its kind of great for the "eli5", not because it's any more right or wrong, but sometimes presenting it in caveman presents something to me in a way that's almost like... really clear and simple. it feels like it cuts through bullshit just a smidge. seeing something framed by a caveman in a couple of occasions peeled back a layer i didnt see before.
it, for whatever reason, is useful somehow to me, the human. maybe seeing it laid out to you in caveman bulletpoints gives you this weird brevity that processes a little differently. if you layer in caveman talk about caves, tribes, etc it has sort of a primal survivalship way of framing things, which can oddly enough help me process an understanding.
plus it makes me laugh. which keeps me in a good mood.
The same site that complains so much about replication crises in science too...
Anecdote: i discussed that with an LLM once and it explained to me that LLMs tend to respond to terse questions with terse answers because that's what humans (i.e. their training data) tend to do. Similarly, it explained to me that polite requests tend to lead to LLM responses with _more_ information than a response strictly requires because (again) that's what their training data suggests is correct (i.e. because that's how humans tend to respond).
TL;DR: how they are asked questions influences how they respond, even if the facts of the differing responses don't materially differ.
(Edit: Seriously, i do not understand the continued down-voting of completely topical responses. It's gotten so bad i have little choice but to assume it's a personal vendetta.)
It joke. No yell at me. It kind of work?
The rest of what you're saying sounds find, but that remark seems confused to me.
prefix your prompt with "be a moron that does everything wrong and only superficially look like you're doing it correctly. make constant errors." Of course you can degrade the performance, question is if any particular 'output styling' actually does and to what extent.
Measuring "degredation" for the nonsense task, like you gave, would be difficult.
To clarify, consider the gradated:
> Do task X extremely well
> Do task X poorly
> Do task X or else Y will happen
> Do task X and you get a trillion dollars
> Do task X and talk like a caveman
Do you see the problem? "Do task X" also cannot be a solid baseline, because there are any number of ways to specify the task itself, and they all carry their own implicit biasing of the track the output takes.
The argument that OP makes is that RL prevents degradation... So this should not be a problem? All prompts should be equivalent? Except it obviously is a problem, and prompting does affect the output (how can it not?), _and they are even claiming their specific prompting does so, too_! The claim is nonsense on its face.
If the caveman style modifier improves output, removing it degrades output and what is claimed plainly isn't the case. Parent is right.
If it worsens output, the claim they made is again plainly not the case (via inverted but equivalent construction). Parent is right.
If it has no effect, it runs counter to their central premise and the research they cite in support of it (which only potentially applies - they study 'be concise' not 'skill full of caveman styling rules'). Parent is right.