Kind of ironic that people are jumping in here to defend Sam Altman on the message board of Y Combinator, which also fired him from an executive leadership role for similar reasons.
Guy can’t code, can’t design, can’t publish, can’t climb a traditional corporate ladder with even modest guardrails against fraud, can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Can lie, threaten, cajole, manipulate, bribe with zero hesitation or remorse.
I’ve been short this nonsense for a decade, and it’s done no favors to me on remaining solvent, but when the market gets rational, it usually gets rational all at once.
Karpathy, Ilya, Yoon right off the top of my head, countless others. LeCun woke up the other day and chose violence on X. Insiders are getting short like Goldman dealing with Burry.
Guy has nine lives, already been fired for fraud like three times and he’s still living that crime life, so who knows, maybe he lasts long enough to put Ice Nine in my glass after all, but this can only happen so many times.
SBF was trying to pocket the difference on a regionally lax regulatory climate. Felon? Sure thing. By all means, hand down a sentence. It’s fraud.
Altman has blown straight past the “personal financial gain” fraud line multiple times and has amassed enough fear of retribution to now be at the “manipulate both potential executive orders and plausible legislation to arrogate de facto regulator status to myself” stage of the conquest of Arrakis.
Both bad. One far scarier.
2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you." https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
2014: "Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent..." https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president
Now, this isn't about pg specifically. Maybe he had reservations at the time but still thought he was making the right decision, maybe he's since changed his mind, maybe he hasn't but has pretty well moved on from this scene. Not interesting.
I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.
Maybe a moralistic, basically decent person couldn't get ChatGPT launched and turned in to the household topic of discussion it is today; maybe nice people can't build cheap rockets. Maybe in the future, when making an endorsement for a leadership position in some company, someone might be brazen enough to say aloud, "I believe this person is sufficiently nasty to make us all more successful."
And so then the question is, does society net benefit more from the moralists or more from the capitalists? Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? How many Altmans can we have before something goes horribly, irreversibly wrong?
Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?
You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals.
You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until you make it rather than correct/technical information.
A few weeks ago one of the guys (a freelancer) who stayed in that project was on an event of a competitor to this shop framework. After that event, he said that their software was way better, but it wasn't interesting enough for him to invest in learning that system. In his opinion, their marketing is not good enough, and they won't be able to sell it to important companies.
So we are stuck with bad products because they apparently sell better than the good ones.
The developers in the company I mentioned first even knew beforehand that the software was bad. They were "included" in the decision process, and they all voted against the bad software and preferred another solution (it was before my time, and I don't remember if they told me what they actually wanted to use). But the manager who made the ultimate decision had such a good time with the guys from the bad product that he decided to go with it.
I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.
Because the best marketers and salespeople are plainly people who lie. People who lie about the capability of the product they are selling to get their customer to buy more of it. Good marketers and salespeople cripple their financial gain by being truthful. So liars get more money, so they get more customers, so they get more power. So it goes.
Software development, being somewhere between a craft, an art, and a science, is fundamentally grounded in truth. You can't bullshit your way to quality software. You can't lie to the computer like you can to a human (maybe with AI you can). So "success" in these two fields is diametrically different.
Though I bet you'll get the opposite answer on a sales/marketing forum.
and yes, the world is full of these dysfunctional groups flush with money. (you might euphemistically call it this or that VC/startup scene)
on one hand it's great that there's plenty of room for technical improvement, on the other it needs the right socioeconomic circumstances. sometimes FOSS helps with this. (developers who spend their career working on products based on FOSS stuff at least have some chance of knowing that their efforts can might be valuable for a wider audience.)
I do think that "cool technology" such as dishwashers and MRI machines is a virtue and we're better of with those than without.
My point (which I communicated poorly) wasn't that assholes are necessary, but rather that there are reasonable definitions of "cool technology" which are an inherent virtue.
I even think believing this idea (you need to be ruthless to succeed) is dangerous. And if you behave like a boss from the 90s at some point you will be exposed. I've seen places where these people rule and they only have high turnover with the exception of these few shops where investors are funneling tons of money so employees just stopped caring.
And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work.
Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy.
Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly.
Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally.
Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”.
Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder.
I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this?
Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.
It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions.
Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.
Says you, random HN poster. Here's the assessment of a NASA astronaut who spent time on the ISS and who has a PhD in mechanical engineering and a degree in applied mechanics:
"[Musk is] able to have conversations with our top engineers about software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy"
But sure, him and the software engineers at NASA are all dumbasses who are fooled by an actor. Happens all the time.
Again - do you guys really think this will work? You are saying what you want to be true, not what actually is true. It's really not necessary. You can loathe the guy for political reasons and still accept that he is in fact an engineer, and does in fact know how to write software. These things are not mutually exclusive.
As for "he lies, he gets caught up". Really. Nobody making this claim is in in any position to attack someone else for getting caught up in a lie, given how brazen this claim is, how many people with direct experience have lined up to say the exact opposite, and how obvious it is that it can't be true given his achievements.
Please, stop claiming Musk isn't technical or that Gwynne Shotwell is the real leader of SpaceX. It doesn't work and makes all criticism of Musk look like ideologically motivated reasoning. There are plenty of genuine ways to criticize Musk! Attack him for being way too over-optimistic about FSD in Tesla cars if you want. Attack him for requiring logins to Twitter. But don't spread obvious lies about him - it lowers the credibility of all criticism.
Or this: > I personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages & white pages on the Internet in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++. Didn't use a "web server" to save CPU cycles (just read port 8080 directly). Couldn't afford a Cisco T1 router, so wrote an emulator based on a white paper.
Or maybe this: > I mean, man, you’re in charge of the servers and the programming and whatever,” Brown continued. “What is the stack, Elon? Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!
To which he answered: > Jackass
Or this: > They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
Again I’m not speaking for rocket science, but as for software engineering and ML it seems he only has surface knowledge but does enough name dropping to maintain the illusion.
The quotes you chose contain direct references to him coding, to code that he wrote himself. Where is the name dropping? Are you being confused by the reference to web servers in the first quote maybe? In 1995 the term web server meant something like Apache with CGI. Writing a custom implementation of HTTP in C was a fairly standard technique to improve performance back then. The first version of Amazon was written in C, Google's web servers were still frequently written in C++ when I joined.
I mean, you say he has only "surface knowledge" and is "acting" to "maintain the illusion", but how many programmers could knock out their own implementation of HTTP in C on their own, let alone implement BGP and all the other low level stuff you need to bring a T1 online? How many would even understand what Musk was talking about?
My point is contrary to what he and his supporters claim he has has no deep understanding of the actual tech of his companies. I'm not arguing he doesn't know tech enough to run a tech company. It's common to find tech executives and VP that coded in their younger years. He might sit maybe a bit above a decent salespeople that has a good understanding of his product line, but below a Bill Gates and definitely not at the level of a ML researcher or Tech lead. He is maybe more invested that a typical CEO in day to day operations, but the aura of genius/inventor added on top is an illusion.
The "...buddy? C'mon!" framing is simply obnoxious. Who would engage with such a person in the first place?
And as a casual Twitter/X user who doesn't give a damn about Musk one way or the other, I don't see the sabotage. The web site and mobile app seem to be working fine. Community Notes is great. I understand that advertising revenue is down but that has no impact on users.
> Anyone who cares can build a replacement.
Technologically, sure; nothing special about it. But in terms of adoption and reach, no, Twitter is unique and extremely difficult to replace.
- there's a huge difference between a set of executives who are accountable to a board and shareholders, and a single person who is not, and doubly so when that person is among the wealthiest in the world, likes to shoot their mouth off, has a huge ego, and likes to exercise a great deal of control
Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work.
Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant.
If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.
Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.
Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?
For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match.
I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at.
I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.
Besides… Blue origin? Boeing? These are not state owned or “invisible” yet are failing.
He started off looking like a Lore from Star Trek, and then took the criticism seriously enough to learn to present as a genuine human.
Might have been around the time FB was getting named by the UN as bearing some responsibility for a genocide though.
So if anything, for him at least, the opposite.
Not so much wealth hoarders but products of the capitalist system where you can own a company and it may do well and become worth lots of money.
And what is the alternative? Communist communal ownership of the means of production is not really cracking along these days.
Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?
One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network.
Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year.
Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind.
Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6]
Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals?
[1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
[3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/
[4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli...
[6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...
They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want.
> moralists ... capitalists
History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets).
Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must have big business.
Adam Smith saw "Theory of Moral Sentiments" as the foundation of his later work on "Wealth of Nations", right? ie that morals were a necessary prerequisite to markets etc.
As for abortion, the debate there rests on a conflict of the rights of two people, and there isn't any clear answer to it based on rights.
Marriage is tangled up with the rights of children. Children are not fully formed humans and we allot them a subset of the rights of adults. Marriage without children is an issue of morality, not rights.
I don't know what mesopothemia is.
And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong" - there is no law in nature preventing this.
But you made no point for your argument - just stepping through mine with comments.
You are mixing morality with justice, which (in the modern world) is based on rights. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a moral statement, it puts the focus and the obligation of individuals to keep moral behavior. My right not to be attacked is not based on moral and not dependent on the morality or the beliefs of any other people, it is based on justice, a social contract that declare a set of a societal or universal rights granted to every individual.
The very first thing a group does when organized is to protect themselves from attack. They do this because it works. We've evolved that way, which makes it a law of nature for humans.
Communist rights, however, are not laws of nature because they do not work with humans. Humans are not beehives.
But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.
Your first paragraph describes a group sharing a common will and organisation based on natural instinct (like a hive of bees), your second paragraph disputes this organisation as a group for humans, decide for one it can’t be both ways.
Oh, it can be both ways and is both ways. See my last sentence again, about the compelling evidence that humans thrive with their rights being protected, while a beehive thrives from being a perfect communist society.
Communism requires people to behave like bees in a beehive, and that will never work no matter how fervently one believes in communism and no matter how much coercion is used to force people to be good communists.
Your mashing togehter things without any coherent explanation what you mean. Also you fail to provide a simple example beyond "the evidence is clear" you don't even say what evidence you're refering to.
Communism works for bees, it does not work for humans, because humans have not evolved into a beehive.
We did not evolve with private property rights thus, by your reasoning, those are not "natural rights". I am at a loss in trying to understand what you are saying. It seem like you are trying to argue for capitalism but arguments that you give seem to favor socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property
Natural or universal rights does not require theism. Robert Nozick is famous proponent of the secular based position that property is a natural right.
Nozick's position on the existence natural rights is simply not grounded. He appeals to intuition and to the reader's morality to appeal for their existence, but he doesn't (and cannot) actually deduce their existence once he forgoes theism. He makes a few appeals to Kant, but they obviously cannot be sufficient, Kant's conditions are merely necessary. I'm very confused by your reference to Nozick on a discussion about the grounding of natural rights when Nozick himself admits that he cannot justify them - he simply assumes Locke, which himself uses a theistic argument, in ASU. If you want, I can get the quote, but I don't have time to skim it until I'm home from work.
At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified, hence why it is threatened by theism. It is no wonder that positive rights and social right theory only really emerged after the Renaissance.
Hume's original text describing the is-ought problem is specifically targeting justification of ethics on god. Laws that no one is ought to abide by are no laws but nonsense.
Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?
> At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified
Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error
> Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?
We agree here, but that isn't how religion solves the problem. Religious laws are also enforced by threats in the afterlife and violence in the present life, not merely by reason, so they do not need to solve the is-ought problem like secular laws do. Of course, religious law has other problems.
> Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error
I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.
You are mixing law with moral/ethics. Secular law doesn't have is-ought problem, it is enforced by the state law enforcement forces. Pressure to abide to the laws doesn't entail or justify their morality.
> I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.
It wasn't. It was arguing for inherent rights. The claim for inherent rights can be justified. It can't be justified by logic just like it cannot be proved mathematically. But it can be justified ethically using reason.
All attempts at changing human nature have failed, and it is human nature from whence rights are derived.
Parents with zero or one child believe that human nature is conferred from the parents. Those with 2+ children know that it is inherent.
Yeah, we did. The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.
Attempts to raise children from birth as good communists have never worked. Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior. Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.
It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.
No we did not.
> The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.
The concept of "mine" also exists in socialism. How have you come to the conclusion that when a child says "mine" that it is referring to the capitalist notion of private property?
> Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior.
Are you denying the existence of families now? Humans evolved and spread in small familial groups which practiced communal behavior.
> Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.
What point are you trying to make whit this?
> It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.
If it wasn't malleable we wouldn't have capitalism as evidenced by early human history. While you at it why don't you tell us what human nature is, because there doesn't seem to be any consensus on it and you seem so confident in using it that you must have a ready definition of it.
Nope, even your shoes officially belong to the collective. I was told this by a former subject of the USSR.
> family
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, children are not fully formed humans, and have only a subset of adult rights. Families have evolved to deal with this issue. Extending the family to society does not work.
> why don't you tell us what human nature is
Two excellent books on the topic:
"The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
"Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo-Anth...
I can sum it up with human nature is our evolved behavior, rather than learned behavior.
The laws of nature do not include any rights, unless there's some new physics I'm not aware of.
> But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.
This is an argument from morality. You start with the premise that a good societal outcome is morally good and then use that to justify the rights you advocate for.
You fundamentally cannot make an argument for what something should be like without resorting to morality. Without it, you can only make arguments on what things are.
I said how well societies work, and have also used words like "thrive" and "prosperous". We have evolved to be that way, it's our local optima just like beehives have evolved a different local optima.
> you can only make arguments on what things are.
And that's exactly what I did. Humans starve to death under communism - every time it has been tried. Nobody starves due to loose morals.
It most certainly isn't. Inherent from where or what? In nature, I have no right not to be attacked by a lion or a pack of wolves, so surely this right cannot exist outside society, and then how can it derive from something outside society? Without a God, man in nature has no rights, though you can follow Hobbes and assert some principles from an idea of universal morality. I'm not aware of any serious philosopher who pretends to be able to derive any right at all without religion or morality.
Modern ethical philosophers have developed ethic theories that propose secular basis for universal rights, moral theory that doesn't rely on God (Rawls is a famous example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice)
So I still do not understand how we aren't saying the same thing. Rawls proposes a system of universal rights based on a particular moral theory, he does not prove that his system of rights is natural, it is artificial. In fact, Rawls is not a proponent of natural rights, he is a proponent of socially determined rights, hence his theory of the Veil that allows us to socially evaluate proposed rules.
I would argue that this definition is very narrow and limiting, it introduce weird dependency on our current scientific knowledge, and isn't very useful. For instance, when Hobbes proposed the social contract theory he was discussing natural rights but today we know that his natural science knowledge was incorrect and therefore he was actually describing artificial rights. To me this makes no sense. Instead, I will propose, that rights that are derived by reason, that are universal, and that do not depend on a specific state law or the social norms of a specific society are natural rights. They are natural in the sense that they are not dependent on any state or law but are inherent. Those rights are not granted by god, and they are not artificial law propositions. They are based on universal principals of reason and the reality of human existence.
This view and this definition of natural rights is not my invention. It's reflected in the language of the universal declaration of human rights - which recognizes a set of universal rights. The declaration isn't a legal document that legislate a binding law. It recognize rights that are not (let's hope, are not yet) generally accepted by all nations. Nevertheless those rights are not based on God or born by the act of composing and publishing the declaration, those are natural rights. They are natural despite being in opposition to humans natural behavior, despite their consistent violation. It is because those rights are natural that they can serve as basis and justification for international law and justice.
Rawls theory of rights is universal, it isn't about specific social norms, it discuss human society in principle. One might say that his ethics are based on theory of the human nature.
There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans.
BTW, we kill wolves that attack us.
> There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans.
I certainly agree with you : but "better for humans" is a morally grounded position.
> BTW, we kill wolves that attack us.
Sure. How is that a problem?
Yet there is. People can temporarily override human nature, but it always reasserts itself. Universal rights are based on human nature.
You can socially declare that what's yours is mine, but be both know how that will end up.
You can also pay people to be poor, but then you'll wonder why poverty increases.
Second, places like Babylon had a very sophisticated legal, financial and administrative system, with tons of written evidence preserved in the form of clay tables surviving.
The Code of Hammurabi being cited as one of the most important pieces of written evidence of a code of laws in ancient times.
The fact is they have enough money to have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults AND ALSO invest a shitload of money.
History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.
You can have big business without robber barons. I'm not sure that exploitation is a necessity to produce things like chat bots, even really good chatbots. Pretending that these people are not hoarding wealth is not really going to answer the question, though.
Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.
> History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy.
History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.
> You can have big business without robber barons.
Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.
If this is meant to be a reference to Soviet-style communism, then all that shows is that centrally planned economies run by dictators end up poorly for everyone.
They don't end up without wealth disparity, though. In fact, USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin, when well-off party bureaucrats and high-ranking professionals hired housemaids - openly and legally - to clean their large apartments and dachas, while attending high school required paying money.
Another way to think about it is that USSR was a society in which capital was still controlled by a small elite, but collectively as a corporation (the Party). A particular apparatchik would be living much better than the average worker for ultimately the same reasons - because his lifestyle was financed by wealth produced by other people who did not have the claim to the wealth they produced under the law. But he didn't own his cars and his dachas personally; he merely used them so long as he retained his rank within the Party (which for many people could be a lifetime thing in practice, purges aside).
Both Jamestown and Plymouth colonies started out with communal agriculture, and starved. The Plymouth colony switched to private farms after the first year, and then prospered. The Jamestown colony failed. The San Francisco Summer of Love lasted, well, one summer, and then collapsed. The Seattle CHAZ lasted 6 weeks. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, then left the fields completely covered in trash and poo for others to clean up.
Find a commune that has lasted more than a handful of years. The Israeli kibbutzen don't count because they feed themselves from a government subsidy.
But hey, you don't have to listen to me. Communes in the US are perfectly legal (20,000 of them have been tried). You're free to start one with your friends. Please keep us posted how it goes!
And these people aren't even considered 'rich' by the standards of truly rich people.
True, the Soviet elite, like any elite ever, had great resources at its finger tips, and high ranking bureaucrats had access to perks like luxury resorts reserved for Party officials, better cars and luxury housing, I'm pretty sure no one had the excess wealth of having a hundred million dollar yacht (or equivalent), that today's billionaires (including Russian oligarchs) have.
Edit: I'm not allowed to respond to you, probably some anti-flamewar mechanism (and downvote you, which you obviously did to me), so let my answer stand here.
You wrote:
>USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin
then in when I refuted your post, you replied:
>Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure
And yes, there was one unique way in which Soviets actually had more stratification than pretty much any capitalist society: access to some things (like special stores with imported goods) was gated not on money, but solely on official position of oneself or a family member. Thus some stuff that was nominally well within the range of what the average worker could afford with some saving was in practice just not for sale to the proles, period. In that sense, it was more reminiscent of those feudal societies in which one's social class determined e.g. what color and material one could use for their clothing.
And I did not downvote your post. Please don't make so many uncharitable assumptions if you genuinely wish a discussion.
No, it's an asset only barely less liquid than cash, generally deliberately shelved in a holding company for the exact purpose of hoarding wealth. You have fallen for the bullshit.
> History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.
You left out "unbounded." Deliberate misinterpretation or failure to comprehend? We'll never know. Wealth disparity will always exist. Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.
> Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.
I already have built one, and I'm quite comfortable, thanks. Putting competitors out of business isn't part of the game plan for sustainable success. Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals. You've once again missed the entire point of my post.
Have you ever tried to sell real estate? I have. It's nothing like the liquidity of cash. Cash I can spend right now. Real estate? It can be 6 months or more. Even borrowing against the equity takes a while. You have to spend time at the bank, get appraisals, get credit checks, and spend an afternoon at the escrow office reading 100 odd pages of contracts. Bleh.
> Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.
A brief study of various societies will show that wealth disparity is hardly a key ingredient for corruption. Corruption in 3rd world countries, for example, is rampant at every income level. When the only way to get ahead is through corruption, you're going to get a heluva lot of it. The USSR ran on corruption at all levels. There are many books on the Soviet economy.
> Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals
Why does that entitle you to decide what the goals should be for everyone else? What if they decide your business is too big, and you should get a haircut? Setting the maximum for wealth being what you have seems a bit convenient?
Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. With his wealth he was able to start SpaceX. Would we be better off without SpaceX? Musk was also the primary investor in Tesla. He bet his entire fortune on it. Your proposal would have prevented that.
Once again you're ignoring the word "unbounded." I guess we can know whether it's deliberate misinterpretation, after all.
My own agency as a human entitles me to have opinions what is or is not appropriate behavior. Your counterarguments to this are not even specious, just uninteresting scare tactics. For instance, who the hell is 'they'? It doesn't matter, because I don't have to justify the fact that I have opinions.
Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX; it's a pollution factory with a byproduct of further enriching its owner by literally setting precious resources on fire. I am not particularly impressed with Tesla's products, but at least it's not a pointless boondoggle like SpaceX. Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain, which is a bizarre starting point from which to map out an ethos.
I'm done engaging with this thread, as I no longer consider it possible that you're engaging in good faith. Good luck with your future endeavors.
That's just being argumentative.
> Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX
Yes, it's much better to have 10x more expensive rockets.
> Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain
Financial gain due to providing people with the things they want at a price they are willing to pay.
Historically there have been swings in inequality. It can just lead to people voting in left wing governments who tax the rich a lot.
Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).
A morality based system could be, for example, you do not have the right to the fruits of your labor, you automatically owe those fruits to others.
I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.
> a wide inductive gap
A book could be easily written about it.
I guess you didn't understand the point, I did not say that rights and morals were the same things, I said that a rights society would still have the moral opinion that its rights were morally good to have, and that respecting those rights was the moral thing to do.
You can, I'm sure, recall many discussions on HN where people who come from a society with the right to free speech discussing this as a moral good and castigating other societies that are rights based, but without that particular right, as being bad for not having it.
>Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).
I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.
>I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.
there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country. It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.
You seldom hear it because it is not taught in schools and is rarely discussed. Leftist ideology is taught instead.
> there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country
There are differences of opinion about everything, even math, and even about the Earth being a sphere. Some of those opinions are simply wrong. I did not invent the definition of a free market, you can google it.
> It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.
Really? The poor dears cannot understand notions of rights? Research shows that kids develop a sense of "mine" long before kindergarten - nobody has to teach it to them.
My father, a college professor of business in his later years, said students would come up to him and say "I didn't think there was a case for free markets! I've never heard of one!" But they do hear a case in K-12 for collectivism.
In my life time I've seen being gay or smoking weed (for example) turn from immoral to widely accepted. Kind of hard to consider these shifting sentiments as a solid foundation for anything.
Lost in the food fight over today's robberbarons is recognition that small and medium new business formation continues to decline.
IMHO, those are the job creators and wealth creation (vs mere wealth transfer) I prefer we boosted. I trust billionaires will somehow muddle along with or without our help.
The more large, visible winners you have in a society the more us little people are incentivized to buy those lottery tickets. Crowd funding, angel investing and small funds do exist. Or even Robinhood.
Of course, you can make or lose money investing in stocks. But you cannot claim that investing in stocks is only available to connected wealthy people.
You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime of its excellence and I’m inclined to believe the guy who was there.
In your opinion, which you know I respect as much as any hacker living, did Altman build anything or do anything of value to be a billionaire off AirBnB stock certainly less than 3, probably less than one year after Loopt was sold at a loss with Conway’s finger on the scales?
I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.
I gather anoxia is a bad way to go.
Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster.
Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution.
I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.
If it's through selfish behavior, or hard-nosed behavior, it's ok with me. Just like there's nothing wrong with a football team who plays hard to win, as long as they stay within the rules.
Microsoft eventually defeated me in the C++ business. I don't fault them for that. They are hard-nose players, and I knew what the game was when I got into it. I'm actually friends with a few of their players.
Taking credit for what other people do is immoral, but leaders always do that, all the way up to the President.
As a lay observer and a figure of zero public note, I’m not held to the standard a juror is: I can draw a conclusion based on an overwhelming preponderance of evidence and lobby in my tiny way on the basis of said conclusion.
If I were a juror, I’d be held to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”, guidance typically annotated by a judge with specific instructions as to what it means in the context of a specific legal proceeding.
I’m not advocating for some kind of ugly mob justice (I’ve been at the mercy of unruly mobs, I do not recommend it).
I’m advocating that a sufficiently compelling body of evidence both documentary and testimonial exists to remove this person from a position in which they can plausibly manipulate the legal infrastructure itself, and public opinion likewise, and hand the matter over to duly constituted authority.
Personally? I’ll bet the rent that the ocean of evidence will persuade a fair jury, but I’m not a jury, I’m a random guy who knows how scary this technology is in the hands of people like that and is pleading with the world to stop him getting fucking laws passed and shit.
For example, if someone believes that the concept of rights isn't based on morals, I'd suspect they're using a very narrow definition of 'morals'.
Morals are something one learns.
And you're wrong. These people do have cash vaults, but they're other peoples' cash vaults. How else do you think they buy things? And they're living in their multi-million dollar mansions and yachts out of benevolence? Please.
They all ended up as hell-holes.
I'm not really interested in repeating that history.
It is not at all necessary for wealthy people to be benevolent in order to contribute to society. Nor do they need to be nice people, nor do they need to be unselfish.
The free market harnesses selfishness for the benefit of society. It's why it works so well, as excoriating selfish people.
For example, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane so they could get rich off of licensing the patents. Dig into it, and that's the bald, unvarnished, truth. They did get modestly wealthy, but were poor businessmen. Look at what their selfishness did - glorious airplane travel! Have you ever flown on an airplane? You're benefiting from the selfishness of the Wrights.
BTW, everybody is selfish. I am selfish. You are selfish. Everyone who says they are unselfish are selfish. That's what a billion years of evolution did to us.
Get out of here with this melodrama.
We’re in a society that had higher more progressive tax rates as recently as the 1960’s. This isn’t some science fiction dystopia people are advocating for, just a return to the slightly fairer system we had before organized PR campaigns of the elites brought us the increasingly unequal dystopia we’re actually currently experiencing.
That's only superficially true. There were a lot more deductible things in those days, like company cars and 3 martini lunches. Tax shelter investing was de rigueur then. (Tax shelter investing is an inefficient diversion of resources into unproductive investments.) Reagan traded away the tax shelters and tax deductions for lower tax rates, which turned out rather well.
Washington state has enormously higher tax rates today than in the 60s. Sales tax, property tax, estate tax, and now an income tax.
https://dor.wa.gov/about/statistics-reports/history-washingt...
We can trade examples all day but the fact is that the tax burden on the very wealthy has plummeted and income inequality has skyrocketed. Those are broad measurable facts.
Things suck more as a result. I'm not a young guy, I've watched the change.
Since you're not young, if you'd invested a modest sum in AMZN in the 1990s you'd be a millionaire several times over today. Same for MSFT. And Apple.
How does other people having more than you take away from you?
2. I’m rich. Believe it or not some of us actually give a shit what kind of society we are building.
The real question you should be asking is how does other people having less than you within a deeply unfair system not take away from your happiness.
> that’s the basis issue
Basis is the amount paid for the stock. The basis boost happens at death. It has nothing to do with margin debt.
Margin debt isn't free. There are limits to how much one can margin. Etrade margin rates are 12.2%, which is pretty high.
If your stocks drop precipitously, which happens every few years, you're subject to a margin call where the broker will sell your stock for you and you get to pay the tax as well. If there isn't enough stock to cover the debt, the broker will come after your other assets to pay it.
Do you also think it is a travesty to mortgage your house and spend it, too? Do you think you should be income taxed every year on the appreciation in value of your house?
> a deeply unfair system
Anyone can open a robinhood.com account on their phone, buy some AMZN for $100, and margin it. The stock trading system in the US is actually very fair and democratic. It's open to all with a phone and a credit card.
> The real question you should be asking is how does other people having less than you within a deeply unfair system not take away from your happiness.
I encourage people with what I've learned about how to invest and improve their lives. A couple have listened and are now doing well, the rest continued making poor choices.
> I’m rich
Then I infer you're not that unhappy about society. The IRS takes donations. If it will make you happy, you can de-rich yourself at any moment by giving it to the IRS. If you look at history, however, confiscating the wealth of the wealthy has never done much of anything to elevate the poor.
Looking at history we find that confiscating the wealth of the poor has done much to elevate the wealthy.
However, we have indeed ended up in a hell-hole. Again, as someone else mentioned, the U.S. in the early 20th century rose up against the capitalist thinking and companies coming out of the industrial revolution and implemented socialist policies, progressive tax structures, and aggressive anti-trust laws and lawsuits. But the capitalists have one out again and are stronger than ever and are indeed turning the U.S. into a hell-hole.
By many accounts, the U.S. is a hell-hole on the whole. It ranks low in several markings such as education, standard of living, healthcare and healthcare access, wealth equality, infant mortality (i.e., it's quite high in the U.S.), etc. The list goes on. Yes, someone will reply that the U.S. has some of the best education, healthcare, standard of living, etc. in the world. And that is true when looking at specific, local instances. But the gap is wide and as a whole the U.S. is struggling.
Are places like Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, etc. really hell-holes? I'm not saying they are perfect, but there's a reason why they rank on top in terms of health, education, happiness, balance, etc.
Many people are unhappy when they discover that a middle class lifestyle requires work.
In Seattle, the government decided that poor people are entitled to free air conditioners. A hellhole? LOL. It's almost June and I still turn the heat on.
I'm just going to stop responding, but I have to call this out. This statement shows a complete disregard and a total lack of empathy for those in the lower middle class and below in the United States. You need to take a step back and understand just how hard people have it in this country.
For example, read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/
From the article:
> In contrast, there is tremendous inequality within the US, with lower socioeconomic status groups experiencing much higher postneonatal mortality rates.
They even go on to eventually claim that the U.S. actually has an advantage during the neonatal period, which is the first four weeks of life, but has abysmal mortality pre-birth and postneonatal compared to peer countries. The reason, one could surmise, is that neonatal is when people actually see doctors. For lower socioeconomic status, the first time they might be seeing an OBGYN is when they go to the emergency room for birth due to lack of insurance, income, education, and other socioeconomic factors.
1. stay in school
2. pay attention in school, learn the material
3. don't do drugs
4. don't do crimes
5. go to college (loans are readily available)
6. pick a major that pays well
It's not rocket science.
Your cite says that the differences in infant mortality shrink considerably when taking into account differential criteria for infant mortality. What the study does not address is drug abuse by the mother. The paper assumes differences are due to differential health care, rather than different lifestyle choices. Lifestyle that affects infant mortality include:
1. drug abuse
2. smoking
3. obesity
4. diet
5. alcohol use
6. absence of fathers (i.e. lack of stable family)
7. age of mother
These are all significant factors, and ignoring them and blaming the health care system is not good enough.
Infant mortality rate is indeed higher than the US. I dug into it a few years back. It seems that the definition of infant mortality is different among different nations. The US has the most expansive view of it - more specifically, we try to save preemies more aggressively than any other nation, and the failures are counted as infant mortalities. Other nations do not.
Wealth equality is a goal of communism. You are not worse off simply because someone else has more money than you.
No it's not ironic, and it's also not completely correct. There's no point in having a conversation with lack of good faith statements like this. For starters, education is underfunded, and it's leached on to by corporations. Big surprise it doesn't do well. There's also lack of social support structures surrounding our education, so it's no surprise that the educational system is overwhelmed with trying to be too much while also underfunded.
And healthcare is not ran by the government in the U.S. It is almost completely privatized, so your statement is an outright untruth and purely bizarre. I have no idea what you're agenda is, but there clearly is one.
> Wealth equality is a goal of communism.
Wrong again.
This comes up in the Seattle Times nearly every day, and in the reader responses it's invariably pointed out that the funding per student has doubled in the last 15 years or so, even discounted for inflation.
> healthcare
So, Medicare and Medicaid do not exist? Obamacare isn't funded by the government for poor people? Heavy government regulation doesn't cover nearly every aspect of health care?
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." -- Karl Marx
What things have you bought that you didn't want and don't need?
The Panama Papers showed this to be a myth. The ultra rich are in fact extracting wealth and hoarding it in tax havens.
Having red lines to prevent predatory behavior is important. We see the destructive results of allowing such behavior before our very eyes, from certain individuals and groups leveraging power, to entire classes of people remaining in crippling debt, fostering discord and unrest in society. Money printing (inflation), the student debt fiasco, the subprime mortgage fiasco, and more are just examples for us to contemplate.
Islam never claimed nor has a stated goal that everyone is going to be financially equal; quite the opposite in fact - different people will be tested differently (wealth and poverty are both tests). But this does not mean that we should not have a fairer playing field, one where people in the society help each other and care for each other, let alone one that is known to cause instability and predatory behavior.
You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations, but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.
Most everything I buy, other than food, comes from Amazon. The local supermarket stopped selling laundry powder detergent, so now I push a button on my computer and Amazon drops off a box of Tide the next day. And it's cheaper than what the supermarket used to sell it for, too.
Even better - the AMZN stock I bought pays for it!
I was looking for an unusual art print the other day. Found one on Ebay for $40. A frame is just a few bucks from Amazon (though I did try to find one at the thrift store first, cuz I'm cheap.) I even ordered the wall hooks from Amazon.
I grew up in a small town in Kansas long ago. In between tornadoes, as a Boy Scout project, I was trying to build an electric motor. My mom spent hours driving around to shop after shop looking for the right kind of wire. She finally found it in some ramshackle garage on the edge of town. Today, it would be 5 minutes on Amazon.
Even in the UK, I know people on zero-hour contracts (no security) who are working unhealthy hours and in unhealthy environments who will be replaced by robots soon enough. But there are few local jobs, partly because Amazon drains wealth from local communities, local businesses close and wealth is siphoned out to rich shareholders elsewhere, as oppose to circulating in the same community.
These days, anyone can buy fractional shares with robinhood.com. I.e. if you have a checking account and a phone, you can invest in AMZN. Then you'll get your share of the wealth.
Amazon product quality is shit. Fakes are prevalent, half of reviews are fake these days, sellers use blatant fraud such as swapping one item listing for something completely different while retaining the existing collection of 5-star reviews etc.
But meanwhile Amazon's sheer size and monopolistic practices (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...) mean that alternative choices are often simply not available.
And then that market dominance is itself built on large-scale abuse of its workforce. Which is to say, people who are my neighbors.
Ironically, I used to be a hardcore right libertarian; ancap, even. I just couldn't do it anymore because none of it was possible to reconcile with day-to-day observations. I still believe that free markets are good for the people overall. I just don't see any free markets when I look at capitalism. For a market to be truly free and competitive, there must be a balance of power between the players. We don't have anything even remotely like that - not between capital and labor, and not between large and small capital.
As for the workers, nobody makes them work there.
I suspect you've defined a tautology by assuming that anyone running a large organization is a sociopathic megalomaniac.
But let's take an example. Which do you think is better run - NASA or SpaceX?
But being run better than NASA is not exactly a high bar. I would actually amend it to most US federal agencies, even. It's just that Americans, for some reason, assume that the way their government works is exemplar of governments in general. That is not true, to put it mildly - US is just particularly dysfunctional in that regard.
I should also note that my original point was not about a public/private dichotomy, but specifically about the "capitalist hero" cult of personality and the associated management style. You can have private companies that aren't run in this manner, where decisions are collegial or otherwise checked. You can even have private co-ops. And, of course, in many - indeed, most - cases you don't actually need megacorps to do things that need to be done, and a bunch of much smaller competing entities will do just fine without all the undesired political and economical effects.
The result is low levels of prosperity, because big business drives the wealth creation in the economy. Small businesses are needed, too, as they fill in the gaps and are the future big businesses.
An economy made up of cottage businesses and local artisans handweaving baskets just cannot produce the kind of wealth that is produced from efficiencies of scale.
An artisan made car would cost $1 million each.
There are endless numbers of idiots in black turtlenecks being absolute dicks to other co-working space members because they believe that being a dick is a prerequisite to commercial success. They are clearly cargo-culting something.
Most CEOs of large organisations appear to be psychopaths. Is this because you need to be a psychopath to run a large organisation? Or because you need to be a psychopath to get to be a CEO of a large organisation? (these are different things).
It does make sense that non-psychopathic founders don't build the kind of scale of organisation that we're having such problems with. A "normal" person can accept an exit at the merely "more money than you'll ever be able to spend in your lifetime" level, rather than scaling to FAAANG level. Likewise, non-psychopathic executives are probably at a disadvantage when climbing a career ladder.
Psychopathic CEOs make psychopathic decisions, based on their own mental dysfunction. We're seeing this in the Enshittification of Everything; though probably more immediately and clearly in Musk's antics at X: ego over every other consideration.
If we could wave a wand and appoint non-psychopathic CEOs at all the large tech companies, would we see them change behaviour and solve a lot of the problems themselves? Or is it inherent in the organisation culture now, or a required feature of the organisational culture in order to grow so large?
We have historically curbed the extreme capitalist tendencies that build such large organisations. We have anti-trust laws, and all sorts of regulations to control the damage that unbridled capitalism does, and break up large monopolistic organisations. Do we need to draw that line a lot lower for tech?
I like Musk's version of twitter better than the old version. His tweets often make me laugh.
Like watching a clown performing a slapstick routine and then realising that that isn't a clown and the slapstick is an important part of our societal infrastructure.
> I’ve been short this nonsense for a decade,
...this nonsense = deep learning? I mean the current research wave is only just barely 10 years old and its financial/investable effects definitely less than 10 years old....
Or is "this nonsense" something else? Can you short Sam Altman the individual? takemymoney.jpeg I will chug that ice-nine kool-aid.
> LeCun woke up the other day and chose violence on X.
maybe just a link?
I'm curious: are you short all of SPX or just tech companies?
Although a couple of the AI meme chats I’m in starting sending around a link that there’s actually a prediction market on whether he lasts in the CEO chair [1]. I’ve been too busy building shit to even look into whether I can trade it, but it’s been spiking north of 20%.
[1] https://kalshi.com/markets/openaiceochange/openai-hires-anot...
As far as I know, she never retracted her claim of "sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, and financial abuse". And he never admitted to any of the above.
For all we know she could be jealous, have mental issues, or have a different bone to pick with him and thought that’d be the best way to hurt him. If I had his money I could see some of my own relatives doing similar things after being denied handouts, for instance.
Yes, absolutely, because all "we" would be adding to the conversation is speculation. No new information can be gained here.
There is a difference between a witch hunt and making sure underheard voices get attention.
I was suggesting "we" make sure these claims are not being ignored because they are against a public figure. The fact they are a public figure and "might get blackmailed all the time" doesn't somehow relieve a person of criticism. That "we" ensure the proper authorities and groups prioritize finding new information or investigate these claims instead of being swept under a rug.
Real accusations happen all the time too. Nah, I've been homeless and in institutions, I'm well aware of the types of people out here.
Just saying we shouldn't sweep things under the rug just because the person is a public figure or "has family begging for handouts" or "is at risk of blackmail". We should ensure the proper authorizes investigate and the potential victim is not drowned out by more powerful voices.
I tried to Google for a concrete, high quality source, but I cannot find anything. The best I could find:
> Altman was allegedly fired from his role as the President of YCombinator for putting his own interests first.
Is there a YC press release or an insider's account of his termination? Else, this is just a rumor.
To be clear: I don't write this post as a shill for Altman, nor YC.
There are other sources.
Altman will see his day in court if I have to win a Senate seat to see it happen.
That determination will be binding.
Of course there are other court cases like Musk vs OpenAI which may be on the way.
The same person who was pushed out after her coup attempt failed. Which was very likely motivated by much more than Sam lying as she has stated in other articles about how she wants AI she regulated by gov, how GPT shouldn't have been released to the public because it's dangerous, and her interim CEO she pushed as Sams temporary replacement who made statements about wanting to pause AI development for safety reasons.
If what she said was true, I'd leave the board if I were in her position. I would understand why they decided to take him back but decide that it's not worth working with someone who can't be trusted.
Hell, Sam wants AI regulated by government...
... after OAI is well-established and locked in, of course. A little ladder-pulling and regulatory capture is something he's entirely aligned upon.
I'd say it should be the default-expectation for anybody operating as a professional Venture Capitalist these days, and AFAIK there's no personal record to indicate otherwise.
I guess there's no way to know this but how much better than the "Null CEO" did he actually do? What if he happened to preside over a successful company that would've performed as well or better without him?
I think Altman is worse than the null CEO; others may draw their own conclusions, but the bar for CEO quality isn't "much better than the null CEO".
That sounds like an easy bar for an LLM. I, for one, welcome our new LLM CEOs.
You’re talking about someone who led an organization from 0 to tens of billions in valuation, billions in revenue, recruited many unknown but now famous talent as well as famous talent which almost all mutinied when the board fired him, and bet on a technology that many people considered ridiculous. And your complaints are what? That you think he’s trying to regulatory capture the market? That he’s bad at PR, or managing PR-adjacent crises? That he was ruthless and one-sided in employee and other contracts?
That aside, Altman literally hijacked the organization that was created by other people to fulfill certain goals, and now we find out that he did so by outright lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_revenue_productivity_...
No, he lied to other board members, multiple times.
As for "holding back the organization", if we're talking about existential risk, I want them to be held back. These people have no business being stewards of any technology that might be an existential risk.
In addition, the attempt to rebrand it is victim-blaming.
According to Altman and the rest of the OpenAI board, there is. They are the ones sounding the alarm, so they should be judged by the appropriate ethical standards.
I see how it'd be really dicey for a CEO to pitch a fit on the way out under ordinary circumstances. But also, if you fire your CEO, he may very well go stand up a terrifying competitor, which is basically what happened here, right?
Not according to Sam Altman, or for that matter the other OpenAI board members who have been involved in this whole kerfluffle. They all say AI is an existential risk, and OpenAI is necessary to mitigate that risk.
In other words, they themselves have told us to judge them by a much higher ethical standard than "just business". And all of them (not just Altman) have failed when judged by that standard. Even if they're wrong and AI actually isn't an existential risk, that doesn't mean they're off the hook for their behavior, because they themselves set the standard for them to be judged by.
The only reason to be so disinclined in the case of OpenAI would be that you're sure their existential risk claims are wrong. If that's the case, then I suppose you could just shrug your shoulders and ignore the whole kerfluffle, at least as long as you have no skin in the game. I personally still think the conduct of everyone involved has been childish and unprofessional, but if we take existential risk off the table, then the issue is just that the norms of business in our current culture are childish and unprofessional, which is disappointing, but has no simple fix.
Can I reasonably assume that people who are very riled up about OpenAI not meeting its original (weird, IMO) moral standard are revealing that they do in fact take existential AI risk seriously?
I would say many of them probably do, yes--quite possibly in large part because of OpenAI's own rhetoric on the subject.
Then you resign and start your own company whose charter is written the way you think it should be written.
> But it's a matter of survival of the entire universe?
If this is actually true, then, as I've already said elsewhere in this discussion (and in previous HN discussions of OpenAI), Altman is the last person I want in charge of this technology. And the same goes for everyone else associated with OpenAI. None of them have come anywhere remotely close to showing the kind of maturity, judgment, and ethics that would qualify them to be stewards of an existential risk.
If Altman sincerely believes that AI is an existential risk, then he should resign from OpenAI and disqualify himself from working on it or being involved in it in any way. That's what he would do if he were capable of taking an honest look at himself and his actions. But of course I won't be holding my breath.
The ad-extremo argument is a fallacy that doesn't ad anything to the discussion. It's simply a way of pushing a certain view, because you can always find some hypothetical that might justify an action.
Fortunately we are dealing with a concrete situation so we don't need to talk in hypotheticals.
Leave.
> But it's a matter of survival of the entire universe?
Literally nothing is like that. And even after correcting your hypothetical to something reasonable, Altman was almost certainly closer to the "risk destroying the universe" camp than the board.
Surely you jest.
I do very strongly urge you to cast that kind of thinking aside.
Fact is, in many cases where those kinds of arguments are seen, we will also see someone who really, really does not want to be told what to do and or who cannot tolerate a decision they do not agree with.
One can justify any means to any end thinking like that, which is why I am tagging that kind of reasoning as psychopathy.
It is unhealthy.
Take care, live well, peace and all that. I mean nothing personal.
Just give this all some real thought. You are extremely likely to be better off for having done it.
I just don't like the idea of some group of people having superior power of not being questioned about their ethics (the board in this case). Just sounds a bit cultish to imagine boards to always wield these kind intentions.
That means a lot.
In the case of OpenAI, it was Altman, not the board members he should have been arguing his position with openly, who wanted to undertake actions that others thought were too risky. So your argument, if it were valid, would not apply to Altman, but to the other OpenAI board members whose confidence in him had been destroyed. Do you think they should have lied to Altman to get him to stop doing things they thought were too risky?
Come on. That ridiculously unreasonable hypothetical obscures more than it reveals, and is pretty much a total derail.
This type of delusional thinking can be used to justify anything.
It is wise to be exceedingly cautious when deploying ends-justifies-the-means logic. Most of the time, history doesn’t remember those who employ it too fondly.
I'm particularly curious if you've done a meta-analysis on what you choose to analysis or not, and what the fundamental basis is for determining fitness for your values and actions (e.g. what does a healthy society and healthy person look like to you and how do you statistically justify this position?).
Boards serve a vital fiduciary duty to ensure good corporate governance.
They do not exist to hold back the organisation and are not there to be outsmarted.
The government doesn't hold boards to any standard. It's a free-for-all.
Sometimes they are owners, other times they are the ones being duped into rubber stamping and legitimizing criminals.
Boards routinely hold back the success of organizations, and ousting those boards can be in the best interests of the company. This is pure idealism. Some companies are better with passive or active boards; however, activist boards and passive-reactive boards can cause all kinds of harm leading to the death of the company.
The board member here does not appear knowledgeable in the technology while also expressing a motive be deeply involved in its development. This was a recipe for disaster.
How could you say this with a straight face.
Can I have some of what you're on? It sounds like fun. Seriously, nobody in the entire world has been adversely affected by the widespread adoption of LLMs?
There has been industrial scale copyright infringement.
You can argue it's for the greater good but to say that no one was hurt is a lie.
The man has enough money to take care of his own, and he isnt.
It's a bad look.
I think this might be the understatement of the year!