I agree that treating corporations or governments or countries as single coherent individuals is a type error, since it’s important to be able to decompose them into factions and actors to build a good gears-level model that is predictive, and you can easily miss that. I strongly disagree that treating them as actors which can be trusted or distrusted is a type error. You seem to be making the second claim, and I don’t understand it; the company makes decisions, and you can either trust it to do what it says, or not—and this post says the latter is the better model for anthropic.
Of course, the fact that you can’t trust a given democracy to keep its promises doesn’t mean you can’t trust any of the individuals in it, and the fact that you can’t trust a given corporation doesn’t necessarily mean that about the individuals working for the company either. (It doesn’t even mean you can’t trust each of the individual people in charge—clearly, trust isn’t necessarily conserved over most forms of preference or decision aggregation.)
But as stated, the claims made seem reasonable, and in my view, the cited evidence shows it’s basically correct, about the company as an entity and its trustworthiness.
I agree that treating corporations or governments or countries as single coherent individuals is a type error, since it’s important to be able to decompose them into factions and actors to build a good gears-level model that is predictive, and you can easily miss that. I strongly disagree that treating them as actors which can be trusted or distrusted is a type error. You seem to be making the second claim, and I don’t understand it; the company makes decisions, and you can either trust it to do what it says, or not—and this post says the latter is the better model for anthropic.
Of course, the fact that you can’t trust a given democracy to keep its promises doesn’t mean you can’t trust any of the individuals in it, and the fact that you can’t trust a given corporation doesn’t necessarily mean that about the individuals working for the company either. (It doesn’t even mean you can’t trust each of the individual people in charge—clearly, trust isn’t necessarily conserved over most forms of preference or decision aggregation.)
But as stated, the claims made seem reasonable, and in my view, the cited evidence shows it’s basically correct, about the company as an entity and its trustworthiness.
I don’t really disagree with anything you said here. (Edit to add: except that I don’t agree with the OP’s interpretation of all the evidence listed.)