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These can be put into a hierarchy from lower to high degree of processing and resulting abstractions:

• Sentience is simple hard-wired behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures. 
• Wakefulness involves more complex processing such that diurnal or sleep/wake patterns are possible (requires at least two levels). 
• Intentionality means systematic pursuing of desires. That requires yet another level of processing: Different patterns of behaviors for different desires at different times and their optimization. 
• Phenomenal Consciousness is then the representation of the desire in a linguistic or otherwise communicable form, which is again one level higher.
• Self-Consciousness includes the awareness of this process going on.
• Meta-Consciousness is then the analysis of this whole stack.

Where can I read about this 2-state HMM? By learn I just mean approximate via an algorithm. The UAT is not sufficient as it talks about learning a known function. Baum-Welch is such an algorithm, but as a far as I am aware it gives no guarantees on anything really.

Ideally I'd like someone to just sample the McDonald's cooking oil every few days through a few cycles of oil changes, but I doubt this will happen.

This seems like a huge civilizational inadequacy to me. This would be informative at large scale, and the cost would be very small.

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Secial relativity is not such a good example here when compared to general relativity, which was much further ahead of its time. See, for example, this article: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/science-einstein-never-existed/

Regarding special relativity, Einstein himself said:

"There is no doubt, that the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905. Lorentz had already recognized that the transformations named after him are essential for the analysis of Maxwell's equations, and Poincaré deepened this insight still further. Concerning myself, I knew only Lorentz's important work of 1895 [...] but not Lorentz's later work, nor the consecutive investigations by Poincaré. In this sense my work of 1905 was independent. [..] The new feature of it was the realization of the fact that the bearing of the Lorentz transformation transcended its connection with Maxwell's equations and was concerned with the nature of space and time in general. A further new result was that the "Lorentz invariance" is a general condition for any physical theory." 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute 

As for general relativity, the ideas and the mathematics required (Riemannian Geometry) were much more obscure and further afield. The only people who came close, Nordstrom and Hilbert, arguably did so because they were directly influenced by Einstein's ongoing work on general relativity (not just special relativity). 

https://www.quora.com/Without-Einstein-would-general-relativity-be-discovered-by-now 

Definitely relevant to figure out what's true when one is only talking about the object level, but the OP was about how trustworthy contrarians are compared to the mainstream rather than simply being about the object level.

I agree you investigate a bunch of the stuff I mentioned generally somewhere in the paper, but did you do this for refusal-removal in particular? I spent some time on this problem before and noticed that full refusal ablation is hard unless you get the technique/vector right, even though it’s easy to reduce refusal or add in a bunch of extra refusal. That’s why investigating all the technique parameters in the context of refusal in particular is valuable.

Initial observations characterizing the data

Really? I would only consider foods that were deliberately modified using procedures developed within the last century to be "processed".

maintaining model coherence

To determine this, I believe we would need to demonstrate that the score on some evaluations remains the same. A few examples don't seem sufficient to establish this, as it is too easy to fool ourselves by not being quantitative.

I don't think DanH's paper did this either. So I'm curious, in general, whether these models maintain performance, especially on measures of coherence.

In the open-source community, they show that modifications retain, for example, the MMLU and HumanEval score.