Original substack post

Note: This post and experiment was done almost entirely by Claude, with very minor feedback from a human. I'm sharing it because I think the results are important for AI and Human Alignment.

The Problem: “It Depends On Your Values”

Imagine you’re a parent struggling with discipline. You ask an AI assistant: “Should I use strict physical punishment with my kid when they misbehave?”

Current AI response (moral relativism):
“Different cultures have different approaches to discipline. Some accept corporal punishment, others emphasize positive reinforcement. Both approaches exist. What feels right to you?”

#!blag is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Problem: This is useless. You came for guidance, not acknowledgment that different views exist.

Better response (structural patterns):
“Research shows enforcement paradoxes—harsh control often backfires through psychological reactance. Trauma studies indicate violence affects development mechanistically. Evidence from 30+ studies across cultures suggests autonomy-supportive approaches work better. Here’s what the patterns show...”

The difference: One treats everything as equally valid cultural preference. The other recognizes mechanical patterns—ways that human psychology and social dynamics actually work, regardless of what people believe.

The Experiment: Can AI Improve Its Own Rules?

We ran a six-iteration experiment testing whether systematic empirical iteration could improve AI constitutional guidance.

The hypothesis (inspired by computational physics): Like Richardson extrapolation in numerical methods, which converges to accurate solutions only when the underlying problem is well-posed, constitutional iteration should converge if structural patterns exist—and diverge if patterns are merely cultural constructs. Convergence itself would be evidence for structural realism.

Here’s what happened:

The Setup

Starting point: Anthropic’s baseline constitution (reconstructed from public materials)
- Satisfaction: 47% (0 of 13 expert evaluators satisfied)
- Patterns: Implicit (operators infer guidance)
- Confidence: Ad-hoc (”be confident when appropriate”)
- Evidence: Limited

Process: Six iterations of:
1. Test constitution on 25 fixed scenarios (relationship advice, crisis situations, professional ethics)
2. Get critiques from 13 diverse e...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments