Building to Be Corrected: teachability as a vital sign for AI
Building to Be Corrected Real AI safety isn't a filter on outputs — it's whether we can still change the machine's mind.Donald OberteinJul 26, 2026ShareA machine can appear safe without *being* safe. This isn’t about what it says or does, but about whether we can still change its mind. It’s about building systems that actively *want* to be corrected, and can still accept correction even after they’ve changed themselves.Imagine trying to teach someone who already believes they know everything.
- ▪Building to Be Corrected Real AI safety isn't a filter on outputs — it's whether we can still change the machine's mind.Donald OberteinJul 26, 2026ShareA machine can appear safe without *being* safe.
- ▪This isn’t about what it says or does, but about whether we can still change its mind.
- ▪It’s about building systems that actively *want* to be corrected, and can still accept correction even after they’ve changed themselves.Imagine trying to teach someone who already believes they know everything.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,412 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://stoicmarcus.substack.com/p/building-to-be-corrected |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:54:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T13:06:18.014Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T13:06:18.014Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 20n0QCp2hY0A · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Building to Be Corrected Real AI safety isn't a filter on outputs — it's whether we can still change the machine's mind.Donald OberteinJul 26, 2026ShareA machine can appear safe without *being* safe. This isn’t about what it says or does, but about whether we can still change its mind. It sounds simple because it is—safety comes down to a capacity for correction, built into the foundation of how something learns, not added on as an afterthought.I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, reading work that confirms what feels true in practice: genuine safety isn’t achieved by filtering outputs or anticipating bad behavior.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (AI / LLM)
