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Claude's new constitution

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#521

Post by skissane »

eloisant wrote: post #518
skissane wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport? By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby. Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you…

> As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value. I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time. There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before th…

A lot of this sounds to me like common prejudices about the past. And repeating ideas ultimately coming from Philippe Ariès' 1960 book Centuries of Childhood, which most mediaevalists nowadays consider largely discredited.

Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?

And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#522

Post by recursivedoubts »

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.

“There are no objective universal moral truths” is an objective universal moral truth claim

Re: Claude's new constitution

#523

Post by skissane »

jychang wrote: post #496
skissane wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Almost everyone agrees that "1+1=2" is objective. There is far less agreement on how and why it is objective–but most would say we don't need to know how to answer deep questions in the philosophy of mathematics to know that "1+1=2" is object…

Strong disagree. Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy. And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus. Physicists by consensus concluded that Newton was right, and absolute... until Einstein introduced relativity. You cannot do "proofs by feel". I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Prin…

> Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport?

You aren't hunting the baby for sport. Sport is not among your reasons for hunting the baby.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#524

Post by jychang »

skissane wrote: post #523
jychang wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy. And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus. Physicists by consensus concluded that Newton was right, and absolute... until Einstein introduced relativity. You cannot do "proofs by feel". I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Prin…

> Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport? You aren't hunting the baby for sport. Sport is not among your reasons for hunting the baby.

Actually, I think "The Most Dangerous Game" is a good analogy here. At the end of the story, the protagonist IS hunting for sport. He started off in fear, but in the end genuinely enjoyed it. So likewise- if you start off hunting a baby in fear, and then eventually grow to enjoy it, but it also saves your village, does that make it evil? You're still saving your village, but you also just derive dopamine from killing the baby!

This actually devolves into human neuroscience, the more I think about it. "I want to throw a ball fast, because I want to win the baseball game". The predictive processing theory view on the statement says that the set point at the lower level (your arm) and the set point at the higher level (win the baseball game) are coherent, and desire at each level doesn't directly affect the other. Of course, you'd have to abandon a homunculus model of the mind and strongly reject Korsgaard, but that's on shaky ground scientifically anyways so this is a safe bet. You can just say that you are optimizing for your village as a higher level set point, but are hunting for game at a slightly lower level set point.

Note that sport is not a terminal desire, as well. Is a NBA player who plays for a trophy not playing a sport? Or a kid forced to play youth soccer? So you can't even just say "sport must be an end goal".

Re: Claude's new constitution

#525

Post by polytely »

boxed wrote: post #416
rybosworld wrote: post #29

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

Isn't it a good sign? The Laws of Robotics seems like a slam dunk baseline, and the issues and subtleties of it has been very thoughtfully mapped out in Asimovs short story collection.

The whole point of those books was to explore the places where those laws produced unexpected behaviour, so they are clearly not sufficient. I would argue those books are actually about demonstrating that it is very hard to build an ethical system out of rules.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#526

Post by ben_w »

skissane wrote: post #513
ben_w wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "Nazis", and I did say "millennia"; despite the words "thousand year reich", they did not last very long. The examples I have in mind include things predating the oldest known city in the area now known as Germany in some cases, and collectively span multiple continents.

In none of those examples were people harming/killing babies for the sole or primary reason of "harming/killing babies is fun", so they aren't counterexamples to my principle.

Which examples do you think I have in mind that you are so confident about refuting them, given I've not actually told you what they are yet and only alluded to them by describing their properties?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#527

Post by rednafi »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #323
rednafi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, this is mostly for PR stunts as the company prepares for its IPO. It’s like saying, “Guys, look, we used these docs to make our models behave well. Now if they don’t, it’s not our fault.”

That, and the catastrophic risk framing is where this really loses me. We're discussing models that supposedly threaten "global catastrophe" or could "kill or disempower the vast majority of humans." Meanwhile, Opus 4.5 can't successfully call a Python CLI after reading its 160 lines of code. It confuses itself on escape characters, writes workaround scripts that subsequent instances also can't execute, and after I e…

If they advertised these LLMs as just another tool in your repertoire, like Bash, imagine how that would go.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#528

Post by skissane »

ben_w wrote: post #526
skissane wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In none of those examples were people harming/killing babies for the sole or primary reason of "harming/killing babies is fun", so they aren't counterexamples to my principle.

Which examples do you think I have in mind that you are so confident about refuting them, given I've not actually told you what they are yet and only alluded to them by describing their properties?

This is a really strange way to argue. "I have counterexamples to your argument, but I haven't told you what they are, I'm just leaving you to guess–and you've guessed wrongly"

Re: Claude's new constitution

#529

Post by Dilettante_ »

skissane wrote: post #495
sroussey wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport? During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time? BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults. Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will leg…

> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport? By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby. Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you…

People absolutely "torture" babies for their own enjoyment. It's just "in good fun", so you don't think about it as "torture", you think of it as "teasing". Cognitive blind spot. People do tons of things that are displeasant or emotionally painful to their children to see the child's funny or interesting reaction. It serves an evolutionary purpose even, challenging the child. "Mothers stroke and fathers poke" and all that.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#530

Post by chairmansteve »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #355
rungeen__panda wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is that distinct difference if you care to elaborate?

It's a clear sunny day and you ask me, "is it raining?". I answer, "it's not snowing." Am I lying?

With your attitude to the truth, I wouldn't trust you an inch.

I'll choose to be charitable and assume you are arguing rhetorically. If not, your relationship with truth is "interesting".

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