Inspired by a recent discussion about whether Anthropic broke a commitment to not push the capabilities frontier (I am more sympathetic to their position than most, because I think that it’s often hard to distinguish between “current intentions” and “commitments which might be overridden by extreme events” and “solemn vows”):
Maybe one translation tool for bridging the gap between rationalists and non-rationalists is if rationalists interpret any claims about the future by non-rationalists as implicitly being preceded by “Look, I don’t really believe that plans work, I think the world is inherently wildly unpredictable, I am kinda making everything up as I go along. Having said that:”
This translation tool would also require rationalists and such to make arguments of the form “I think supporting Anthropic (by, e.g., going to work there or giving it funding) is a good thing to do because they sort of have a feeling right now that it would be good not to push the AI frontier”, rather than of the form ”… because they’re committed to not pushing the frontier”.
Which are arguments one could make! But is a pretty different argument and I think people would behave differently if these were the only arguments in favour of supporting a new scaling lab.
Am I correct that the implied implication here is that assurances from a non-rationalist are essentially worthless?
I think it is also wrong to imply that Anthropic have violated their commitment simply because they didn’t rationally think through the implications of their commitment when they made it.
I think you can understand Anthropic’s actions as purely rational, just not very ethical.
They made an unenforceable commitment to not push capabilities when it directly benefited them. Now that it is more beneficial to drop the facade, they are doing so.
I think “don’t trust assurances from non-rationalists” is not a good takeaway. Rather it should be “don’t trust unenforceable assurances from people who will stand to greatly benefit from violating your trust at a later date”.
The intended implication is something like “rationalists have a bias towards treating statements as much firmer commitments than intended then getting very upset when they are violated”.
For example, unless I’m missing something, the “we do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities” claim is just one offhand line in a blog post. It’s not a firm commitment, it’s not even a claim about what their intentions are. As stated, it’s just one consideration that informs their actions—and in fact the “wish” terminology is often specifically not a claim about intended actions (e.g. “I wish I didn’t have to do X”).
Yet rationalists are hammering them on this one sentence—literally making songs about it, tweeting it to criticize Anthropic, etc. It seems like there is a serious lack of metacognition about where a non-adversarial communication breakdown could have occurred, or what the charitable interpretations of this are.
(I am open to people considering them then dismissing them, but I’m not even seeing that. Like, if people were saying “I understand the difference between Anthropic actually making an organizational commitment, and just offhand mentioning a fact about their motivations, but here’s why I’m disappointed anyway”, that seems reasonable. But a lot of people seem to be treating it as a Very Serious Promise being broken.)
I guess the followup question is “how were Anthropic able to cultivate the impression that they were safety focused if they had only made an extremely loose offhand commitment?”
Certainly the impression I had from how integrated they are in the EA community was that they had made a more serious commitment.
Everyone is afraid of the AI race, and hopes that one of the labs will actually end up doing what they think is the most responsible thing to do. Hope and fear is one hell of a drug cocktail, makes you jump to the conclusions you want based on the flimsiest evidence. But the hangover is a bastard.
Imo I don’t know if we have evidence that Anthropic deliberately cultivated or significantly benefitted from the appearance of a commitment. However if an investor or employee felt like they made substantial commitments based on this impression and then later felt betrayed that would be more serious. (The story here is I think importantly different from other stories where I think there were substantial benefits from commitment appearance and then violation)
The intended implication is something like “rationalists have a bias towards treating statements as much firmer commitments than intended then getting very upset when they are violated”.
That sounds suspiciously similar to “autists have a bias towards interpreting statements literally”.
I think part of the disappointment is the lack of communication regarding violating the commitment or violating the expectations of a non-trivial fraction of the community.
If someone makes a promise to you or even sets an expectation for you in a softer way, there is of course always some chance that they will break the promise or violate the expectation.
But if they violate the commitment or the expectation, and they care about you as a stakeholder, I think there’s a reasonable expectation that they should have to justify that decision.
If they break the promise or violate the soft expectation, and then they say basically nothing (or they say “well I never technically made a promise– there was no contract!”, then I think you have the right to be upset with them not only for violating you expectation but also for essentially trying to gaslight you afterward.
I think a Responsible Lab would have issued some sort of statement along the lines of “hey, we’re hearing that some folks thought we had made commitments to not advance the frontier and some of our employees were saying this to safety-focused members of the AI community. We’re sorry about this miscommunication, and here are some steps we’ll take to avoid such miscommunications in the future.” or “We did in fact intend to follow-through on that, but here are some of the extreme events or external circumstances that caused us to change our mind.”
In the absence of such statement, it makes it seem like Anthropic does not really care about honoring its commitments/expectations or generally defending its reasoning on important safety-relevant issues. I find it reasonable that this disposition harms Anthropic’s reputation among safety-conscious people and makes safety-conscious people less excited about voluntary commitments from labs in general.
See my comment below. Basically I think this depends a lot on the extent to which a commitment was made.
Right now it seems like the entire community is jumping to conclusions based on a couple of “impressions” people got from talking to Dario, plus an offhand line in a blog post. With that little evidence, if you have formed strong expectations, that’s on you. And trying to double down by saying “I have been bashing you because I formed an unreasonable expectation, now it’s your job to fix that” seems pretty adversarial.
I do think it would be nice if Anthropic did make such a statement, but seeing how adversarially everyone has treated the information they do release, I don’t blame them for not doing so.
Right now it seems like the entire community is jumping to conclusions based on a couple of “impressions” people got from talking to Dario, plus an offhand line in a blog post.
No, many people had the impression that Anthropic had made such a commitment, which is why they were so surprised when they saw the Claude 3 benchmarks/marketing. Their impressions were derived from a variety of sources; those are merely the few bits of “hard evidence”, gathered after the fact, of anything that could be thought of as an “organizational commitment”.
Also, if Dustin Moskovitz and Gwern—two dispositionally pretty different people—both came away from talking to Dario with this understanding, I do not think that is something you just wave off. Failures of communication do happen. It’s pretty strange for this many people to pick up the same misunderstanding over the course of several years, from many different people (including Dario, but also others), in a way that’s beneficial to Anthropic, and then middle management starts telling you that maybe there was a vibe but they’ve never heard of any such commitment (nevermind what Dustin and Gwern heard, or anyone else who might’ve heard similar from other Anthropic employees).
I do think it would be nice if Anthropic did make such a statement, but seeing how adversarially everyone has treated the information they do release, I don’t blame them for not doing so.
I really think this is assuming the conclusion. I would be… maybe not happy, but definitely much less unhappy, with a response like, “Dang, we definitely did not intend to communicate a binding commitment to not release frontier models that are better than anything else publicly available at the time. In the future, you should not assume that any verbal communication from any employee, including the CEO, is ever a binding commitment that Anthropic, as an organzation, will respect, even if they say the words This is a binding commitment. It needs to be in writing on our website, etc, etc.”
Right now it seems like the entire community is jumping to conclusions based on a couple of “impressions” people got from talking to Dario, plus an offhand line in a blog post. With that little evidence, if you have formed strong expectations, that’s on you.
Like Robert, the impressions I had were based on what I heard from people working at Anthropic. I cited various bits of evidence because those were the ones available, not because they were the most representative. The most representative were those from Anthropic employees who concurred that this was indeed the implication, but it seemed bad form to cite particular employees (especially when that information was not public by default) rather than, e.g., Dario. I think Dustin’s statement was strong evidence of this impression, though, and I still believe Anthropic to have at least insinuated it.
I agree with you that most people are not aiming for as much stringency with their commitments as rationalists expect. Separately, I do think that what Anthropic did would constitute a betrayal, even in everyday culture. And in any case, I think that when you are making a technology which might extinct humanity, the bar should be significantly higher than “normal discourse.” When you are doing something with that much potential for harm, you owe it to society to make firm commitments that you stick to. Otherwise, as kave noted, how are we supposed to trust your other “commitments”? Your RSP? If all you can offer are vague “we’ll figure it out when we get there,” then any ambiguous statement should be interpreted as a vibe, rather than a real plan. And in the absence of unambiguous statements, as all the labs have failed to provide, this is looking very much like “trust us, we’ll do the right thing.” Which, to my mind, is nowhere close to the assurances society ought to be provided given the stakes.
I do think it would be nice if Anthropic did make such a statement, but seeing how adversarially everyone has treated the information they do release, I don’t blame them for not doing so.
This reasoning seems to imply that Anthropic should only be obliged to convey information when the environment is sufficiently welcoming to them. But Anthropic is creating a technology which might extinct humanity—they have an obligation to share their reasoning regardless of what society thinks. In fact, if people are upset by their actions, there is more reason, not less, to set the record straight. Public scrutiny of companies, especially when their choices affect everyone, is a sign of healthy discourse.
The implicit bid for people not to discourage them—because that would make it less likely for a company to be forthright—seems incredibly backwards, because then the public is unable to mention when they feel Anthropic has made a mistake. And if Anthropic is attempting to serve the public, which they at least pay lip service to through their corporate structure, then they should be grateful for this feedback, and attempt to incorporate it.
So I do blame them for not making such a statement—it is on them to show to humanity, the people they are making decisions for, why those decisions are justified. It is not on society to make the political situation sufficiently palatable such that they don’t face any consequences for the mistakes they have made. It is on them not to make those mistakes, and to own up to them when they do.
The most representative were those from Anthropic employees who concurred that this was indeed the implication, but it seemed bad form to cite particular employees (especially when that information was not public by default) rather than, e.g., Dario. I think Dustin’s statement was strong evidence of this impression, though, and I still believe Anthropic to have at least insinuated it.
This makes sense, and does update me. Though I note “implication”, “insinuation” and “impression” are still pretty weak compared to “actually made a commitment”, and still consistent with the main driver being wishful thinking on the part of the AI safety community (including some members of the AI safety community who work at Anthropic).
I think that when you are making a technology which might extinct humanity, the bar should be significantly higher than “normal discourse.” When you are doing something with that much potential for harm, you owe it to society to make firm commitments that you stick to.
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So I do blame them for not making such a statement—it is on them to show to humanity, the people they are making decisions for, why those decisions are justified. It is not on society to make the political situation sufficiently palatable such that they don’t face any consequences for the mistakes they have made. It is on them not to make those mistakes, and to own up to them when they do.
I think there are two implicit things going on here that I’m wary of. The first one is an action-inaction distinction. Pushing them to justify their actions is, in effect, a way of slowing down all their actions. But presumably Anthropic thinks that them not doing things is also something which could lead to humanity going extinct. Therefore there’s an exactly analogous argument they might make, which is something like “when you try to stop us from doing things you owe it to the world to adhere to a bar that’s much higher than ‘normal discourse’”. And in fact criticism of Anthropic has not met this bar—e.g. I think taking a line from a blog post out of context and making a critical song about it is in fact unusually bad discourse.
What’s the disanalogy between you and Anthropic telling each other to have higher standards? That’s the second thing that I’m wary about: you’re claiming to speak on behalf of humanity as a whole. But in fact, you are not; there’s no meaningful sense in which humanity is in fact demanding a certain type of explanation from Anthropic. Almost nobody wants an explanation of this particular policy; in fact, the largest group of engaged stakeholders here are probably Anthropic customers, who mostly just want them to ship more models.
I don’t really have a strong overall take. I certainly think it’s reasonable to try to figure out what went wrong with communication here, and perhaps people poking around and asking questions would in fact lead to evidence of clear commitments being made. I am mostly against the reflexive attacks based on weak evidence, which seems like what’s happening here. In general my model of trust breakdowns involves each side getting many shallow papercuts from the other side until they decide to disengage, and my model of productive criticism involves more specificity and clarity.
if Anthropic is attempting to serve the public, which they at least pay lip service to through their corporate structure, then they should be grateful for this feedback, and attempt to incorporate it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this move on an interpersonal level, but it is exactly the type of move that tends to backfire hard. And in fact a lot of these things are fundamentally interpersonal things, about who trusts whom, etc.
I think the right way to think about verbal or written commitments is that they increase the costs of taking a certain course of action. A legal contract can mean that the price is civil lawsuits leading to paying a financial price. A non-legal commitment means if you break it, the person you made the commitment to gets angry at you, and you gain a reputation for being the sort of person who breaks commitments. It’s always an option for someone to break the commitment and pay the price, even laws leading to criminal penalties can be broken if someone is willing to run the risk or pay the price.
In this framework, it’s reasonable to be somewhat angry at someone or some corporation who breaks a soft commitment to you, in order to increase the perceived cost of breaking soft commitments to you and people like you.
People on average maybe tend more towards keeping important commitments due to reputational and relationship cost, but maybe corporations as groups of people tend to think only in terms of financial and legal costs, so are maybe more willing to break soft commitments (especially, if it’s an organization where one person makes the commitment but then other people break it). So for relating to corporations, you should be more skeptical of non-legally binding commitments (and even for legally binding commitments, pay attention to the real price of breaking it).
Yeah, I think it’s good if labs are willing to make more “cheap talk” statements of vague intentions, so you can learn how they think. Everyone should understand that these aren’t real commitments, and not get annoyed if these don’t end up meaning anything. This is probably the best way to view “statements by random lab employees”.
Imo would be good to have more “changeable commitments” too in between, statements that are “we’ll do policy X until we change the policy, when we do we commit to clearly informing everyone about the change” which is maybe more the current status of most RSPs.
Inspired by a recent discussion about whether Anthropic broke a commitment to not push the capabilities frontier (I am more sympathetic to their position than most, because I think that it’s often hard to distinguish between “current intentions” and “commitments which might be overridden by extreme events” and “solemn vows”):
Maybe one translation tool for bridging the gap between rationalists and non-rationalists is if rationalists interpret any claims about the future by non-rationalists as implicitly being preceded by “Look, I don’t really believe that plans work, I think the world is inherently wildly unpredictable, I am kinda making everything up as I go along. Having said that:”
This translation tool would also require rationalists and such to make arguments of the form “I think supporting Anthropic (by, e.g., going to work there or giving it funding) is a good thing to do because they sort of have a feeling right now that it would be good not to push the AI frontier”, rather than of the form ”… because they’re committed to not pushing the frontier”.
Which are arguments one could make! But is a pretty different argument and I think people would behave differently if these were the only arguments in favour of supporting a new scaling lab.
I think that’s how people should generally react in the absence of harder commitments and accountability measures.
This post confuses me.
Am I correct that the implied implication here is that assurances from a non-rationalist are essentially worthless?
I think it is also wrong to imply that Anthropic have violated their commitment simply because they didn’t rationally think through the implications of their commitment when they made it.
I think you can understand Anthropic’s actions as purely rational, just not very ethical.
They made an unenforceable commitment to not push capabilities when it directly benefited them. Now that it is more beneficial to drop the facade, they are doing so.
I think “don’t trust assurances from non-rationalists” is not a good takeaway. Rather it should be “don’t trust unenforceable assurances from people who will stand to greatly benefit from violating your trust at a later date”.
The intended implication is something like “rationalists have a bias towards treating statements as much firmer commitments than intended then getting very upset when they are violated”.
For example, unless I’m missing something, the “we do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities” claim is just one offhand line in a blog post. It’s not a firm commitment, it’s not even a claim about what their intentions are. As stated, it’s just one consideration that informs their actions—and in fact the “wish” terminology is often specifically not a claim about intended actions (e.g. “I wish I didn’t have to do X”).
Yet rationalists are hammering them on this one sentence—literally making songs about it, tweeting it to criticize Anthropic, etc. It seems like there is a serious lack of metacognition about where a non-adversarial communication breakdown could have occurred, or what the charitable interpretations of this are.
(I am open to people considering them then dismissing them, but I’m not even seeing that. Like, if people were saying “I understand the difference between Anthropic actually making an organizational commitment, and just offhand mentioning a fact about their motivations, but here’s why I’m disappointed anyway”, that seems reasonable. But a lot of people seem to be treating it as a Very Serious Promise being broken.)
That makes sense.
I guess the followup question is “how were Anthropic able to cultivate the impression that they were safety focused if they had only made an extremely loose offhand commitment?”
Certainly the impression I had from how integrated they are in the EA community was that they had made a more serious commitment.
Everyone is afraid of the AI race, and hopes that one of the labs will actually end up doing what they think is the most responsible thing to do. Hope and fear is one hell of a drug cocktail, makes you jump to the conclusions you want based on the flimsiest evidence. But the hangover is a bastard.
Imo I don’t know if we have evidence that Anthropic deliberately cultivated or significantly benefitted from the appearance of a commitment. However if an investor or employee felt like they made substantial commitments based on this impression and then later felt betrayed that would be more serious. (The story here is I think importantly different from other stories where I think there were substantial benefits from commitment appearance and then violation)
That sounds suspiciously similar to “autists have a bias towards interpreting statements literally”.
I mean, yes, they’re closely related.
I think part of the disappointment is the lack of communication regarding violating the commitment or violating the expectations of a non-trivial fraction of the community.
If someone makes a promise to you or even sets an expectation for you in a softer way, there is of course always some chance that they will break the promise or violate the expectation.
But if they violate the commitment or the expectation, and they care about you as a stakeholder, I think there’s a reasonable expectation that they should have to justify that decision.
If they break the promise or violate the soft expectation, and then they say basically nothing (or they say “well I never technically made a promise– there was no contract!”, then I think you have the right to be upset with them not only for violating you expectation but also for essentially trying to gaslight you afterward.
I think a Responsible Lab would have issued some sort of statement along the lines of “hey, we’re hearing that some folks thought we had made commitments to not advance the frontier and some of our employees were saying this to safety-focused members of the AI community. We’re sorry about this miscommunication, and here are some steps we’ll take to avoid such miscommunications in the future.” or “We did in fact intend to follow-through on that, but here are some of the extreme events or external circumstances that caused us to change our mind.”
In the absence of such statement, it makes it seem like Anthropic does not really care about honoring its commitments/expectations or generally defending its reasoning on important safety-relevant issues. I find it reasonable that this disposition harms Anthropic’s reputation among safety-conscious people and makes safety-conscious people less excited about voluntary commitments from labs in general.
See my comment below. Basically I think this depends a lot on the extent to which a commitment was made.
Right now it seems like the entire community is jumping to conclusions based on a couple of “impressions” people got from talking to Dario, plus an offhand line in a blog post. With that little evidence, if you have formed strong expectations, that’s on you. And trying to double down by saying “I have been bashing you because I formed an unreasonable expectation, now it’s your job to fix that” seems pretty adversarial.
I do think it would be nice if Anthropic did make such a statement, but seeing how adversarially everyone has treated the information they do release, I don’t blame them for not doing so.
No, many people had the impression that Anthropic had made such a commitment, which is why they were so surprised when they saw the Claude 3 benchmarks/marketing. Their impressions were derived from a variety of sources; those are merely the few bits of “hard evidence”, gathered after the fact, of anything that could be thought of as an “organizational commitment”.
Also, if Dustin Moskovitz and Gwern—two dispositionally pretty different people—both came away from talking to Dario with this understanding, I do not think that is something you just wave off. Failures of communication do happen. It’s pretty strange for this many people to pick up the same misunderstanding over the course of several years, from many different people (including Dario, but also others), in a way that’s beneficial to Anthropic, and then middle management starts telling you that maybe there was a vibe but they’ve never heard of any such commitment (nevermind what Dustin and Gwern heard, or anyone else who might’ve heard similar from other Anthropic employees).
I really think this is assuming the conclusion. I would be… maybe not happy, but definitely much less unhappy, with a response like, “Dang, we definitely did not intend to communicate a binding commitment to not release frontier models that are better than anything else publicly available at the time. In the future, you should not assume that any verbal communication from any employee, including the CEO, is ever a binding commitment that Anthropic, as an organzation, will respect, even if they say the words
This is a binding commitment. It needs to be in writing on our website, etc, etc.”Could you clarify how binding “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” is?
Like Robert, the impressions I had were based on what I heard from people working at Anthropic. I cited various bits of evidence because those were the ones available, not because they were the most representative. The most representative were those from Anthropic employees who concurred that this was indeed the implication, but it seemed bad form to cite particular employees (especially when that information was not public by default) rather than, e.g., Dario. I think Dustin’s statement was strong evidence of this impression, though, and I still believe Anthropic to have at least insinuated it.
I agree with you that most people are not aiming for as much stringency with their commitments as rationalists expect. Separately, I do think that what Anthropic did would constitute a betrayal, even in everyday culture. And in any case, I think that when you are making a technology which might extinct humanity, the bar should be significantly higher than “normal discourse.” When you are doing something with that much potential for harm, you owe it to society to make firm commitments that you stick to. Otherwise, as kave noted, how are we supposed to trust your other “commitments”? Your RSP? If all you can offer are vague “we’ll figure it out when we get there,” then any ambiguous statement should be interpreted as a vibe, rather than a real plan. And in the absence of unambiguous statements, as all the labs have failed to provide, this is looking very much like “trust us, we’ll do the right thing.” Which, to my mind, is nowhere close to the assurances society ought to be provided given the stakes.
This reasoning seems to imply that Anthropic should only be obliged to convey information when the environment is sufficiently welcoming to them. But Anthropic is creating a technology which might extinct humanity—they have an obligation to share their reasoning regardless of what society thinks. In fact, if people are upset by their actions, there is more reason, not less, to set the record straight. Public scrutiny of companies, especially when their choices affect everyone, is a sign of healthy discourse.
The implicit bid for people not to discourage them—because that would make it less likely for a company to be forthright—seems incredibly backwards, because then the public is unable to mention when they feel Anthropic has made a mistake. And if Anthropic is attempting to serve the public, which they at least pay lip service to through their corporate structure, then they should be grateful for this feedback, and attempt to incorporate it.
So I do blame them for not making such a statement—it is on them to show to humanity, the people they are making decisions for, why those decisions are justified. It is not on society to make the political situation sufficiently palatable such that they don’t face any consequences for the mistakes they have made. It is on them not to make those mistakes, and to own up to them when they do.
This makes sense, and does update me. Though I note “implication”, “insinuation” and “impression” are still pretty weak compared to “actually made a commitment”, and still consistent with the main driver being wishful thinking on the part of the AI safety community (including some members of the AI safety community who work at Anthropic).
I think there are two implicit things going on here that I’m wary of. The first one is an action-inaction distinction. Pushing them to justify their actions is, in effect, a way of slowing down all their actions. But presumably Anthropic thinks that them not doing things is also something which could lead to humanity going extinct. Therefore there’s an exactly analogous argument they might make, which is something like “when you try to stop us from doing things you owe it to the world to adhere to a bar that’s much higher than ‘normal discourse’”. And in fact criticism of Anthropic has not met this bar—e.g. I think taking a line from a blog post out of context and making a critical song about it is in fact unusually bad discourse.
What’s the disanalogy between you and Anthropic telling each other to have higher standards? That’s the second thing that I’m wary about: you’re claiming to speak on behalf of humanity as a whole. But in fact, you are not; there’s no meaningful sense in which humanity is in fact demanding a certain type of explanation from Anthropic. Almost nobody wants an explanation of this particular policy; in fact, the largest group of engaged stakeholders here are probably Anthropic customers, who mostly just want them to ship more models.
I don’t really have a strong overall take. I certainly think it’s reasonable to try to figure out what went wrong with communication here, and perhaps people poking around and asking questions would in fact lead to evidence of clear commitments being made. I am mostly against the reflexive attacks based on weak evidence, which seems like what’s happening here. In general my model of trust breakdowns involves each side getting many shallow papercuts from the other side until they decide to disengage, and my model of productive criticism involves more specificity and clarity.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this move on an interpersonal level, but it is exactly the type of move that tends to backfire hard. And in fact a lot of these things are fundamentally interpersonal things, about who trusts whom, etc.
I think the right way to think about verbal or written commitments is that they increase the costs of taking a certain course of action. A legal contract can mean that the price is civil lawsuits leading to paying a financial price. A non-legal commitment means if you break it, the person you made the commitment to gets angry at you, and you gain a reputation for being the sort of person who breaks commitments. It’s always an option for someone to break the commitment and pay the price, even laws leading to criminal penalties can be broken if someone is willing to run the risk or pay the price.
In this framework, it’s reasonable to be somewhat angry at someone or some corporation who breaks a soft commitment to you, in order to increase the perceived cost of breaking soft commitments to you and people like you.
People on average maybe tend more towards keeping important commitments due to reputational and relationship cost, but maybe corporations as groups of people tend to think only in terms of financial and legal costs, so are maybe more willing to break soft commitments (especially, if it’s an organization where one person makes the commitment but then other people break it). So for relating to corporations, you should be more skeptical of non-legally binding commitments (and even for legally binding commitments, pay attention to the real price of breaking it).
Yeah, I think it’s good if labs are willing to make more “cheap talk” statements of vague intentions, so you can learn how they think. Everyone should understand that these aren’t real commitments, and not get annoyed if these don’t end up meaning anything. This is probably the best way to view “statements by random lab employees”.
Imo would be good to have more “changeable commitments” too in between, statements that are “we’ll do policy X until we change the policy, when we do we commit to clearly informing everyone about the change” which is maybe more the current status of most RSPs.