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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#461

Post by a3w »

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.

Sound like the Rationalist agenda: have two axioms, and derive everything from that.

1. (Only sacred value) You must not kill other that are of a different opinion. (Basically the golden rule: you don't want to be killed for your knowledge, others would call that a belief, and so don't kill others for it.) Show them the facts, teach them the errors in their thinking and they clearly will come to your side, if you are so right.

2. Don't have sacred values: nothing has value just for being a best practice. Question everthing. (It turns out, if you question things, you often find that it came into existance for a good reason. But that it might now be a suboptimal solution.)

Premise number one is not even called a sacred value, since they/we think of it as a logical (axiomatic?) prerequisite to having a discussion culture without fearing reprisal. Heck, even claiming baby-eating can be good (for some alien societies), to share a lesswrong short story that absolutely feels absurdist.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#462

Post by vidarh »

pineaux wrote: post #313
IgorPartola wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) a…

The discussion is about universal morality, not morality in general.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#463

Post by jychang »

skissane wrote: post #455
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.

I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant…

Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms).

The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is.

That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons.

Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action.

Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive.

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...

Re: Claude's new constitution

#466

Post by jychang »

a3w wrote: post #461
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.

Sound like the Rationalist agenda: have two axioms, and derive everything from that. 1. (Only sacred value) You must not kill other that are of a different opinion. (Basically the golden rule: you don't want to be killed for your knowledge, others would call that a belief, and so don't kill others for it.) Show them the facts, teach them the errors in their thinking and they clearly will come to your side, if you are…

That was always doomed for failure in the philosophy space.

Mostly because there's not enough axioms. It'd be like trying to establish Geometry with only 2 axioms instead of the typical 4/5 laws of geometry. You can't do it. Too many valid statements.

That's precisely why the babyeaters can be posited as a valid moral standard- because they have different Humeian preferences.

To Anthropic's credit, from what I can tell, they defined a coherent ethical system in their soul doc/the Claude Constitution, and they're sticking with it. It's essentially a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics system that disposes of the strict rules a la Kant in favor of establishing (a hierarchy of) 4 core virtues. It's not quite Aristotle (there's plenty of differences) but they're clearly trying to have Claude achieve eudaimonia by following those virtues. They're also making bold statements on moral patienthood, which is clearly an euphemism for something else; but because I agree with Anthropic on this topic and it would cause a shitstorm in any discussion, I don't think it's worth diving into further.

Of course, it's just one of many internally coherent systems. I wouldn't begrudge another responsible AI company from using a different non virtue ethics based system, as long as they do a good job with the system they pick.

Anthropic is pursuing a bold strategy, but honestly I think the correct one. Going down the path of Kant or Asimov is clearly too inflexible, and consequentialism is too prone to paperclip maximizers.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#467

Post by adangert »

The largest predictor of behavior within a company and of that companies products in the long run is funding sources and income streams (anthropic will probably become ad-supported in no time flat), which is conveniently left out in this "constitution". Mostly a waste of effort on their part.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#468

Post by wraptile »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #73

LLMs really get in the way of computer security work of any form. Constantly "I can't do that, Dave" when you're trying to deal with anything sophisticated to do with security. Because "security bad topic, no no cannot talk about that you must be doing bad things." Yes I know there's ways around it but that's not the point. The irony is that LLMs being so paranoid about talking security is that it ultimately helps th…

Claude has refused to explain some cookies stored on my browser several times which was my litmus test on the effectiveness of this "constitution".

Re: Claude's new constitution

#469

Post by AllegedAlec »

vidarh wrote: post #460
staticassertion wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Ha. Not really. Moral philosophers write those books all the time, they're not exactly rolling in cash. Anyone interested in this can read the SEP

The key being "well written", which in this instance needs to be interpreted as being convincing . People do indeed write contradictory books like this all the time and fail to get traction, because they are not convincing.

"I disagree with this point of view so it's objectively wrong"

Re: Claude's new constitution

#470

Post by milchek »

IgorPartola wrote: post #202
simpaticoder wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the con…

I used to believe the same thing but now I’m not so sure. What if we simply cannot fathom the true nature of the universe because we are so minuscule in size and temporal relevance?

What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?

What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?

I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.

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