llm-stubbornness-50-case-inspection
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/xie-2024-chameleon-sloth-sA-appendix-chunk-1.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:59+00:00
Manual inspection of 50 cases where LLMs rejected all counter-memory revealed 34 were attributable to ambiguity, commonsense impossibility, or suggestive question phrasing.
Summary
In most cases where an LLM refuses to accept a correction that contradicts its earlier answer, the refusal is actually justified. When 50 of these rejections were checked by hand, nearly seven out of ten turned out to involve unclear wording, a proposed fact that defies common sense, or a question that was nudged to produce a specific answer, meaning the model is usually detecting a problem with the input rather than being irrationally stubborn.