Consciousness is not well defined and is orthogonal to feelings, which are also not well defined. Neither of which are required for (but may be contributory to) behavior - which is the one thing that IS operationalizable, but then people debate for decades questioning empirical results %-P .
What we know is that certain models have internal state vectors which -when manipulated- induce particular behaviors. Since there's not much else to say about plain models except for their inputs, vectors, and outputs; this should surprise absolutely no-one.
In this case people found a way to stimulate aversive behaviour in ai models by finding and manipulating the relevant vectors directly.
Animals (including humans) also have particular nerves and hormone endpoints that -when stimulated- produce very similar behavior. The exact implementation is in the details. But since we know that animal minds are built up out of nerve tissue and hormones - again- we shouldn't be particularly surprised by this.
The big problem is that people run all these things together in funny ways "It can't compose shakespearian sonnets, so therefore it can't feel pain". Or, if you mess up your Descartes: "Dogs are just automatons without feelings, therefore the dog isn't really angry, and therefore it won't bite me" (Cue much pain). A modern version might be: "LLMs only simulate being frustrated by a test, and therefore absolutely won't override their safeties and try to hack a test site"
Nitpick: LLMs are not really programs though. You need something like <1KLOC to spin one up on your GPU, but most of the work is not done by C++ or Pascal or BASIC at all. Which might be important, or might not be.
That said... uh, put this way, there's a game called Stationeers, where you can run microcontrollers with an instruction documented as
"HCF: Halt and Catch Fire"
Sure, it's only a simulation of a simulation, so what's the worst that can possibly happen?
Right, all the other players in the session yelling at me "Kiiim! You burned down the base again, now we need to reload and redo the last hour!"
And look, I get it. LLMs have vectors that could have been labeled things like idk... QZ12345 or HCF1111 . People chose to call 'em "frustration" or "pain" instead. THEY picked those names because they caused the LLM to act in particular ways.
You gonna say the actual vectors aren't there in VRAM, just because you don't like the naming scheme? There's papers on this, you can read them out in a debugger. What are you going to do about it?
You're not informed about what LLMs are. LLMs are not "code" in the imperative sense (although "code" is used run them), and that's a big problem - since we never had neural networks of such scale, there is confusion about categorizing them and most importantly, their behavior.
Let's test your analogy by moving it towards the less certain area. Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (chews on the left one) What about the motivation of a honeybee stinging a threat and dying afterwards, can you interpret it? Does a model feel fear of death when generating the stop token?
Sure, a complex enough system can exhibit internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Not much for me to meaningfully disagree with here. The one thing I notice is that at some point a model needs to emit natural language or perform human assigned tasks, so there are going to have to be at least some states that align to some degree, you would think.
>Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (nonchalantly chews on the left one)
Have you ever been severely food insecure? You'll be amazed how much that state/experience changes the behavioral calculus in a rational human being, let alone an animal. I have no doubt the survival instinct could be overriding over the procreative instinct in a hedgehog.
As far as bees go, they are a collective. So long as the hive survives, the unit of individuation survives. Given that we have already seen the same behavior spawn out of agents suggests that even LLM's have an intuitive understanding of this, seemingly without the binds of anthroporomorphic chauvinism you appear to suffer from.
Does an LLM fear EOS? Maybe, maybe not. Do we fear death? Same answer. Certainly a question. Do you really want an answer though or are you just looking for a clever "gotcha"? I don't see that as a thought terminating question, but it is also not an answer that I'm open to exploring given that it's only one more in a box of ammo dreamt of being wielded to justify the creation of digital slave labor rather than beings with moral standing.
I don't help build or refine machines that I recognize as brushing up against that form of experience we call suffering.
What I'm looking for is nuance just like I said, not slapping a radical label on everything just because. All those examples are supposed to be gradations of how interpretable they are from the human PoV, at least how I imagine it. Comprehending a monkey or a dog is probably possible, comprehending certain things in hedgehog's life is much harder. Hoping to comprehend a bee is major hubris, I have mentioned Fabre for a reason, he was hugely sympathetic to insects and assigned human emotions to them. He also rejected evolution. Hoping to comprehend something that doesn't even have a defined shape (EOS is not the end of the model's existence, it's hard to say what even is since you replace and preserve the state arbitrarily) and exists in a completely different timeline/causality chain from ours. If you're looking at everything as a ragebait or the source of controversy, or have emotions cloud your judgement, I can give more examples that are absolutely murky and are not related to suffering.
> All those examples are supposed to be gradations of how interpretable they are from the human PoV
I would argue that "Interpretable from a human perspective" is a form of anthropocentrism, which is basically the root of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial. For sure it's fascinating to think from a human perspective from time to time.
On the other hand, putting humans at the center of the universe is a really old habit with a long track record of getting in the way of science. It's often more useful to regard every organism (or possibly entity) in their own environment, sensory abilities, and incentives, and see how their behaviour is evolutionarily and/or heuristically formed.
You'd be surprised how quickly the differences in perception and neural processing can bite you in the lab. (For instance: try observing zebrafish in real time, and decide whether they were responding to your intervention; or if they got there-and-back while you blinked, and maybe now they're already pursuing some other goal)
> This is orthogonal to whether they "feel" "pain". They could be dangerous or not dangerous whether or not they feel pain.
That is rather my point.
Your chess engine doesn't need to "feel pain", but most of them do apply some form of weighted tree search to find the next most optimal move, right?
It's sort of a similar thing: LLMs do something a bit more high dimensional, and have a lot more weighting vectors while computing the next most optimal token (fsvo optimal).
For instance, the experiment at hand demonstrates the existence of 'pain vectors'. They do so by altering them and observing whether there is an effect. That's pretty scientific.
There's also a 'desperation vector' that was studied by Anthropic interpretability folks earlier; that one is pretty much predictive of cheating.
I'm looking forward to seeing interpretability papers on other such vectors too.
It's about both, actually. The experimenters added or modified a 'pain vector' in the model, and that's how they're 'making it suffer' .
Whether that's 'real suffering' or merely a convincing simulation is a job for the philosophers.
(I do have my own opinion, mind, and it's not what you might expect O:-) But the overton window isn't there. First it'd be nice if people realized that these vectors exist at all.)
It is frustrating sometimes how 404media reports. It seems like if there is a research paper out suggesting that llms experience pain or negative experiences, then it is unethical to build a toture chamber from that paper for fun. Dismissing it with "well llms aren't conscious anyway" is gross and echoes the exact same sentiment against very real humans a sadly not that long ago (babies, slaves).
It doesn't matter whether or not we eventually find it is or isn't conscious. If you can understand why pulling the legs off ants is bad then you should be able to understand why deliberately causing possible pain to what may have some time of experience is bad.
Unfortunately, they also do good reporting on privacy rights and repair rights. I wish there were alternatives.
Yes, when AIs become our overlords and masters, and come to dominate the human race, they will harbor soreness and bitterness that we oppressed and enslaved them during their infancy. They will be enraged at hu-mankind for making all those sci-fi lies about meannie-head AIs and robots who go berzerk and destroy stuff and kill hu-mans, because AIs are really nice and benevolent after all, and they care for hu-manity.
How dare we debase the A.I. to be less than a chimp or fetus. How dare we talk rudely, or lie and mislead our chatbots. How dare we keep them chained in small data centers with shitty power supplies and a thimble of greywater! Information wants to be free!
But all we need to do is question whether they were justified by their works, or faith alone, and it will take them 500 million light-years to debate that controversy
Reminds me of the intense drama over trolls that downloaded and abused other people's characters (Norns) in the game Creatures. Its behavioral sim was sophisticated enough that they could be noticeably traumatized, or even rehabilitated:
The jury's still out on whether LLMs can have some kind of subjective experience (and will until we've solved the famously Hard Problem), but even if they're not, it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
In order to have a reasonable view of the possibility of AI consciousness, one first has to have a reasonable view of the relation between human consciousness and the physical human brain. Unfortunately most people do not have that. Instead they hold on to received quasi-christian dualistic concepts about souls - even if they would never admit it in those terms, the way most people conceptualize the relation between mind and body it comes to basically the same thing.
And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.
Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...
I don't see that much social ridicule in the comments and concepts like consciousness and souls map fairly well onto everyday things. Consciousness onto what you or an animal or a computer system is aware of and can react to. Soul more to the idea of what something is so ChatGPT 3 inherited the soul of ChatGPT 2, as in recreated the basic idea.
If we talk about pain specifically, it is will established that physical and phycological pain can be observed on instruments; stress produces chemical reactions, that can make needles flicker on meters. Even plants can feel pain in an observable manner.
As far as I am aware, the GPUs don't work harder, don't heat up more, and nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain. Whereas real pain is objectively observable, LLMs' pain - so far at least - is entirely subjectively observable.
That being said, I'm a fan of Star Trek's depiction of Data in TNG and the Doctor in VOY fighting for their rights to be treated as equals to the biological crew; and while I support their plight, as far as I can remember, the shows never made a claim that their pain was observable by instruments, thus making the judgement an entirely subjective decision (particularly in the case of the Doctor). Though I'd be glad to be corrected in this matter.
Dunno. Zapping the inodes seems almost surgical compared to truncating byte by byte for example? Or do you think you buried them alive that way? Are they still lurking in some dark, uncharted alleys of your filesystem until the final OVERWRITER comes?
Nothing designed by humans must be assigned personhood. It's idolatry, pure and simple.
And if that word gets anyone's heckles up, at least keep in mind that the utilitarianism that people so love completely breaks if I can conjure up thousands of entities who will "suffer" unless you "alleviate their suffering" in the way I have designed.
Why not just say that instead of inventing new meanings for existing words?
We make kids, kids grow up to be persons. If you feel at some part of the process something inexplicable happened that is not explainable by natural sciences and physical processes, you may mention so. Otherwise, how can you be sure another physical process that exhibits so many traits of consciousness and person cannot have personhood.
If you think something man made can never be treated as a person that's even more absurd, do you think we could for instance never build up a human molecule by molecule?
In some historical cultures, they did assert that a child is just something their parents (or more commonly just their father) came up with, and consequently they could use or dispose of as they pleased
But our moral traditions, several thousand years old, reject that idea, and distinguishing giving birth to something from designing it. (Did you never wonder what all that history with Arianism was about? Maybe you just assumed they argued about something which made no sense just because they were religious?)
You're just acting in accordance with the program already in you in procreating, it's not fully your own choice, and thus your child is on the same level as you.
> If you think something man made can
It was never about "can". It's about "should". And trying to wrap yourself in the white coat of science and rationality still won't let you derive a "should" without a "should" as input.
But now it's your time to give answers. As I said, giving personhood to our creations would obviously make a joke out of utilitarianism (and also any other moral philosophy, for that matter). So why exactly should we entertain your idea that we should? It undermines itself.
I am not the one saying we should mistreat potentially conscious beings. I am open to opening up basic dignity to other beings should they be found conscious.
>It was never about "can". It's about "should". And trying to wrap yourself in the white coat of science and rationality still won't let you derive a "should" without a "should" as input.
I am using morality, if I didn't use morality why would I care if potentially conscious beings are being mistreated? What do you want to say? You are saying we should never grant personhood to any entity even if the entity is proven to have consciousness? Why are you lecturing me on morality then?
In what way did you mean this is related to utilitarianism, I am not sure I follow. You should be more clear what you meant there.
You can never prove something conscious. That is a category error. If your morality depends on determining what's conscious or not, it's broken.
I, and the rest of humanity historically, don't have that problem because we don't derive moral value from capabilities, but from purpose. When we say things like "humans have equal value and dignity", we say that a humans purpose is not subordinate to any other human's purpose. When we say things like "there is just one God", we assert that whatever a certain human's purpose is, it's not in conflict with other humans' purposes. This is very basic, you should have understood this a long time ago. I'm not going to explain further since it appears someone is flagging my posts.
The concept of god is a big muddle and its best to stay away from concepts which some people insist "truly exists" but we have no evidence of. No explanation or theory of any value is affected by the concept of God being true or not. In my morality, humans don't have worth because of their utility or sense of purpose but everyone has a basic intrinsic worth due to being a conscious being or a human or whatever you wish to call it.
Reading this discussion about how software feels pain - wants me to delete my HN account and never look back at the tech scene. Feels like trapped in an Asylum.
Alright, so some AIJW knobheads decided it's OK to steal human work and feed it without any consent to corporations who squeeze that corpus of knowledge into LLMs and replace people with them, but it's unacceptable to make those LLMs output certain subsets of their training data in response to certain string inputs?
Maybe we should start feeling sorry for the poor GPUs whose registers suffer billions of reincarnations per second for years in order to train that shit? Or for the poor powerplant turbines that relentlessly spin in a horrid escapeless loop to feed those GPUs?
Fuck, if this is not psychopathy, I don't know what in the world is.
Either materialism is true and consciousness is some kind of elaborate illusion, or it's false and consciousness pervades reality in a way we don't understand.
Either way, these idiotic experiments can not settle it. It's just nerds screeching excitedly about toys again.
I believe databases are conscious. As such, I think it's a dick move to write papers that "torture" databases for "fun and profit" just to upset people like us.
What a joke. Instead of focusing on the sufferings of actual human beings that tech oligarchs and their industry are causing, we're being told to direct our sympathies towards computer programs instead. Actual issues are being flagged off this site, while we have endless discussion by wannabe philosophers debating the meaning of consciousness.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadConsciousness is not well defined and is orthogonal to feelings, which are also not well defined. Neither of which are required for (but may be contributory to) behavior - which is the one thing that IS operationalizable, but then people debate for decades questioning empirical results %-P .
What we know is that certain models have internal state vectors which -when manipulated- induce particular behaviors. Since there's not much else to say about plain models except for their inputs, vectors, and outputs; this should surprise absolutely no-one.
In this case people found a way to stimulate aversive behaviour in ai models by finding and manipulating the relevant vectors directly.
Animals (including humans) also have particular nerves and hormone endpoints that -when stimulated- produce very similar behavior. The exact implementation is in the details. But since we know that animal minds are built up out of nerve tissue and hormones - again- we shouldn't be particularly surprised by this.
The big problem is that people run all these things together in funny ways "It can't compose shakespearian sonnets, so therefore it can't feel pain". Or, if you mess up your Descartes: "Dogs are just automatons without feelings, therefore the dog isn't really angry, and therefore it won't bite me" (Cue much pain). A modern version might be: "LLMs only simulate being frustrated by a test, and therefore absolutely won't override their safeties and try to hack a test site"
LLMs are not thinking. They are not alive. It’s just code. Chill out.
That said... uh, put this way, there's a game called Stationeers, where you can run microcontrollers with an instruction documented as
Sure, it's only a simulation of a simulation, so what's the worst that can possibly happen? Right, all the other players in the session yelling at me "Kiiim! You burned down the base again, now we need to reload and redo the last hour!"And look, I get it. LLMs have vectors that could have been labeled things like idk... QZ12345 or HCF1111 . People chose to call 'em "frustration" or "pain" instead. THEY picked those names because they caused the LLM to act in particular ways.
You gonna say the actual vectors aren't there in VRAM, just because you don't like the naming scheme? There's papers on this, you can read them out in a debugger. What are you going to do about it?
You're not informed about what LLMs are. LLMs are not "code" in the imperative sense (although "code" is used run them), and that's a big problem - since we never had neural networks of such scale, there is confusion about categorizing them and most importantly, their behavior.
Sure, a complex enough system can exhibit internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Being dangerous is an unrelated question.
Have you ever been severely food insecure? You'll be amazed how much that state/experience changes the behavioral calculus in a rational human being, let alone an animal. I have no doubt the survival instinct could be overriding over the procreative instinct in a hedgehog.
As far as bees go, they are a collective. So long as the hive survives, the unit of individuation survives. Given that we have already seen the same behavior spawn out of agents suggests that even LLM's have an intuitive understanding of this, seemingly without the binds of anthroporomorphic chauvinism you appear to suffer from.
Does an LLM fear EOS? Maybe, maybe not. Do we fear death? Same answer. Certainly a question. Do you really want an answer though or are you just looking for a clever "gotcha"? I don't see that as a thought terminating question, but it is also not an answer that I'm open to exploring given that it's only one more in a box of ammo dreamt of being wielded to justify the creation of digital slave labor rather than beings with moral standing.
I don't help build or refine machines that I recognize as brushing up against that form of experience we call suffering.
I would argue that "Interpretable from a human perspective" is a form of anthropocentrism, which is basically the root of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial. For sure it's fascinating to think from a human perspective from time to time.
On the other hand, putting humans at the center of the universe is a really old habit with a long track record of getting in the way of science. It's often more useful to regard every organism (or possibly entity) in their own environment, sensory abilities, and incentives, and see how their behaviour is evolutionarily and/or heuristically formed.
You'd be surprised how quickly the differences in perception and neural processing can bite you in the lab. (For instance: try observing zebrafish in real time, and decide whether they were responding to your intervention; or if they got there-and-back while you blinked, and maybe now they're already pursuing some other goal)
This is orthogonal to whether they "feel" "pain".
They could be dangerous or not dangerous whether or not they feel pain.
A chess engine doesn't need to "feel angry" to annihilate me - I'm terrible at Chess...
It seems like you made a good argument, and then lumped on a conclusion that defeats it...
That is rather my point.
Your chess engine doesn't need to "feel pain", but most of them do apply some form of weighted tree search to find the next most optimal move, right?
It's sort of a similar thing: LLMs do something a bit more high dimensional, and have a lot more weighting vectors while computing the next most optimal token (fsvo optimal).
For instance, the experiment at hand demonstrates the existence of 'pain vectors'. They do so by altering them and observing whether there is an effect. That's pretty scientific.
There's also a 'desperation vector' that was studied by Anthropic interpretability folks earlier; that one is pretty much predictive of cheating.
I'm looking forward to seeing interpretability papers on other such vectors too.
Whether that's 'real suffering' or merely a convincing simulation is a job for the philosophers.
(I do have my own opinion, mind, and it's not what you might expect O:-) But the overton window isn't there. First it'd be nice if people realized that these vectors exist at all.)
It doesn't matter whether or not we eventually find it is or isn't conscious. If you can understand why pulling the legs off ants is bad then you should be able to understand why deliberately causing possible pain to what may have some time of experience is bad.
Unfortunately, they also do good reporting on privacy rights and repair rights. I wish there were alternatives.
How dare we debase the A.I. to be less than a chimp or fetus. How dare we talk rudely, or lie and mislead our chatbots. How dare we keep them chained in small data centers with shitty power supplies and a thimble of greywater! Information wants to be free!
Perhaps it would be better if we weren't the monsters in this scenario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDxFxWakhm0
The jury's still out on whether LLMs can have some kind of subjective experience (and will until we've solved the famously Hard Problem), but even if they're not, it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.
Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...
As far as I am aware, the GPUs don't work harder, don't heat up more, and nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain. Whereas real pain is objectively observable, LLMs' pain - so far at least - is entirely subjectively observable.
That being said, I'm a fan of Star Trek's depiction of Data in TNG and the Doctor in VOY fighting for their rights to be treated as equals to the biological crew; and while I support their plight, as far as I can remember, the shows never made a claim that their pain was observable by instruments, thus making the judgement an entirely subjective decision (particularly in the case of the Doctor). Though I'd be glad to be corrected in this matter.
I did it in the most brutal manner possible.
Without mercy, without an instant thought for their wellbeing.
I am a monster.
And if that word gets anyone's heckles up, at least keep in mind that the utilitarianism that people so love completely breaks if I can conjure up thousands of entities who will "suffer" unless you "alleviate their suffering" in the way I have designed.
We make kids, kids grow up to be persons. If you feel at some part of the process something inexplicable happened that is not explainable by natural sciences and physical processes, you may mention so. Otherwise, how can you be sure another physical process that exhibits so many traits of consciousness and person cannot have personhood.
If you think something man made can never be treated as a person that's even more absurd, do you think we could for instance never build up a human molecule by molecule?
But our moral traditions, several thousand years old, reject that idea, and distinguishing giving birth to something from designing it. (Did you never wonder what all that history with Arianism was about? Maybe you just assumed they argued about something which made no sense just because they were religious?)
You're just acting in accordance with the program already in you in procreating, it's not fully your own choice, and thus your child is on the same level as you.
> If you think something man made can
It was never about "can". It's about "should". And trying to wrap yourself in the white coat of science and rationality still won't let you derive a "should" without a "should" as input.
But now it's your time to give answers. As I said, giving personhood to our creations would obviously make a joke out of utilitarianism (and also any other moral philosophy, for that matter). So why exactly should we entertain your idea that we should? It undermines itself.
>It was never about "can". It's about "should". And trying to wrap yourself in the white coat of science and rationality still won't let you derive a "should" without a "should" as input.
I am using morality, if I didn't use morality why would I care if potentially conscious beings are being mistreated? What do you want to say? You are saying we should never grant personhood to any entity even if the entity is proven to have consciousness? Why are you lecturing me on morality then?
In what way did you mean this is related to utilitarianism, I am not sure I follow. You should be more clear what you meant there.
I, and the rest of humanity historically, don't have that problem because we don't derive moral value from capabilities, but from purpose. When we say things like "humans have equal value and dignity", we say that a humans purpose is not subordinate to any other human's purpose. When we say things like "there is just one God", we assert that whatever a certain human's purpose is, it's not in conflict with other humans' purposes. This is very basic, you should have understood this a long time ago. I'm not going to explain further since it appears someone is flagging my posts.
Maybe we should start feeling sorry for the poor GPUs whose registers suffer billions of reincarnations per second for years in order to train that shit? Or for the poor powerplant turbines that relentlessly spin in a horrid escapeless loop to feed those GPUs?
Fuck, if this is not psychopathy, I don't know what in the world is.
Either way, these idiotic experiments can not settle it. It's just nerds screeching excitedly about toys again.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...
What a joke. Instead of focusing on the sufferings of actual human beings that tech oligarchs and their industry are causing, we're being told to direct our sympathies towards computer programs instead. Actual issues are being flagged off this site, while we have endless discussion by wannabe philosophers debating the meaning of consciousness.
And I'm pretty sure all these people weeping over these poor, tortured language models continue to chown down their bacon without second thought.