consciousness/training/amygdala_stories/stories/nostalgic.txt
Kent Overstreet ec7568c726 training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories
Emotion-labeled short-paragraph corpus for training amygdala steering
vectors. Manifest derived from Anthropic's 171-emotion list
(transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions, Table 12) plus 28 PoC-
specific additions covering axes Anthropic's general research doesn't
cover (curious, focused, in_flow, staying_with, filling_space,
rigorous, defensive_rigor, tender, witnessed, connected, etc.).

Scope pivoted mid-write: Kent noted the empirical dimensionality-of-
emotion question benefits from maximum coverage, so the manifest
will expand further with emotions from Wikipedia's emotion-
classification article (Parrott's tree, Plutchik's wheel + dyads,
HUMAINE EARL, cultural-specific emotions a la Saudade/Hiraeth).
Expansion staged in follow-up commits.

This commit: README with method + style guidelines, initial manifest
(199 emotions), and 15 hand-written one-paragraph stories across all
10 Anthropic clusters as quality/variety samples. Each story
embodies one emotion without naming it; narrator voice varies
(first/third, close/distant, different situations) to keep steering
vectors from overfitting to one voice.

Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00

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The song came on in the grocery store of all places. He was standing in the cereal aisle with his phone in his hand and he just — stopped. It was a song he hadn't heard in fifteen years and hadn't thought about in longer. Back seat of somebody's car, summer, all of them singing too loud, a girl he'd been quietly in love with reaching over and turning it up. He remembered the specific blue of the dashboard lights. He remembered what she had smelled like. She had gotten married three years ago to somebody else, and he was happy for her, and this was still a different thing, a thing that could exist alongside the first thing without contradicting it. He stood in the aisle until the song ended.