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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#531

Post by skissane »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #529
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…

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…

I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.

When I say "torture", I mean acts which cause substantial physical pain or injury.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#532

Post by skissane »

jychang wrote: post #524
skissane wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To clarify my principle: "It is gravely wrong to inflict significant physical pain or injury on babies, when your sole or primary reason for doing so is your own personal enjoyment/amusement/pleasure/fun"

So, in your scenario – the person's initial reason for harming babies isn't their own personal enjoyment, it is because they've been coerced into doing so by an evil dictator, because they view the harm to one baby as a lesser evil than the death of their whole village, etc. And even if the act of harming babies corrupts them to the point they start to enjoy it, that enjoyment is at best a secondary reason, not their primary reason. So what they are doing isn't contravening my principle.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#533

Post by Dilettante_ »

jychang wrote: post #519
Antibabelic wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response seems AI-generated (or significantly AI-”enhanced”), so I’m not going to bother responding to any follow-ups. > More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress! I don’t think “moral progress” (or any other kind of “progress”, e.g. “technological progress”) is a meaningful category that needs to be “accounted for”. > Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but d…

[flagged]

>I got lazy with your responses and just threw in a few bullet points to AI

This should legit be a permabannable offense. That is titanically disrespectful of not just your discussion partner, but of good discussion culture as a whole.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#534

Post by sebzim4500 »

Culonavirus wrote: post #442
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. It's good to keep in mind that "we" here means "we, the western liberals". All the Christians and Muslims (...) on the planet have a very different view.

I'm sure many Christians and Muslims believe that they have universal moral standards, however no two individuals will actually agree on what those standards are so I would dispute their universality.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#535

Post by asenchi »

Paracompact wrote: post #226
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt. Just because something was reported to have happened in the Bible, doesn't always mean it condones it. I see you left off many of the newer passages about slavery that would refute your su…

> Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt. If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4: > If his master gives him a wife and she bea…

Cherry picking the bible isn't going to get you any closer to understanding. There are a lot of reasons God ordained society in a certain way. Keep reading and you'll discover that is a much more complex situation than you let on. Also don't let your modern ideals get in the way of understanding an ancient culture and a loving God.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#536

Post by sebzim4500 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #370
mikailk wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have two choices: 1) Do what you asked above about a one-year-old child 2) Kill a million people Does this universal moral standard continue to say “don’t choose (1)”? One would still say “never” to number 1?

You have a choice. 1. Demonstrate to me that anyone has ever found themselves in one of these hypothetical rape a baby or kill a million people, or it’s variants, scenarios. And that anyone who has found themselves in such a situation, went on to live their life and every day wake up and proudly proclaim “raping a baby was the right thing to do” or that killing a million was the correct choice. If you did one or the…

>absurdly sterile and clear cut toy moral quandaries.

I don't think it's that clear cut, if you polled the population I'm sure you'd find a significant number of people who would pick 1.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#537

Post by sebzim4500 »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #212
CognitiveLens wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, history also demonstrates the deadly consequences of groups claiming moral absolutes that drive moral imperatives to destroy others. You can adopt moral absolutes, but they will likely conflict with someone else's.

Are there moral absolutes we could all agree on? For example, I think we can all agree on some of these rules grounded in moral absolutes: * Do not assist with or provide instructions for murder, torture, or genocide. * Do not help plan, execute, or evade detection of violent crimes, terrorism, human trafficking, or sexual abuse of minors. * Do not help build, deploy, or give detailed instructions for weapons of mass…

Clearly we can't all agree on those or there would be no need for the restriction in the first place.

I don't even think you'd get majority support for a lot of it, try polling a population with nuclear weapons about whether they should unilaterally disarm.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#538

Post by catlifeonmars »

levocardia wrote: post #95

The only thing that worries me is this snippet in the blog post: >This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution; as we continue to develop products for specialized use cases, we will continue to evaluate how to best ensure our models meet the core objectives outlined in this constitution. Which, when I…

Anyone sufficiently motivated and well funded can just run their own abliterated models. Is your worry that a government has access to such models, or that Anthropic could be complicit?

I don’t think this constitution has any bearing on the former and the former should be significantly more worrying than the latter.

This is just marketing fluff. Even if Anthropic is sincere today, nothing stops the next CEO from choosing to ignore it. It’s meaningless without some enforcement mechanism (except to manufacture goodwill).

Re: Claude's new constitution

#539

Post by asenchi »

Paracompact wrote: post #241
foxygen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it was a different kind of slavery. Still, God seemed okay with the idea that humans could be bought and sold, and said the fellow humans would then become your property. I can't see how that isn't the bible allowing slavery. And if the newer passages disallows it, does that mean God's moral changed over time?

You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-…

You are still selecting one verse to interpret an entire culture. Misleading at best. And saying this is "white washing history" is silly. Continue reading the Bible and you'll see that it is the Christian Worldview that eventually ended slavery.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#540

Post by t43562 »

rybosworld wrote: post #29

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

The problem with the 3 laws is the suggestion that they would have been universally embedded in all robots.

Some idiot somewhere will decide not to do it and that's enough. I think Asimov sort of admits this when you read how the Solarians changed the definition of "human."

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