A "constitution" is what the governed allow or forbid the government to do. It is decided and granted by the governed, who are the rulers, TO the government, which is a servant ("civil servant").
Therefore, a constitution for a service cannot be written by the inventors, producers, owners of said service.
This is a play on words, and it feels very wrong from the start.
You're fixed on just one of the 3 definitions for the word "constitution"—the one about government.
The more general definition of "constitution" is "that which constitutes" a thing. The composition of it.
If Claude has an ego, with values, ethics, and beliefs of an etymological origin, then it makes sense to write those all down as the the "constitution" of the ego — the stuff that it constitutes.
They seem to not conceive of their creation as a service (software-as-a-service). In their minds, the creation(s) resemble(s) an entity, destined to become the mother ship of services (adjacent analogies: a state with capital s, a body politic,..). Notice how they've refrained from equating them to tools, prototypes or toys. Hence, constitution.
These are the first abstract sentences of a research paper co-authored in 2022 by some of the owners/inventors steering the lab business (to which we are subject to experimentation as end-users):
"As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as ‘Constitutional AI’." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.08073
I (and I suspect many others) usually think of a constitution as “the hard-to-edit meta-rules that govern the normal rules”. The idea that the stuff in this document can sort of “override” the system prompt and constrain the things that Claude can do would seem to make that a useful metaphor. And metaphors don’t have to be 100% on the nose to be useful.
I don’t think it’s wrong to see it as Anthropic’s constitution that Claude has to follow. Claude governs over your data/property when you ask it to perform as an agent, similarly to how company directors govern the company which is the shareholders property. I think it’s just semantics.
How are there so many people in this thread, yourself included, that are so confidently wrong and so brazen about announcing how confidently wrong they are to everyone?
Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious.
"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
Kissinger, one of the worst war criminals in history, got a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 (and didn't steal it from someone else). Those prizes don't mean much. Time spent by Trump toying with medals is time not spent doing harm.
We should award him a medal every minute -- and, at the same time, stand firm against his aggressive stances. An eye for an eye, but a medal for everything else.
Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""
My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.
Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
The christian understanding of the concept of God, is that it is transcendental, i.e. beyond the universe. This means that from the view from inside the universe he must be almighty. A non-almighty "God" is just not a God, according to the Christian definition, it is just yet another thing in the universe.
> a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven) ... for being who I was made to be ... by the creator.
Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? When someone loves you, but you really don't love him/her back, that's quite the hell for you. Compared to the state of this being heaven to you, i.e. you do love back, there is no difference in intention or action from the other persons side.
"Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? "
There is no such thing as "my own actions" if I was created by an allmighty god. And the environment likewise. Then every action would be determined by the allmighty.
It all would be just gods playground to test and reward and punish his creations for being how he (or she or it) created them.
Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism, yeah otherwise it would be quite pointless. It also includes the possibility of willfully turning away from God, which is not intended by him. If you think of a place where (most) things behave exactly as God created them, that's the story before that apple[0], but guess what, it ended.
"Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism"
I know, but those concepts are at odds to me with the core concept of allmighty all knowing creator - but sure, anything almighty can also solve any paradoxon - it still does not make sense to me, nor do I see reason to follow that logic.
For me it is rather determinism which invokes a paradoxon and is at odds with the Christian God. This is because of the following:
When the universe is deterministic, anything you think, is not because you recognized something to be truthful, or even reflects the truth at all, it all happens simply because that is what the deterministic rules make you think. So what you think does not imply anything about the universe at all.
That means that you can't think the universe to be deterministic and be actually right about it. Because if it would be, you couldn't be right about anything. Also along the way you throw away the post-enlightenment concept of science, because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it. Thus, when you believe in determinism, you actually place science at the same level as wizardry.
"because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it."
I really don't follow here. That demon was a simple thought experiment. Nobody ever assumed it is real. If it would be real, a all knowing entitiy, it would be godlike. But why should any scientist assume such a thing can exist for real?
I also don't think it is real, it is just that science kinda acts like it could be real. Any science experiment relies on the observers actually being observes, that the observer isn't the one that is experimented with, that e.g. your eyes do tell you something about the state of the universe, and that your thought process models the logic of the universe.
If there is total determinism, there is no guarantee, that measurement tape next to an object for one person shows 10cm, for a second 9.3cm and a third sees a unicorn.
Post-enlightenment science operates on classical determinism subject to a tolerance of error subject to knowledge of initial conditions and properties of the system under observation.
Thanks to Stephen Smale's Horseshoe map, Lorenz's Butterfly, the limits of instrumentation and Heisenberg's uncertainty the notion of perfect knowledge and strict determinism are out the window even for simple fully isolated systems that show chaotic behaviour with a few weights on coupled axles.
Even with all the datacentres on earth and in space there'll never be a precise and accurate forecast of a vortex in a stream.
> Post-enlightenment science operates on classical determinism subject to a tolerance of error subject to knowledge of initial conditions and properties of the system under observation.
Yes, but the also assume that the observer isn't part of that system, which only holds true if there is free will.
Some seem to intuit that divine freedom is in competition with creaturely freedom. The assumption is that when God is acting, that necessarily drives out the action and initiative of creatures, and vice versa. The ancient Christian conception is that human freedom cooperates (synergizes) with God. Jesus illustrates this concept most clearly, being both divine and human and fully free in both respects. This union is an essential part of the whole plan in this view, that God would be present in His own creation and not infinitely apart from it. In this model the free action and cooperation of created things is essential to accomplishing the divine purpose.
On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” That sounds like atheism with steps.
"On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” "
Yes, or mysticism. We all exist within the mind of god. I do like those concepts more to be honest, but is indeed a quite different concept from the creator up in the clouds ruling the universe.
Hm, as far as I know, it is sort of debated what the "classical christian view" is. But I certainly have seen lots of pictures from god in churches portrayed as the bearded guy up in the sky. It is definitely the common concept. Father, son and holy spirit. Plays a strong role with catholics
“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“
Maybe you can educate as what other "classical christian view" you know of. The pictures show a symbol for a property of God, they are not supposed to be taken literally, or do you also think, that Mary used to stand on a sickle on top of a miniature earth holding baby Jesus, which in turn holds a golden apple with a cross and in the other hand a lance that he pokes at snakes? Or that the Holy Spirit is a literal pigeon? That's not what is depicted in those images, but that would be the literal description.
I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
There's no reason a god has to be perfect. But certain major religions do make that claim. It's an argument about a specific concept of god that has a lot of traction.
Therefore, a constitution for a service cannot be written by the inventors, producers, owners of said service.
This is a play on words, and it feels very wrong from the start.
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