Definition
Plain language
A false alarm — flagging something as a problem when it actually isn't.
As stated in the literature
An instance incorrectly classified as positive by a detector; the rate of these trades off against recall and is a key cost metric for safety monitors and guards.
Also called: false positives, false-positive
Why it matters: Too many false alarms make a safety tool annoying and untrustworthy, so keeping them low is a key cost of any detector.
For example, a spam filter that moves an important work email to the junk folder has produced a false positive.
Heard on the show
“… Not deployable yet — you'd want around ninety at low false-positive rate before you'd put it in production — but it suggests that probing the residual stream for …”Episode 004 — The Sycophancy Circuit That Survives Alignment Training