[bertylicious]

"They're driven by values" is meaningless praise unless you qualify what these values are. The Nazis had values too, you know. They were even willing to die for them. One of the core values of the Catholic church is probably compassion. Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.

So what core values led "Dario, Jared, and Sam" to work with a government that just tried to rename the DoD to "department of war" and is acting aggressively imperialist in a way like the US hasn't in a long time.

And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning? Does this list include the autocrats the US government is working together with?

[lebovic]

Yeah, values on their own don't lead to positive outcomes. I agree that many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.

I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though, and are motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI go well.

Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for for many – but not all – people at Anthropic.

That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a hard road ahead.

[jghn]

> to rename the DoD to "department of war"

The very fact that they referred to it as the Department of War instead of Defense tells me that they're still bootlickers, and just trying to put a good spin on things.

[marxisttemp]

Careful speaking truth to power on this site, remember that YC is deeply enmeshed with Garry Tan, Peter Thiel, and of course Paul Graham who as of late has made a habit of posting right wing slop on his Twitter

[viking123]

> And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning?

Anyone that Israel doesn't like

[DeepSeaTortoise]

> Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.

I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.

But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.

The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.

Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.

[bertylicious]

I'm confused. You heard about someone you knew being wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit and you could have provided the testimony to clear him, but you just decided not to? Why not?

[DeepSeaTortoise]

I never was contacted during the trial and only read about it almost 2 years later in the news.

Also, he's a man of strong faith, not that he knows he'll win in the end, but more like that it just doesn't have the same importance for him as it would have for us. I only had a short opportunity to ask him about it since then and basically he doesn't think there is just about any chance to win this, what he's most worried about is ruining the public image of his students (including his accusers) and since his order allowed him to rejoin and start over, in practice, he got all he wanted to ask for already.