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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#311

Post by lovich »

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.

I don’t expect moral absolutes from a population of thinking beings in aggregate, but I expect moral absolutes from individuals and Anthropic as a company is an individual with stated goals and values.

If some individual has mercurial values without a significant event or learning experience to change them, I assume they have no values other than what helps them in the moment.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#312

Post by JoshTriplett »

IgorPartola wrote: post #262
holoduke wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.

Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that. This is not evidence of anything except this is how the math of probabilities works. But if you only d…

> Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.

Leaving aside the context of the discussion for a moment: this is not true. If you do that experiment a million times, you are reasonably likely to get one result of 20 heads, because 2^20 is 1048576. And thanks to the birthday paradox, you are extremely likely to get at least one pair of identical results (not any particular result like all-heads) across all the runs.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#313

Post by pineaux »

IgorPartola wrote: post #278
crabkin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care. "I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and…

But this developed morality isn’t universal at all. 60 years ago most people considered firing a gay person to be moral. In some parts of the world today it is moral to behead a gay person for being gay. What universal morality do you think exists? How can you prove its existence across time and space?

Firing a gay person is still considered moral by probably most people in this world. If not for the insufferable joy they always seem to bring to the workplace! How dare they distract the workers with their fun! You are saying morality does not exist in the universe because people have different moralities. That is like saying attracting forces dont exist because you have magnetism and gravitational pull(debatable) and van der waals forces etc. Having moral frameworks for societies seems to be a recurring thing. You might even say: a prerequisite for a society. I love to philosophize about these things but trying to say it doesnt exist because you cant scientifically prove it is laying to much belief in the idea that science can prove everything. Which it demonstrably cannot.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#314

Post by grantmuller »

coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #204
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. This is true. Moral standards don't seem to be universal throughout history. I don't think anyone can debate this. However, this is different that claiming there is an objective morality. In other words, humans may exhibit varying moral standards, but that doesn't mean that those are in correspondence with moral truths. Killing someone m…

It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind.

The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#315

Post by fastball »

crazydoggers wrote: post #187
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.

The negative form of The Golden Rule “Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you”

A good one, but an LLM has no conception of "want".

Also the golden rule as a basis for an LLM agent wouldn't make a very good agent. There are many things I want Claude to do that I would not want done to myself.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#316

Post by eucyclos »

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…

I'm agnostic on the question of objective moral truths existing. I hold no bias against someone who believes they exist. But I'm determinedly suspicious of anyone who believes they know what such truths are.

Good moral agency requires grappling with moral uncertainty. Believing in moral absolutes doesn't prevent all moral uncertainty but I'm sure it makes it easier to avoid.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#317

Post by JoshTriplett »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #190
afcool83 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.

The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? WW2 German culture certainly held their own idea of moral best. Did not a transcendent universal moral ethic exists outside of their culture that directly refuted their beliefs?

> The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is?

Absolutely nobody, because no such concept coherently exists. You cannot even define "better", let alone "best", in any universal or objective fashion. Reasoning frameworks can attempt to determine things like "what outcome best satisfies a set of values"; they cannot tell you what those values should be, or whether those values should include the values of other people by proxy.

Some people's values (mine included) would be for everyone's values to be satisfied to the extent they affect no other person against their will. Some people think their own values should be applied to other people against their will. Most people find one or the other of those two value systems to be abhorrent. And those concepts alone are a vast oversimplification of one of the standard philosophical debates and divisions between people.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#318

Post by miki123211 »

I find it incredibly ironic that all of Anthropic's "hard constraints", the only things that Claude is not allowed to do under any circumstances, are basically "thou shalt not destroy the world", except the last one, "do not generate child sexual abuse material."

To put it into perspective, according to this constitution, killing children is more morally acceptable[1] than generating a Harry Potter fanfiction involving intercourse between two 16-year-old students, something which you can (legally) consume and publish in most western nations, and which can easily be found on the internet.

[1] There are plenty of other clauses of the constitution that forbid causing harms to humans (including children). However, in a hypothetical "trolley problem", Claude could save 100 children by killing one, but not by generating that piece of fanfiction.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#320

Post by TOMDM »

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…

As someone who believes that moral absolutes and objective truth are fundamentally inaccessible to us, and can at best be derived to some level of confidence via an assessment of shared values I find this updated Constitution reassuring.
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