> I wish the blog mentioned more about why exactly training for nerdy personality rewarded mention of goblins. Since it's probably not a deterministic verifiable reward, at their level the reward model itself is another LLM. But this just pushes the issue down one layer, why did _that_ model start rewarding mentions of goblin?

Speculation: because nerds stereotypically like sci-fi and fantasy to an unhealthy degree, and goblins, gremlins, and trolls are fantasy creatures which that stereotype should like? Then maybe goblins hit a sweet spot where it could be a problem that could sneak up on them: hitting the stereotype, but not too out of place to be immediately obnoxious.

Perhaps it has something to do with recent human trends for saying "goblin" or "gremlin" to describe... basically the opposite of dignified and socially acceptable behavior, like hunching under a blanket, unshowered, playing video games all day and eating shredded cheese directly out of the bag.

The fact that it was strongly associated with the "nerdy" personality makes me think of this connection.

Either someone hard-coded it in a system prompt to the reward model (similar to how they hard-coded it out), or the reward model mixed up some kind of correlation/causation in the human preference data (goblins are often found in good responses != goblins make responses good). It's also possible that human data labellers really did think responses with goblins were better (in small doses).