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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

721–730 of 743 posts

Re: Claude's new constitution

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human moral sense" -- at least that'd be a really bad conclusion to humanity as AI scales up). Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in t…

That was entirely handwritten.

Yeah but nobody is gonna read it if they waded through five paragraphs of insubstantial LLM slop from you before. You betrayed the trust of everyone reading that post, wasting their time, energy and quite frankly making us feel a little dirty for reading in good faith what turned out to be something you put zero effort into generating and took us a lot of effort to read. Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me and all that.

This is exactly, genuinely, 100% what I was talking about when I said you were being direspectful of good discussion culture. You're turning it from high-trust into low-trust and soon nobody will be reading any comment longer than two sentences by default.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#722
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later. I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you…

Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!" Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetica…

Do you think blood libel is a modern creation?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who said anything about a formula? In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?) > It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species True > keep us in the game" That's a formula right there my friend > Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if…

>In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?) I have no idea what you're talking about, so I guess I'm not "one of them". > That's a formula right there my friend No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor.

> I have no idea what you're talking about

Read the top level comment and "objective anchors". It's always great to know the context before replying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712541

There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.

> No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor

Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#724
post #563

> 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. Capitalism at its best: we decide what is ethical or not. I'm sorry pal, but what is acceptable/not acceptable is usually decided at a country level,…

Morality isn't defined by laws, neither are values. Go back to school, please, if you think otherwise.

I was talking about ethics. And many countries have ethics committees that feed input to politics to write laws. Ethics permeates in law. But that's not the important point. The important point: it's decided as a society and it is local to that society. Therefore, Claude can't be universal in its choices: they must adapt to local definitions.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not what people argue. People do argue that women do get abortions for fun.

I think there’s a clear distinction between (1) doing an act because you find it fun in itself, (2) doing an act because it eliminates an unwanted consequence of some other fun act. When I say no woman gets an abortion “for fun”, I mean there is no woman for whom abortion belongs to (1); when some pro-lifer claims women get abortions “for fun”, they are talking about (2) not (1). My claim that essentially everyone ag…

Sure, you can constantly keep making distinctions to insist you're correct. But it's an absurd statement anyway and it has no actual support.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we are employing a different definition of 'moral claim'? I take it that a moral claim tells you that something is good/bad, just/unjust, permissible/impermissible, or what should/shouldn't do, etc.

Yes. A moral claim is a claim about the morality of our actions. Saying there are no objective moral claims is equivalent to saying "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Of course, when phrased in that manner, it is at least self-consistent.

What does 'do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' mean in your understanding?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#727
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution "unless the government wants to kill, imprison, enslave, entrap, coerce, spy, track or oppress you, then we don't have a constitution." basically all the things you would be concerned about AI doing to you, honk honk clown world. Their constitution should just be a middle finger lol. Edit: Downvotes? Why?

It’s bad if the government is using it this way, but it would probably be worse if everyone could.

Thats a logical fallacy FYI. The people that would be most at risk of abusing power are removing their limitations. The average person that has zero likelihood of doing such things is restricted so it don't matter.

Fox meet henhouse.

Gov = good , people = bad. Gov is people....

Re: Claude's new constitution

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Really? We can't agree that shooting babies in the head with firearms using live ammunition is wrong?

That's not a standard, that's a case study. I believe it's wrong, but I bet I believe that for a different reason than you do.

1. Do people necessarily need to agree on the justification for a standard to agree on the standard itself? Does everyone agree on the reasoning / justification for every single point of every NIST standard?

2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Really? We can't agree that shooting babies in the head with firearms using live ammunition is wrong?

Someone: "Division is a hard thing to do in your head" You: "Watch me ! 1/1 = 1 !"

Apples and oranges. The claim being refuted was an absolute negative that claimed no universal moral standards exist, a binary statement.

Difficulty is a spectrum.

This matters because if there's a single counterexample to an absolute, binary assertion, the assertion is proven false.

Nobody's arguing that all moral standards are easy to reach consensus on, the argument is that "there are no universal moral standards" is a demonstrably false statement.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?) I have no idea what you're talking about, so I guess I'm not "one of them". > That's a formula right there my friend No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor.

> I have no idea what you're talking about Read the top level comment and "objective anchors". It's always great to know the context before replying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712541 There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking. > No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor Formula IS a metaphor..…

> There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.

I believe I'm saying the same thing, and summing it up in the word "evolutionary". I have no idea what you're talking about when you suggest that I'm perhaps "one of those people". I understand the context of the thread, just not your unnecessary insinuation.

> Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?

There is no "is" here. There "is" no formula or fixed law. Formula is metaphor only in the sense that all language is metaphor. I can use the word literally this context when I say that I literally did not say anything about a formula or fixed law, because I am literally saying there is no formula or fixed law when it comes to the context of morality. Even evolution is just a mental model.

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