Document state distributions and prompt projection

docs/architecture/aetheria-persistent-agent-architecture.md

@@ -6,6 +6,8 @@ For the first concrete slice, see [Aetheria Cold Wake MVP Scenario](./aetheria-c
 
 For the scaling model that explains how a crowded region can be simulated with a relatively small persistent cast, see [Aetheria Agent Population Model](./aetheria-agent-population-model.md).
 
+For the deeper note on how culture, personality distributions, memory, and perceived state should project into prompts, see [Agent State Distributions And Prompt Projection](./agent-state-distributions-and-prompt-projection.md).
+
 That document is the theft list. This one is the machine we are trying to build out of the stolen parts.
 
 The target is a persistent world full of in-universe agents who:

docs/architecture/agent-state-distributions-and-prompt-projection.md

@@ -0,0 +1,381 @@
+# Agent State Distributions And Prompt Projection
+
+This note describes how personality, culture, memory, and social context should be represented in structured state, and how that state should be projected into prompts for dialogue generation.
+
+The central rule is simple:
+
+- the prompt is not the source of truth
+- the prompt is a temporary projection of deeper state for one turn or one scene
+
+If we try to store the whole person in prompt prose, the system turns back into theatrical mush. The real machine has to live in explicit state.
+
+For the related notes on personality structure and dialogue classification, see:
+
+- [Personality Model Roadmap](../research/personality-model-roadmap.md)
+- [Personality Signal Classifier](../research/personality-signal-classifier.md)
+
+## Core Principle
+
+We should model agents through:
+
+1. canonical latent state
+2. perceived state for each agent
+3. prompt projection from perceived state into live generation
+
+That gives us:
+
+- stable world truth
+- subjective misunderstanding
+- efficient live prompting without pretending the prompt is the database
+
+## State Families
+
+Each agent should have explicit state families, not one giant personality blob.
+
+### 1. Underlying Organization
+
+These are deep structural variables:
+
+- self-coherence
+- contingent worth
+- shame sensitivity
+- reciprocity capacity
+- mentalization quality
+- authenticity tolerance
+- mask rigidity
+- external-regulation dependence
+
+These are slow-changing and often heavily shaped by early development and repeated relational history.
+
+### 2. Stable Dispositions
+
+These are relatively persistent tendencies:
+
+- novelty-seeking
+- conformity
+- status hunger
+- risk tolerance
+- sociability
+- baseline threat sensitivity
+- aesthetic appetite
+- ideological rigidity
+
+### 3. Behavioral Dimensions
+
+These are first-class, not optional garnish. They belong in the rebuild from the start:
+
+- warmth
+- drive
+- grandiosity
+- validation-seeking
+- anxiety
+- control pressure
+- hostility
+- suspicion
+- rigidity
+- withdrawal
+- volatility
+- attachment-seeking
+- distance-seeking
+
+These are the main handles for social behavior, institutional pressure, and consumer or factional drift.
+
+### 4. Presentation Strategy
+
+These describe how the self is performed:
+
+- charm
+- compliance
+- superiority
+- detachment
+- seductiveness
+- competence theater
+- moral theater
+- strategic opacity
+- cultivated harmlessness
+
+These are not just decorative style. In some agents they are survival machinery.
+
+### 5. Situational State
+
+These are transient activations:
+
+- exhaustion
+- scarcity pressure
+- humiliation
+- panic
+- triumph
+- grief
+- overstimulation
+- grievance activation
+- acute shame
+- perceived status threat
+
+### 6. Relationship State
+
+Per target person, faction, group, product domain, or institution:
+
+- trust
+- resentment
+- dependence
+- fear
+- fascination
+- obligation
+- envy
+- moral disgust
+- perceived status gap
+- expectation of care
+- expectation of betrayal
+
+### 7. Goals And Values
+
+- active goals
+- protected values
+- emotional stakes
+- tradeoffs
+- unforgivables
+
+## How To Represent Variables
+
+Do not represent most of these as naked scalars if we want culture and history to shape them properly.
+
+A practical representation is:
+
+- `mean`
+- `certainty` or `concentration`
+- `plasticity`
+- `current_activation`
+
+So instead of:
+
+- `status_hunger = 0.72`
+
+use something like:
+
+- `status_hunger.mean = 0.72`
+- `status_hunger.certainty = 0.81`
+- `status_hunger.plasticity = 0.22`
+- `status_hunger.current_activation = 0.89`
+
+This gives us:
+
+- stable baseline personality
+- uncertainty and variation
+- different rates of change
+- scene-sensitive activation without rewriting the whole person every turn
+
+## Culture As A Prior Field
+
+Culture should not create clones. Culture should shape distributions.
+
+For each culture, faction, class stratum, or institution, define:
+
+- prior means over variables
+- covariance structure
+- reward gradients
+- penalty gradients
+- preferred masks
+- taboo map
+- prestige map
+- default relationship posture to insiders, outsiders, rivals, inferiors, and superiors
+- favored narrative scripts
+
+This means a culture is not "people here are high in trait X."
+
+It is more like:
+
+- this culture rewards controlled presentation
+- penalizes spontaneous vulnerability
+- elevates status anxiety
+- normalizes suspicion of low-status outsiders
+- attaches prestige to procedural fluency and emotional composure
+
+That is how a Dominion or Lucent style environment should work: as a field that shapes what people become profitable or safe enough to be.
+
+## Personal History As A Transform Layer
+
+Culture is only the starting pressure.
+
+Then the prior is transformed by:
+
+- attachment history
+- class position
+- faction indoctrination
+- educational shaping
+- labor regime
+- remembered humiliations
+- remembered betrayals
+- remembered rescue, admiration, abandonment, and obligation
+
+So agent state should be read as:
+
+- cultural prior
+- transformed by developmental history
+- transformed by remembered episodes
+- currently activated by scene pressure
+
+## Cohorts And Populations
+
+The same representation can be lifted from individuals to populations.
+
+A colony, district, labor bloc, or consumer cohort can have:
+
+- shared priors
+- institutional conditioning
+- repeated collective incidents
+- relationship state toward factions, employers, media ecosystems, and product classes
+
+This is much better than Big Five-style population sliders because it lets us model things like:
+
+- prestige hunger
+- fear-state compliance
+- grievance accumulation
+- attachment to institutions
+- validation loops induced by media
+- suspicion induced by audit or betrayal
+
+That is much closer to Aetheria than a broad trait scaffold alone.
+
+## Canonical State Vs Perceived State
+
+The world should not only track what is true. It should track what each agent thinks is true.
+
+So we need:
+
+- canonical world state
+- canonical agent state
+- per-agent perceived state
+
+Perceived state includes:
+
+- what this agent believes about others
+- what motives they attribute
+- what traits they think they are seeing
+- what mask they think someone is wearing
+- what threats or opportunities they think are present
+
+This is where emotional intelligence, suspicion, attachment hunger, status anxiety, and cultural priors distort interpretation.
+
+The acting agent should mostly be prompted from perceived state, not canonical truth. That is how misunderstanding becomes organic instead of hand-authored.
+
+## Prompt Projection
+
+Prompt rendering should be treated as projection, not storage.
+
+For a live scene, build the prompt from:
+
+### 1. Identity And Role
+
+- who the agent is
+- what role they occupy
+- what they want to be seen as
+
+### 2. Cultural Default Frame
+
+- prestige rules
+- taboo zones
+- expected forms of control or intimacy
+- factional posture
+
+### 3. Current Presentation Strategy
+
+- how they are trying to appear right now
+- what they are concealing
+- what they must not look like
+
+### 4. Current Situation
+
+- scene pressure
+- public exposure
+- scarcity
+- humiliation risk
+- safety risk
+
+### 5. Relationship Context
+
+- what they think of the other party
+- what they need from them
+- what wounds or debts are active
+- what status relation they perceive
+
+### 6. Relevant Memory
+
+Not full history. Only:
+
+- the few most relevant episodes
+- relationship summaries
+- current active fears, loyalties, or grievances
+- currently salient cultural scripts
+
+### 7. Goals And Constraints
+
+- what they are trying to achieve in this scene
+- what they cannot afford
+- what values they will not betray
+
+### 8. Listener Model
+
+If the scene involves another agent, include:
+
+- what this agent thinks the other wants
+- what they fear the other is doing
+- where they may be misreading them
+
+## What The Prompt Should Not Do
+
+Do not make the prompt:
+
+- the sole canonical store of identity
+- a full dump of all memories
+- a taxonomy recital
+- a fake omniscient summary that erases subjective misreading
+
+The prompt should be compact, selective, and scene-bound. The state store carries the rest.
+
+## Economic Consequences
+
+This model gives us much more useful demand and cultural behavior than old trait-only systems.
+
+For example:
+
+- high status hunger plus validation-seeking plus fragile self-worth leads toward prestige goods, symbolic upgrades, and visible luxury
+- high threat sensitivity plus conformity plus shame reactivity leads toward safety goods, procedural systems, insurance, and respectable signaling
+- high drive plus novelty-seeking plus low institutional attachment leads toward frontier gear, gray-market experimentation, and risky migration
+- high mask rigidity plus high impression-management intensity leads toward corrective aesthetics, social camouflage, and reputation-maintenance consumption
+
+That is how culture, labor, media, and institutions become market-shaping forces instead of mere flavor text.
+
+## Recommended Implementation Path
+
+1. Define the state schema with first-class support for:
+   - underlying organization
+   - stable dispositions
+   - all core behavioral dimensions, including `volatility`, `attachment-seeking`, and `distance-seeking`
+   - presentation strategies
+   - situational state
+   - relationship state
+   - goals and values
+2. Represent those variables as priors plus activation, not just fixed scalars.
+3. Define cultural and institutional prior templates.
+4. Add history transforms from remembered episodes.
+5. Add per-agent perceived state overlays.
+6. Build prompt renderers that project perceived state into live generation.
+7. Keep canonical state, perceived state, and prompt projection cleanly separated.
+
+## Bottom Line
+
+The right machine is not:
+
+- a persona prompt with some adjectives taped to it
+- a canonical trait sheet with no cultural shaping
+- a direct line from "personality value" to dialogue
+
+The right machine is:
+
+- latent state distributions
+- shaped by culture
+- reshaped by history
+- distorted by perception
+- projected into prompts for one scene at a time
+
+That gives us agents who can feel culturally situated, personally scarred, socially biased, and dynamically alive without making the prompt carry the whole civilization on its back.

docs/research/personality-model-roadmap.md

@@ -58,6 +58,9 @@ It derives behavioral dimensions such as:
 - `Suspicion`
 - `Rigidity`
 - `Withdrawal`
+- `Volatility`
+- `Attachment-Seeking`
+- `Distance-Seeking`
 
 Those are better than Big Five for our purposes because they speak directly to:
 
@@ -245,9 +248,9 @@ That is part of why broad trait systems are too tidy for the thing we want.
 
 These were not properly banked elsewhere and should stop living only in chat residue.
 
-### Add More Behavioral Dimensions
+### Treat The Core Social Dimensions As First-Class
 
-The next promising additions are:
+The rebuild should treat these as first-class from the start, not as nice extras for some later prettier version:
 
 - `Volatility`
   - mood-lability, escalation speed, susceptibility to emotional swing
@@ -364,10 +367,7 @@ That is much closer to Aetheria than personality taxidermy.
 
 ## Near-Term Work To Steal Next
 
-1. Keep the current Void interaction dimensions, but add:
-   - `Volatility`
-   - `Attachment-Seeking`
-   - `Distance-Seeking`
+1. In the rebuild, treat `Volatility`, `Attachment-Seeking`, and `Distance-Seeking` as core dimensions from day one.
 2. Split `social stance` from `project-thinking style`.
 3. Add reflection jobs that consolidate episodes into semantic profile and relationship updates.
 4. Add evaluation fixtures for:
@@ -382,6 +382,8 @@ That is much closer to Aetheria than personality taxidermy.
    - relationship state
    - collective memory
 
+For the concrete state and prompt architecture behind that port, see [Agent State Distributions And Prompt Projection](../architecture/agent-state-distributions-and-prompt-projection.md).
+
 ## Bottom Line
 
 The useful lesson is simple:

docs/research/personality-signal-classifier.md

@@ -134,6 +134,9 @@ Targets should be event-level or utterance-level signals such as:
 - `suspicion`
 - `rigidity`
 - `withdrawal`
+- `volatility`
+- `attachment_seeking`
+- `distance_seeking`
 
 In practice, the canonical reader may need to emit both:
 
@@ -147,11 +150,8 @@ for example:
 - organic confidence vs compensatory grandiosity
 - actual reciprocity vs manipulative agreeableness
 
-Later additions worth supporting:
+Additional useful targets worth supporting:
 
-- `volatility`
-- `attachment_seeking`
-- `distance_seeking`
 - `status_hunger`
 - `submission`
 - `dominance`
@@ -485,3 +485,5 @@ The right shape is:
 - profile updates based on repeated evidence
 
 That gives us honest reading, organic misunderstanding, and enough structure to let agents become socially interesting instead of merely chatty.
+
+For the broader state-distribution and prompt-projection architecture that should feed this classifier, see [Agent State Distributions And Prompt Projection](../architecture/agent-state-distributions-and-prompt-projection.md).

state/evidence.jsonl

@@ -13,3 +13,4 @@
 {"ts":"2026-05-01T16:13:06Z","type":"research","status":"ok","note":"Persisted a focused personality-model roadmap: the current Void behavioral-dimension stack is a better basis for future agent and population modeling than the older Big Five colony layer, and the next worthwhile additions are volatility, attachment-vs-distance, reflection, and a split between social stance and project-thinking style."}
 {"ts":"2026-05-01T16:27:17Z","type":"research","status":"ok","note":"Persisted the personality-signal classifier design: generated dialogue should be read through a canonical event-level classifier and then distorted per listener by EQ, personality, relationship baggage, and situational load. The utterance is not the ground truth; the hidden speaker state and expressed signal are."}
 {"ts":"2026-05-01T16:47:54Z","type":"research","status":"ok","note":"Expanded the personality roadmap and classifier spec to treat performed selves, contingent-worth defenses, and impression management as first-class structure. Dialogue is not a clean window into the person; concealment and shell-maintenance are themselves part of the signal the system should model."}
+{"ts":"2026-05-01T16:56:41Z","type":"research","status":"ok","note":"Documented the state-distribution and prompt-projection architecture for Aetheria agents: core variables should live as culture-shaped latent state with history transforms and per-agent perceived overlays, while prompts are temporary projections of perceived state. Volatility, attachment-seeking, and distance-seeking are first-class dimensions in the rebuild, not later garnish."}