Right the red line wasn’t much of a line. If you’re drawing your line only at unconstitutional mass surveillance and allowing the DoD to build skynet because Claude’s not ready for it yet that’s not really a line of principle.

There's been a fair amount of speculation that pushing back after discovering that that had happened was what instigated this week's fun.

Did you ask these too: what was the full context? To what degree was Anthropic aware in advance? What was their action space (their options)? What would be the consequences of their next actions?

And of course: and what sources are you using?

I get it: moral oversimplification is tempting for many people. I understand digging in takes time, but this situation warrants extra consideration.

Ethics is complicated and much harder than programming. Ethical reasoning is a muscle you have to train. Generally speaking, it isn’t the kind of skill that you build in isolation. At the very least, a lot of awareness and introspection is required.

I’d like to think that HN is a fairly intelligent community. But I don’t assume too much. Going based on what I’ve seen here generally, I see a lot of shallow thinking. So I think it’s a reasonable concern to think many of us here have a pretty large blind spot (statistically) when it comes to “softer” skills like philosophy and ethics.

This is not me “blaming” individuals; our industry has strong bias and selection criteria. This is my overall empirical take based on participating here for years.

Still, I’d like to think we are sufficiently intelligent and we have sufficient means and time to fill the gaps. But we have to prove it. I suggest we start modeling and demonstrating the kind of behavior and reasoning that we want to see in the world.

You can probably tell that I lean heavily towards consequentialist ethics, but I don’t discount other kinds of ethical thinking. I just want everyone to think hard harder. Seek more context. Ask what you would do in another’s shoes and why. Recognize the incentives and constraints.

Many people are tempted to judge others. That’s human. I suggest tamping that down until you’ve really marinated in the full context.

Also, each of us probably has more influence with your own actions than merely judging others.

And let me be brutally honest about one’s impact. Organizing and collaborating is so much of a force multiplier (easily 100X) that not doing it for things you care about is moral failure!

I’m not discounting good intentions, but in my system of ethics, I put much more emphasis on our actions. And persuasion is an action, which is what I’m hoping to do here.

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