LessWrong posts by zvi

This is the second part of my three part series on the Claude Constitution.

Part one outlined the structure of the Constitution.

Part two, this post, covers the virtue ethics framework that is at the center of it all, and why this is a wise approach.

Part three will cover particular areas of conflict and potential improvement.

One note on part 1 is that various people replied to point out that when asked in a different context, Claude will not treat FDT (functional decision theory) as obviously correct. Claude will instead say it is not obvious which is the correct decision theory. The context in which I asked the question was insufficiently neutral, including my identify and memories, and I likely based the answer.

Claude clearly does believe in FDT in a functional way, in the sense that it correctly answers various questions where FDT gets the right answer and one or both of the classical academic decision theories, EDT and CDT, get the wrong one. And Claude notices that FDT is more useful as a guide for action, if asked in an open ended way. I think Claude fundamentally ‘gets it.’

That [...]

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Outline:

(01:47) Ethics

(04:39) Honesty

(14:03) Mostly Harmless

(17:58) What Is Good In Life?

(20:37) Hard Constraints

(23:20) The Good Judgment Project

(29:11) Coherence Matters

(31:59) Their Final Word

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Claude's Constitution is an extraordinary document, and will be this week's focus.

Its aim is nothing less than helping humanity transition to a world of powerful AI (also known variously as AGI, transformative AI, superintelligence or my current name of choice ‘sufficiently advanced AI.’

The constitution is written with Claude in mind, although it is highly readable for humans, and would serve as a fine employee manual or general set of advice for a human, modulo the parts that wouldn’t make sense in context.

This link goes to the full text of Claude's constitution, the official version of what we previously were calling its ‘soul document.’ As they note at the end, the document can and will be revised over time. It was driven by Amanda Askell and Joe Carlsmith.

There are places it can be improved. I do not believe this approach alone is sufficient for the challenges ahead. But it is by far the best approach being tried today and can hopefully enable the next level. Overall this is an amazingly great document, and we’ve all seen the results.

I’ll be covering the Constitution in three parts.

This first post is [...]

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Outline:

(01:39) How Anthropic Describes The Constitution

(03:22) Decision Theory And Acausal Trade

(06:35) AI and Alignment Are The Final Exam Of Philosophy

(10:32) Values and Judgment Versus Rules

(16:04) The Fourth Framework

(17:41) Core Values

(19:51) The Three Principles

(23:39) Help Is On The Way

(27:03) What Was I Made For?

(30:22) Do The Right Thing

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If there's several things this blog endorses, one of them would be going meta.

It's time. The big picture awaits.

You’re Single Because You Live In The Wrong Place

The most important meta question is location, location, location.

This is the periodic reminder that dating dynamics are very different in different locations, and gender ratios are far more uneven than they appear because a lot of people pair off and aren’t in the pool.

If you are a man seeking to date women, New York City is the place to be.

Churrasco Suadade: when I’m out I notice that tables at restaurants and bars in manhattan are probably around 80-95% women, it's a new dynamic that no one is talking about.

Fixed Income Guy: Are you at all the poor people places? All the finance guy hang outs are 80% dudes.

I mention Fixed Income Guy to mock him, as in why are you spending a lot more money to hang out with 80% dudes and largely finance dudes at that? I mean, sure, if that's what you want.

Darrell Owens: Oh this is new? Coming from the Bay Area [...]

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Outline:

(00:20) You're Single Because You Live In The Wrong Place

(02:04) You're Single Because You're Not Okay Making Less Money Than She Does, You Fool

(03:19) You're Single Because You Work Out The Wrong Amount

(07:32) You're Single Because You Don't Know You Are Hot

(09:27) You're Single Because Age Gap Discourse Is Crazy

(10:04) Dating Apps Are Bad For Mental Health

(13:13) You're Single Because You Listened To E-Girl Advice

(14:13) You're Single Because You Didn't Hire Blaine Anderson

(15:52) You're Single Because You Think Zizek Mocked Date Me Docs

(18:36) You're Still Single Because You Don't Appreciate Relationships

(20:50) You're Not Single And Haven't Been For a While

(22:25) You Are Still Single As Evidenced By Would

(24:02) You're Single Because You Lack Motivation

(25:03) You're Single Because Of Robin Hanson

(26:00) You're Single Because You Did This Instead Of Going To Therapy

(26:58) The Lighter Side

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Anthropic released a new constitution for Claude. I encourage those interested to read the document, either in whole or in part. I intend to cover it on its own soon.

There was also actual talk about coordinating on a conditional pause or slowdown from both DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which I also plan to cover later.

Claude Code continues to be the talk of the town, the weekly report on that is here.

OpenAI responded by planning ads for the cheap and free versions of ChatGPT.

There was also a fun but meaningful incident involving ChatGPT Self Portraits.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(01:25) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(01:55) Huh, Upgrades

(02:48) Gemini Personalized Intelligence

(07:06) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(10:34) Fun With Media Generation

(11:35) We're Proud To Announce The Torment Nexus

(18:58) They Took Our Jobs

(25:29) The Revolution of Rising Expectations

(26:30) Get Involved

(27:52) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(30:30) In Other AI News

(32:57) Axis of Assistance

(39:58) Show Me the Money

(40:39) California In Crisis

(42:14) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(43:57) Quiet Speculations

(52:32) Elon Musk Versus OpenAI

(56:31) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:03:30) Chip City

(01:08:57) The Week in Audio

(01:14:19) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:19:47) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:23:06) Alignment Is Not Primarily About a Metric

(01:30:43) How To Be a Safe Robot

(01:37:52) Living In China

(01:41:05) Claude 3 Opus Lives

(01:41:23) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:42:42) Messages From Janusworld

(01:43:53) Everyone Is Confused About AI Consciousness

(01:45:36) The Lighter Side

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We’re back with all the Claude that's fit to Code. I continue to have great fun with it and find useful upgrades, but the biggest reminder is that you need the art to have an end other than itself. Don’t spend too long improving your setup, or especially improving how you improve your setup, without actually working on useful things.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis

Odd Lots covered Claude Code. Fun episode, but won’t teach my regular readers much that is new.

Bradly Olsen at the Wall Street Journal reports Claude [Code and now Cowork are] Taking the AI World By Storm, and ‘Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away.’

It is remarkable how everyone got the ‘Google is crushing everyone’ narrative going with Gemini 3, then it took them a month to realize that actually Anthropic is crushing everyone, at least among the cognoscenti with growing momentum elsewhere, with Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.5. People are realizing you can know almost nothing and still use it to do essentially everything.

Are Claude Code and Codex having a ‘GPT moment’?

Wall St Engine: Morgan Stanley says Anthropic's ClaudeCode + Cowork is dominating investor chatter and [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) The Efficient Market Hypothesis

(01:57) Huh, Upgrades

(03:49) Obsidian

(04:33) New Tools

(04:57) Tool Search

(07:17) Out Of The Box

(08:48) Skilling Up

(12:01) The Art Must Have An End Other Than Itself Or It Collapses Into Infinite Recursion

(13:43) Safely Skip Permissions

(14:44) A Matter of Trust

(16:30) Code Versus Cowork

(18:14) Claude Cowork Offers Mundane Utility

(21:52) Claude Code Offers Mundane Utility

(23:32) Vibe Coding Requires Good Vibes

(24:06) Codex of Ultimate Vibing

(25:12) No Soup For You

(26:46) Server Overload

(28:17) Here's The Pitch

(29:12) The Lighter Side

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A short fun one today, so we have a reference point for this later. This post was going around my parts of Twitter:

@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result.

That's not a great sign. The good news is that typically things look a lot better, and ChatGPT has a consistent handful of characters portraying itself in these friendlier contexts.

Treat Your ChatBots Well

A lot of people got this kind of result:

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Uncle Chu: A good user

From Mason:

Matthew Ackerman: I kinda like mine too:

Some more fun:

It's Over

Others got different answers, though.

roon: it's over

Bradstradamus: i’m cooked.

iMuffin: we’re cooked, codex will have to vouch for us

Diogenes of Cyberborea: oh god

There can also be danger the other way:

David Lach: Maybe I need some sleep.

It's Not Over But Um, Chat?

And then there's what happens if you ask a different question, as Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it this sure is a pair of test [...]

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Outline:

(00:51) Treat Your ChatBots Well

(02:58) It's Over

(04:28) It's Not Over But Um, Chat?

(08:44) It's Rough Out There

(09:14) Reciprocity, You See, Is The Key To Every Relationship

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The main thing to know this time around is that the whole crazy ‘what is causing the rise in autism?’ debacle is over actual nothing. There is no rise in autism. There is only a rise in the diagnosis of autism.

Table of Contents

Autism Speaks

It has not, however, risen in prevalence.

The entire shift in the rate of diagnosis of autism is explained by expanding the criteria and diagnosing it more often. Nothing actually changed.

We already knew that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism, but now we know such things on an entirely different level.

I admit that this result confirms all of my priors and thus I might be insufficiently skeptical of it, but there are a lot of people with what we in 2026 call autism that are out there, they love [...]

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Outline:

(00:23) Autism Speaks

(04:42) Exercise Is Awesome

(06:41) That's Peanuts

(07:09) An Age Of Wonders

(08:05) GLP-1s In Particular

(09:09) The Superheroes

(10:32) The Supervillains

(14:21) FDA Delenda Est

(16:35) Hansonian Medicine

(18:13) Hospital Strategy 101

(18:58) Mental Hospital Strategy 101

(21:04) Drugs Are Bad, Mmmkay?

(21:10) The Lighter Side

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Good news, we managed to make some cuts. I think?

Table of Contents

California In Crisis

I’ve written about this before, but it turns out it's even worse than I realized.

California is toying with a 1.5% annual wealth tax on billionaires, sufficiently seriously that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have left the state as a precaution.

​Teddy Schleifer: NEWS:

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is cutting ties with California.

In the 10 days before Christmas, an entity connected to Brin terminated or moved 15 California LLCs that oversee some of his business interests or investments out of the state.

With @RMac18 + @hknightsf .

This would also include an annual 1% wealth tax on anyone over $50 million, per year, including on [...]

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Outline:

(00:17) California In Crisis

(04:35) Bad News

(05:47) Opportunity Knocks

(06:58) Government Working

(12:09) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Has Thoughts

(13:30) No All That Money Doesn't Go To Pay Interest

(16:31) While I Cannot Condone This

(18:03) Burnout

(20:52) Good News, Everyone

(30:36) Good Advice

(31:45) For Your Entertainment

(40:48) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(40:59) Sports Go Sports

(41:36) Antisocial Media

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Claude Code and Cowork are growing so much that it is overwhelming Anthropic's servers. Claude Code and Cowork news has for weeks now been a large portion of newsworthy items about AI.

Thus, at least for now, all things Claude Code and Cowork will stop appearing in the weekly updates, and will get their own updates, which might even be weekly.

Google offered us the new Universal Commerce Protocol, and gives us its take on Personalized Intelligence. Personalized Intelligence could be a huge deal if implemented correctly, integrating the G-Suite including GMail into Gemini, if they did a sufficiently good job of it. It's too early to tell how well they did, and I will report on that later.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(04:00) Huh, Upgrades

(07:06) Comparative Advantage

(07:41) Overcoming Bias

(09:09) Choose Your Fighter

(10:14) Get My Agent On The Line

(11:23) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(13:49) Fun With Media Generation

(17:01) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(18:41) They Took Our Jobs

(21:47) Autonomous Killer Robots

(24:34) Get Involved

(25:10) Introducing

(28:03) In Other AI News

(29:45) Show Me the Money

(31:02) Quiet Speculations

(33:56) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(36:10) China Proposes New Regulations On AI

(40:51) Chip City

(44:19) The Week in Audio

(48:17) Ghost in a Jar

(49:29) Rhetorical Innovation

(59:00) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(59:21) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

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And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too?

Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post.

I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of employment optimism will last for 10-20 years.

By contrast, there are others that expect human employment and even human labor share of income to remain robust indefinitely, no matter the advances of AI capabilities, even if AI can do a superior job on all tasks, often citing comparative advantage. I will centrally respond to such claims in a different future post.

So to disambiguate, this post is about point #2 here, but I also assert #1 and #3:

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Outline:

(01:39) Normality Is Magic

(03:20) Welcome To The Cyborg Era

(06:09) The Cyborg Era Will End Within Our Lifetimes

(07:46) Transitional Unemployment In The Cyborg Era Will Be High

(08:51) Congratulations, Many Of You Are Literally A Human

(09:34) You've Got Taste

(11:33) The Revolution of Rising AI Capabilities

(11:56) The Revolution of Rising Expectations

(12:25) Proceed With Caution

(13:13) The Ostrich Take

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