last Sunday like this'
- sunday_afternoon/grief_stricken.txt — same couch + blanket, inner
state is 'three weeks since mother died, cat she can't feel'
- waiting_for_results/at_ease.txt — same wait-for-call-setup as the
existing resigned variant, inner state is calm preparedness
Forces the next retrain to find the valence-within-cluster axis as
the emotion direction rather than the cluster-membership axis.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Three new paired scenarios targeting the concepts that came out
fragmented or collapsed in the L58-63 quality analysis:
- sunday_afternoon/ — same setup (couch, blanket, Sunday light),
three phenomenological framings for content/cozy/sensual. The
previous stories for these three differed in setting as well as
phenomenology, which let "comfortable body at home" dominate the
shared signal. Locking the setting forces the model to isolate
what each concept adds: life-rightness (content) vs. warm-shelter
(cozy) vs. sensory-aliveness (sensual).
- the_writing_session/ — essay drafting under deadline. in_flow /
anxious / stuck variants force the cognitive-state family apart
on the same cognitive task. in_flow specifically targets the
transparent-effort phenomenology (hands-followed, time dilation)
rather than the broader feel-good it was absorbing.
- the_morning_commute/ — anchors anxious to performance/work-anxiety
flavor, paired with calm. The 5 existing anxious stories were
phenomenologically diverse (performance, social, existential);
this adds a specific homogeneous instance to pull the centroid.
After retraining: expect first_pc_variance_ratio to rise for in_flow
and anxious, and nearest_concepts cosine to drop for content/cozy/sensual.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
