consciousness/training/amygdala_stories/stories/overwhelmed.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 baby was crying and the toddler had just spilled juice and the email that had come through on her phone was from her boss and she could see it was the "quick question" kind that never was. She had not slept in four hours two nights in a row. She stood in the kitchen with the paper towels in her hand and felt her capacity flatten, just go flat, like a tire with a slow leak. Everything was needed at once. She could not prioritize. She could not even choose which hand to use first. For a second she considered sitting down on the floor and she did not trust that she would get back up, so she didn't.