To be blunt, this is why I believe there was a game of telephone that happened, because I agree that this commitment was unlikely to be held, so I don’t think they promised this would happen (though the comms from Anthropic are surprisingly unclear on such an important point.)
This comment is inspired by Raemon’s comment below this paragraph, and I’ll elaborate on a problematic/toxic dynamic in criticizing orgs that might be right but also have a reasonable probability of being shady is that the people who do try to criticize such orgs are often selected for both more conflict than is optimal, and more paranoia than a correctly calibrated person, which means it’s too easy for even shady organizations to validly argue away any criticism, no matter how serious, and the honest organizations will almost certainly respond the same way, which means you get much less evidence and data for your calibration, and this can easily spiral into being far too paranoid/insane about an organization to the point of elaborating false conspiracy theories about it:
My own take on the entire affair is that Anthropic comms definitely needs to be more consistent and clear, but also we should try to be much more careful around the qualifiers, and importantly to treat 2 similar sounding sentences as potentially extremely different, because every word does matter for these sorts of high-stakes situations.
More generally, it’s important to realize early when a telephone game is happening, so that you can stop the spread of misconceptions.
To be blunt, this is why I believe there was a game of telephone that happened, because I agree that this commitment was unlikely to be held, so I don’t think they promised this would happen (though the comms from Anthropic are surprisingly unclear on such an important point.)
This comment is inspired by Raemon’s comment below this paragraph, and I’ll elaborate on a problematic/toxic dynamic in criticizing orgs that might be right but also have a reasonable probability of being shady is that the people who do try to criticize such orgs are often selected for both more conflict than is optimal, and more paranoia than a correctly calibrated person, which means it’s too easy for even shady organizations to validly argue away any criticism, no matter how serious, and the honest organizations will almost certainly respond the same way, which means you get much less evidence and data for your calibration, and this can easily spiral into being far too paranoid/insane about an organization to the point of elaborating false conspiracy theories about it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/?commentId=9qfPihnpHoESSCAGP
My own take on the entire affair is that Anthropic comms definitely needs to be more consistent and clear, but also we should try to be much more careful around the qualifiers, and importantly to treat 2 similar sounding sentences as potentially extremely different, because every word does matter for these sorts of high-stakes situations.
More generally, it’s important to realize early when a telephone game is happening, so that you can stop the spread of misconceptions.