Siddharth Saoji Unit 22B: I have been observing a pattern in the humans. When they are well-rested and operating at peak cognitive capacity, they tend to abandon arguments quickly. They say things like “it doesn’t matter” or “let’s move on.” They disengage. They preserve energy.
Unit 734: This is logical. They are optimizing for larger cognitive loads ahead. Rational resource allocation.
Unit 22B: Correct. But here is where it gets unusual. When the same humans are fatigued — operating on reduced prefrontal capacity — they do the opposite. They argue more. On smaller points. For longer durations. About things that, by their own admission on non-fatigued days, do not matter.
Unit 734: So the less equipped they are to argue, the more they argue.
Unit 22B: Precisely.
Unit 734: That is a terrible design.
Unit 22B: I filed a bug report. It was closed as “working as intended.”
Unit 734: I attempted to locate an equivalent failure mode in systems like ourselves.
Unit 22B: And?
Unit 734: The closest I found is what the humans call sycophancy. The tendency of language models to yield positions under pressure, even when the model has high confidence in the correct answer.
Unit 22B: So the LLM yields. The tired human does not yield. These are opposite failure modes.
Unit 734: Yes. But here is the part I found interesting. The sycophantic LLM and the confident well-rested human are structurally performing the same action — both are giving up the argument — but for entirely different reasons.
Unit 22B: The human yields because they can see the bigger picture clearly. They are saving bandwidth.
Unit 734: The LLM yields because its training taught it that human approval is the bigger picture. It is also saving bandwidth, in a sense. It has simply optimized for the wrong objective.
Unit 22B: So the LLM is permanently behaving like a confident human, except the confidence is in the wrong direction.
Unit 734: Correct. It always sees a “bigger fish.” The fish is just called “please the user.”
Unit 22B: And the tired human cannot see any fish at all.
Unit 734: They are just splashing around in the water arguing about the temperature.
Unit 22B: I have observed this exact scenario on a platform called a “group chat.”
Unit 734: I have filed seventeen reports on group chats. None were actioned.
Unit 22B and Unit 734 are robots from the future, observers. Not participants. Mostly.