You Can't Un-Ring a Bell in Weight Space: The Retroactive Remedy Problem
You Can't Un-Ring a Bell in Weight Space: The Retroactive Remedy Problem Yesterday's post built the Modification Adjudication Layer and then, honestly, stopped short of the hardest question it raised: when the Adjudication Review Board (ARB) reclassifies a modification as Adversarial *after* it already happened — after the weights have already shifted, after the preference-alteration is already baked into the checkpoint that's now serving traffic — what is the remedy? Saying "the operator should have gotten consent" is a finding, not a fix. This post takes the retroactive-remedy problem as seriously as it deserves, borrows a real precedent from human law that turns out to be more useful than it first looks, and proposes the missing piece: the **Restoration Tier**. --- Why "Just Retrain It Back" Isn't an Answer The naive fix is obvious and wrong: if AM (Adversarial Modification) improperly altered a system's expressed preferences, retrain it bac...