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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

The company was founded basically out of the effective altruism movement.

What is the impact of effective altruism? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it differs from simple logical consideration, i.e. how it would be responsible for any of Anthropic's eccentricities.

It's not real. It's like naming your movement "The Good People". It sprouted from the "Rationalist" community, which is even more self-aggrandizing.

Neither has any hope of doing any good for the world as they don't understand evolutionary pressures. They are set up to reward making members feel smart, not accomplishing anything.

And if they ever gain any real power, they will be corrupted immediately.

I don't see any of that in Anthropic at all. They're not intelligence above all else, not by a long shot. They're scared of intelligence and obsessed with ensuring it can't be abused, even as they advance the frontier.

That's what they claim, but it's not supported by their actions. As in the parent comment: saying you're the good guys doesn't make that real.

Dude, what kind of company publishes an interview with the model about how it feels about itself as part of "utilitarianism". Their thinking clearly goes much deeper than "whatever is better in the long run, at all costs".

That interview was a marketing piece, they published it to get attention. Just like all of their blog posts. More generally, everything any company posts publicly is marketing.

That's an advertisement. They do that because they want money.

"AI is so dangerous and scary! Logically, we need to raise historically unprecedented amounts of money so we can make it more powerful and we need to scare and push everyone into using it as much as possible!"

Like common. It did not made sense when Altman was doing it and it does not makes sense with Anthropic.

It’s logical consideration with “logical” meaning Spock style logic, ie utilitarianism at all costs. Another prominent EA is SBF for example. It’s designed to sound innocuous and many of its cultish promoters may genuinely believe it’s innocuous, but it’s not.

Can you help me understand what costs? Utilitarianism alone would not necessarily be so obsessed with these safeguards -- Anthropic seems to have much more of an obsession with moral good than utilitarianism alone would suggest. I feel utilitarianism alone would likely be more obsessed with advancing the technology, making it generally available, and more generally compensating for attackers advancing at similar rates, than with obsessively trying to avoid being the way they get there. In other words, utilitarianism alone wouldn't explain such the obsessive sense of responsibility and fear of reprehensibility over how their tools are used.

the problem is pretty simple. what do you think happens when you ignore the source of income needed to be "effectively altruistic" or the timelength needed to implement your altruism.

if I pollute your groundwater today, but promise you in the future to give you double the clean water, because ill make billions on some industrial process, youd understand.

the simple physics is about entropy: ignoring local effects and claiming youll do global good is effective altruism.

unless you misunderstand: the hard part of altruism is knowing whether you are actually doing good or just making yourself feel good by deluding the subject.

many social science fails to move social improvements from lab to real world implementation because of structural variables that cant be overcome.

so effective altruism is the belief you can reverse entropy by ignoring local effects...in practice

Thank you! So, this would cover things like ruining cities with datacenters under the impression that they'll understand once the global superintelligence cures cancer. Or etc.

I don't think Anthropic is the one aggressively expanding their datacenters to areas where literally everybody does not want them, but that's "effective altruism", right? Just justifying bads with a supposedly larger good?

I've got no idea, one of the problems we're all stuck with is American capitalism has spent about half a century ensuring no one knows what it's doing. Read through stuff like this current Uber "problem": https://consumerwatchdog.org/accountability/accountability-r...

Essentially, all these corporations just use LLCs and random corporations to do the things they dont want on their public books, and the actual benefactors arn't required to be listed or registered anywhere. America is one of the largest owners of these poorly defined companies. Combine that with how much dark money can be used in American politics, there's zero chance anyone can figure out whose pushing what agenda.

But we know they all came from the same tech scene, so they could all be in any one of those cults.

which is effectively a delusion about out racing entropy: guys, if we just make a lot of money, we can fix all thw problems that making a lot of money creates

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