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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#191

Post by felixgallo »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #186
felixgallo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly struggling to understand your position. You believe that there are true moral absolutes, but that they should not be communicated in the culture at all costs?

I believe there are moral absolutes and not including them in the AI constitution (for example, like the US Constitution "All Men Are Created Equal") is dangerous and even more dangerous is allowing a top AI operator define moral and ethics based on relativist standards, which as I've said elsewhere, history has shown to have deadly consequences.

No, I read your words the first time, I just don't understand. What would you have written differently, can you provide a concrete example?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#193

Post by foxygen »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #172
spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. When is it OK to rape and murder a 1 year old child? Congratulations. You just observed a universal moral standard in motion. Any argument other than "never" would be atrocious.

Since you said in another comment that the ten commandments would be a good starting point for moral absolutes, and that lying is sinful, I'm assuming you take your morals from God. I'd like to add that slavery seemed to be okay on Leviticus 25:44-46. Is the bible atrocious too, according to your own view?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#194

Post by joshuamcginnis »

riwsky wrote: post #155
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the text. Objective anchors and examples are provided throughout, and the passage you excerpt is obviously and explicitly meant to reflect that any such list of them will incidentally and essentially be incomplete.

Uncharitable? It's a direct quote. I can agree with the examples cited, but if the underlying guiding philosophy is relativistic, then it is problematic in the long-run when you account for the infinite ways in which the product will be used by humanity.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#195

Post by dandeto »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #160
smithkl42 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I'm one of those who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth - but I think that practically, this nets out to "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations". At the very least, I don't think that you're gonna get better in this culture. Let's say that you and I disagree about, I dunno, abortion, or premarital sex, and we don't sh…

This is self-contradictory because true moral absolutes are unchanging and not contingent on which view best displays "care" or "wisdom" in a given debate or cultural context. If disagreements on abortion or premarital sex reduce to subjective judgments of "practical wisdom" without a transcendent standard, you've already abandoned absolutes for pragmatic relativism. History has demonstrated the deadly consequences o…

I think the person you're replying to is saying that people use normative ethics (their views of right and wrong) to judge 'objective' moral standards that another person or religion subscribes to.

Dropping 'objective morals' on HN is sure to start a tizzy. I hope you enjoy the conversations :)

For you, does God create the objective moral standard? If so, it could be argued that the morals are subjective to God. That's part of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#196

Post by simpaticoder »

spicyusername wrote: post #164
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from the outside threats that we can (e.g. meteors, comets, super volcanoes, plagues, but not nearby neutrino jets) and even attempt to spread life beyond earth, perhaps with robotic assistance. Right now humanity's existence is quite precarious; we live in a single thin skin of biosphere that we habitually, willfully mistreat that on one tiny rock in a vast, ambivalent universe. We're a tiny phenomena, easily snuffed out on even short time-scales. It makes sense to grow out of this stage.

So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#197

Post by yunnpp »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #180
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute morality? That’s bold. So what is your opinion on lying? As an absolutionist, surely it’s always wrong right? So if an axe murderer comes to the door asking for your friend… you have to let them in.

Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion. Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment. It's not lying when you do…

So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue.

What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else?

Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both.

Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#198

Post by [deleted] »

js8 wrote: post #74
rybosworld wrote: post #29

So an elaborate version of Asimov's Laws of Robotics? A bit worrying that model safety is approached this way.

One has to wonder, what if a pedophile had an access to nuclear launch codes, and our only hope would be a Claude AI creating some CSAM to distract him from blowing up the world. But luckily this scenario is already so contrived that it can never happen.

[deleted]

Re: Claude's new constitution

#199

Post by tntxtnt »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

'good values' means good money. Highest payer get to decide whatever the values are. What do you expect from a for profit company??

Re: Claude's new constitution

#200

Post by joshuamcginnis »

stonogo wrote: post #150
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

Congrats on solving philosophy, I guess. Since the actual product is not grounded in objective truth, it seems pointless to rigorously construct an ethical framework from first principles to govern it. In fact, the document is meaningless noise in general, and "good values" are always going to be whatever Anthropic's team thinks they are. Nevertheless, I think you're reading their PR release the way they hoped people…

The document reflects the system prompt which directs the behavior of the product, so no, it's not pointless to debate the merits of the philosophy which underpins it's ethical framework.
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