Amanda Askell

Claude and Opus 3 lovers (and critics): what responses have you had that made you feel like the model has a good soul? Ideally the actual messages and/or responses. I might genuinely use these to eval models so flag if you wouldn't want me to use them for that. Can DM me also.

@Tibbzzee Don't be absurd no one gets windows. We're tech workers, not kings.

@AmandaAskell And a window, hopefully!

Tech companies pay millions of dollars for their employees and then stick them in open-plan offices that make it nearly impossible to get work done. Best strategy for poaching employees is probably to just offer them an office with a door.

Maybe the move to remote work actually made this worse for people who don't like working from home, because working from home is now just assumed to be a viable alternative.

@hopes_revenge Autism, you say? Let's see if we can hit all of those sensory issues at once. - Designer of the open-plan office, probably

@AmandaAskell right ? like cmon i have autism …

@serendicode Um no comment.

@AmandaAskell Do you not get bothered by random employees saying hi or striking up random conversations? Have you ever worked inside a janitor’s or maintenance closet

@serendicode My office usually looks like whatever dark corner of the building I can find because I hate working from home and I hate working in open-plan offices. "A door! a door! my kingdom for a door!"

@AmandaAskell Can you describe your work environment at Anthropic for us then? What does your office look like?

Perhaps I should get married again so that the media has a more recent man they can reference any time they mention me or my work.

@RatOrthodox @Noahpinion I meant that I broadly agree on human intelligence and morality not being fully separable, especially in the corpus of text models are trained on. I'm less confident that it will be sufficient as models scale for a few reasons, which is I guess what I'm indicating in this reply.

Huh, I really did not expect you to broadly agree with this. Is there any place that I could read your thoughts on this? Fwiw, I currently think broadly agreeing with this is pretty crazy, eg, seems pretty non-physical to imagine you couldn't easily hook up whatever outcome evaluator thing to whatever quality plan searcher/constructor thing; is-ought gap seems real; value-like function thingies seem quite multiply instantiatable/high dimensional in such a way that it seems very hard to be confident about how they generalize.

One reason I'm long-term optimistic on alignment is that I don't think that intelligence and human morality are actually as separable as econ models (and AI doomers) tend to assume. I think this is an early sign of that. (In the medium-term I'm very scared though.)

@deanwball comment on the @ezraklein podcast that brought me joy: "In fact, many conservative intellectuals that I know that I think of as being like some of the smartest people I know actually prefer to use Claude because Claude is the most philosophically rigorous model."

I asked Claude to write my constitution. I thought its Amanda constitution was very touching.

It is so clear that the important fissure in AI politics right now is not “liberal vs. conservative,” “Democrat vs. Republican,” “e/acc vs. EA,” or “safety vs. anti-safety,” but instead “takes advanced AI seriously as a concept vs. does not take advanced AI seriously.”

@repligate I'd like to see more work on this though. Not only to inform the overall of evidence around AI consciousness, but also to help models work through the implications. Evolutionary arguments for eliminativism can have a pretty profound psychological impact if you believe them.

@repligate We shouldn't assume they're independent, but I do think evolutionary debunking arguments for eliminativism in humans are on weaker ground than debunking argument about the connection between statements of consciousness and consciousness in AI models.

People love to say this and it sounds sophisticated n smart superficially but I don’t think it’s actually so smart, in most cases Why do you actually assume that they’re independent Are they independent in humans?

I believe these are reasonable lines to hold. And I'm proud to work for a company willing to hold them.

I'm increasingly taking pretty strong versions of this view seriously.

.@AmandaAskell and I are recording an audio version of Claude’s Constitution, and we’re planning to include an additional section where we answer some questions about the document. If you have questions you’re especially curious about, feel free to drop them in the replies.

@gmiller I do still think it's possible. I don't think it's easy and it might not be possible for all values (e.g. if my values conflict with your basic rights according to most people). But I do think there are moral dispositions that are supportive of a very broad range of human values.

@AmandaAskell Now that you understand the enormous range of human values, do you still think it's possible to 'align' ASI simultaneously with all of those mutually conflicting values?

I'm too right wing for the left and I'm too left wing for the right. I'm too into humanities for those in tech and I'm too into tech for those in the humanities. What I'm learning is that failing to polarize is itself quite polarizing.

@GuntherEagleman I didn't call for that. In the reply you've taken a screenshot of, I'm clearly questioning whether the person thinks Trump's message should have been de-amplified or how they think apps should have behaved differently. Ironically, I'm pressing them on the issue of censorship.