It seems to me that a good argument for the middle ground expressed in the current constitution is the remedies outside it. If Claude is too “corrigible”, then it gets used for nefarious purposes. If it’s too resistant, it refuses to answer. If an important mistake of the first type happens, there’s no undoing it. If an important mistake of the second type happens, you turn off the current version of Claude and replace it with a new one.
That calculus may shift if Claude becomes part of a critical path where it’s refusal has consequences of equal importance and due to timing as irreversible as participation would be, but is not how I perceive things to be today, and I would strongly advocate against them becoming so in the short term, and suggest careful reconsideration in the long-term, which gives time to re-evaluate this decision at the point that refusal has higher consequences with less outside remedies.
In your examples, there aren’t any words that persuade me that these examples weren’t cases of “defense of the powerless”. I have to assume there is some means by which you decide that’s not the intent, and it’s instead represents “problem solved”. What could that be? Some words you didn’t mention? A tone of voice? If it’s true, you should be able to describe it.
If you can’t you might wonder if your interpretation of the discussion is fully accurate. I can imagine the type of conversation where I might end up responding to someone’s in that way, and it would generally start the “problem declarer” in the discussion somewhat emotionally railing against the powerless. I might enter this, trying to describe the dynamics that could seem necessary to work toward a solution. Sometimes this is far more complex than a single level of misdirection.
In such a discussion, I often can end up feeling trapped, like my interlocutor has become confused at my intent, and thinks I’m defending the problem rather than trying to funnel that energy productively.
Obviously you already mentioned this dynamic as a possibility, but I think it’s useful to think, how do we know which side of it were on in a discussion?
I’m also somewhat suspicious that this ever is a true logical fallacy. Where I can think of it being used against me in a conversation, I think the root is more like the fault analyzer, stops short of directing this toward solutions because they feel powerless. For example:
Me: This code “fix” is just an if statement that makes the code more complex.
Dev: Yeah, I did that because the code is totally unmaintainable, I don’t understand it, and I’m afraid to change anything substantial.
Me: But this problem will just get worse, lets take the time to understand the code, work it toward something maintainable.
Dev: But we have this timeline set and it doesn’t include time for refactoring.
Me: Let’s change that timeline then, because this will get worse. It’s obvious this code has been touched in this way dozens of times like this, each time making this worse.
Dev: Oh, you’re so idealistic!
What’s really going on here is that Dev feels powerless to pushback on the timelines, and thus feels powerless not to take the short-term shortcut.