Thanks for the responses, I have a better sense of how you’re thinking about these things.
I don’t feel much desire to dive into this further, except I want to clarify one thing, on the question of any demands in your comment.
I originally felt that either question I asked would be reasonably easy to answer, if time was given to evaluating the potential for harm.
However, given that Hubinger might have to run any reply by Anthropic staff, I understand that it might be negative to demand further work. This is pretty obvious, but didn’t occur to me earlier.
That actually wasn’t primarily the part that felt like a demand to me. This was the part:
How much time have you spent analyzing the positive or negative impact of US intelligence efforts prior to concluding that merely using Claude for intelligence “seemed fine”?
I’m not quite sure what the relevance of the time was if not to suggest it needed to be high. I felt that this line implied something like “If your answer is around ’20 hours’, then I want to say that the correct standard should be ‘200 hours’”. I felt like it was a demand that Hubinger may have to spend 10x the time thinking about this question before he met your standards for being allowed to express his opinion on it.
But perhaps you just meant you wanted him to include an epistemic status, like “Epistemic status: <Here’s how much time I’ve spent thinking about this question>”.
Thanks for the responses, I have a better sense of how you’re thinking about these things.
I don’t feel much desire to dive into this further, except I want to clarify one thing, on the question of any demands in your comment.
That actually wasn’t primarily the part that felt like a demand to me. This was the part:
I’m not quite sure what the relevance of the time was if not to suggest it needed to be high. I felt that this line implied something like “If your answer is around ’20 hours’, then I want to say that the correct standard should be ‘200 hours’”. I felt like it was a demand that Hubinger may have to spend 10x the time thinking about this question before he met your standards for being allowed to express his opinion on it.
But perhaps you just meant you wanted him to include an epistemic status, like “Epistemic status: <Here’s how much time I’ve spent thinking about this question>”.