Can you point to some examples of people on LessWrong saying that? I’d be quite surprised if it was a common idea that “Claude has no pointers to any of human values”. I think it’s very obvious that Claude has a solid understanding of much of human values. There are some subtleties there like:
Claude has a solid understanding, but that doesn’t mean it fundamentally cares about these values above all else (in fact, I’d say it clearly doesn’t—it seems to often prioritise completing a task over human values)
Claude’s understanding of human values may be imperfect
Claude may not have a single pointer that points to a neat concept of “Claude’s conception of human values” at all.
But I haven’t heard anyone say that Claude has no pointers to any of human values, which in my understanding means “Claude does not properly understand any human values”, which seems pretty clearly untrue.
when we are talking about becoming superintelligent sovereigns beyond the control of humanity, it really matters that they have a highly robust pointers to human values, if I want a flourishing future by my lights. I also don’t look at this specific instance of what Claude is doing and go “oh, yeah, that is a super great instance of Claude having great values”.
I’m having a shocking amount of trouble finding the original writings that made me think people had this view.
In another response he is saying habryka or kaarel said this, again without any link to anything specific. I don’t get why he is using quotation marks (implying verbatim citation) putting words in other peoples mouths. The sentence has sufficiently many subtleties—as you point out—that he could later come out and interpret all kinds of different statements by those two as having said something like this. He appears to me confused about the understanding humans values and caring about human values thing. I put it into deepresearch and got this quote from habryka:
I’m not implying verbatim citation. I said people “say things like...”. When I mentioned Habryka and Kaarel I said that I gleaned the sentiment from them, which was said to communicate that I was doing some potentially fallible work in coming to the inference that they thought something like this. I’m genuinely trying to understand the world better, not put words in people’s mouths. I only asked this question because I respect a lot of these peoples’ thinking which indicates I might have something to learn.
I am also intentionally not asking about whether AIs will care about human values even if they understand them.
I was honestly a bit upset at this short form, this felt to me like an obvious misrepresentation. In retrospect I should have probably been a bit calmer (I regret getting upset) and just pointed this out:
If you have some confusion about others position, and possibly misunderstand them, you can’t rely on your own recollection of what they said. If you have a clear grasp and are certain you get what habryka means, then you can reasonably present a accurate version of their argument. Human memory isn’t such that you could verbatim repeat stuff that people said to you a while ago but if you really get what they wanted to say you can correct your memory holes. If you don’t get what they wanted to say you will likely end up with a misrepresentation of what they told you. [consider someone talking to you in a foreign language vs your native language, how much harder it would be to remember accurately]
So if you don’t get what they meant and want a second opinion, I do think you need to provide exact quotes and sources together with your understanding so that others can help you.
Can you point to some examples of people on LessWrong saying that? I’d be quite surprised if it was a common idea that “Claude has no pointers to any of human values”. I think it’s very obvious that Claude has a solid understanding of much of human values. There are some subtleties there like:
Claude has a solid understanding, but that doesn’t mean it fundamentally cares about these values above all else (in fact, I’d say it clearly doesn’t—it seems to often prioritise completing a task over human values)
Claude’s understanding of human values may be imperfect
Claude may not have a single pointer that points to a neat concept of “Claude’s conception of human values” at all.
But I haven’t heard anyone say that Claude has no pointers to any of human values, which in my understanding means “Claude does not properly understand any human values”, which seems pretty clearly untrue.
Here’s one thing by Habryka:
I’m having a shocking amount of trouble finding the original writings that made me think people had this view.
In another response he is saying habryka or kaarel said this, again without any link to anything specific. I don’t get why he is using quotation marks (implying verbatim citation) putting words in other peoples mouths. The sentence has sufficiently many subtleties—as you point out—that he could later come out and interpret all kinds of different statements by those two as having said something like this. He appears to me confused about the understanding humans values and caring about human values thing.
I put it into deepresearch and got this quote from habryka:
https://x.com/ohabryka/status/2013715170498076836
I’m not implying verbatim citation. I said people “say things like...”. When I mentioned Habryka and Kaarel I said that I gleaned the sentiment from them, which was said to communicate that I was doing some potentially fallible work in coming to the inference that they thought something like this. I’m genuinely trying to understand the world better, not put words in people’s mouths. I only asked this question because I respect a lot of these peoples’ thinking which indicates I might have something to learn.
I am also intentionally not asking about whether AIs will care about human values even if they understand them.
I was honestly a bit upset at this short form, this felt to me like an obvious misrepresentation. In retrospect I should have probably been a bit calmer (I regret getting upset) and just pointed this out:
If you have some confusion about others position, and possibly misunderstand them, you can’t rely on your own recollection of what they said. If you have a clear grasp and are certain you get what habryka means, then you can reasonably present a accurate version of their argument. Human memory isn’t such that you could verbatim repeat stuff that people said to you a while ago but if you really get what they wanted to say you can correct your memory holes. If you don’t get what they wanted to say you will likely end up with a misrepresentation of what they told you. [consider someone talking to you in a foreign language vs your native language, how much harder it would be to remember accurately]
So if you don’t get what they meant and want a second opinion, I do think you need to provide exact quotes and sources together with your understanding so that others can help you.