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Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

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Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#81

The real problem is that Altman has legitimately destroyed public trust. We already have way too many immature robber barons playing the oligarchy game for the likes of such as him to be positive for society in the end. If he had a conscience, it appears that he's sold it already.

> The real problem is that Altman has legitimately destroyed public trust. This might seem true in our technical buble, but most of the public probably has no idea who he is. They try ChatGPT for a work task and think it's amazing and love it. I've seen this happen many times, and once one person in a small team/company tries it, everyone else starts using it and they also love it. These people don't know what OpenAI…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#82
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone in your generation (graduating high school 2009) obtained in demand credentials or skills, then they should have reaped enormous returns from 2013 to 2024. The only people who really “lost” in 2008 were those who were overleveraged from going into debt for houses or education, and then had to default due to income loss in 2008 to 2011 or so. Or those who panic sold all their equities.

How is a new college grad supposed to reap "enormous returns" without significant savings?

From entering a hot labor market with rising wages and investing?

The alternative is entering a cool labor market with stagnant or decreasing wages.

Obviously, people who already had assets made out better, but that is not a possibility for 99% of high school/college graduates, so useless to consider.

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#83

This is really dumb, and I'm not even a fan of sama, I think he's a snake. Sam Altman was CEO and President. The fact he was not Chairman is not material. There's a thousand different explanations how that misstatement could have occurred. Maybe someone wrote that up, and sama didn't review every single line, and other people just assumed it was right. But it's not material. Being being the CEO and President of YC is…

>But it's not material.

the corporation President, VP, Secretary, Treasurer, and Board of Directors and Chairman are legally defined titles, they are material titles, they imply fiduciary duty, loyalty, etc. (CEO isn't really a thing, it was made up to point out whether the President or Chairman wielded the ultimate power in situations where the largest shareholder might be more active than passive)

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#84
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the sort of personality type that we need leading the most potentially dangerous new technology in the past 50 years.

While I get the sentiment, things have a way of working out. Maybe he is actually the best person to do it...no one knows who the best person for an undefined situation will be.

> things have a way of working out

The definition of survivorship bias because you literally are alive to say this.

Tens of millions have been killed by CEOs of tobacco companies, and that's just one industry. Energy companies will likely cause the death of billions.

We got rid of many dangerous American oligarchs in the Gilded Age by using govt to break them up. Things don't "just work out," people sacrifice huge amounts of time and energy to fix them.

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#85
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a new college grad supposed to reap "enormous returns" without significant savings?

From entering a hot labor market with rising wages and investing? The alternative is entering a cool labor market with stagnant or decreasing wages. Obviously, people who already had assets made out better, but that is not a possibility for 99% of high school/college graduates, so useless to consider.

I think people really over-estimate the wage growth differences between good and bad labor markets.

Median usual weekly earnings are (in 1982 Dollars) Q1 2024: 365 Q1 2013: 331

So over 9 years, including the largest bump in wages in generation during the pandemic, wages grew by 1%

From the early 80s until now, wage growth was like 0.4%

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pagn

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from clear. Dozens of finance executives wiped a decade worth of economic growth off the United States the year before I graduated high school. My generation will never recover. They left their jobs with more money that I'll make in an entire lifetime. None went to prison.

If someone in your generation (graduating high school 2009) obtained in demand credentials or skills, then they should have reaped enormous returns from 2013 to 2024. The only people who really “lost” in 2008 were those who were overleveraged from going into debt for houses or education, and then had to default due to income loss in 2008 to 2011 or so. Or those who panic sold all their equities.

IMO nobody highly typical reaped major returns from '2013 - 2019' unless they already had excess income.

Even restricting to CS (and I haven't tracked my graduating CS classes that closely from the '08 - '11 range) my memory is that many of the smartest ones didn't end up working in CS for reasons that were never clear to me and sort of muddled by for years. (To a certain extent I'm still not sure how college grads who didn't get internships or work in the field are supposed to land their first job in the field if they're great at c and algorithms but can't and won't market themselves or move.) The only ones who made out like bandits were the ones who landed internships at places like Google or MS or had preexisting connections or niche interests of some form. A solid chunk ended up at big old companies, like IBM, Lockheed Martin, etc. They mostly made out well because getting paid $60k - $90k out of college around then made it easy to buy a house, and because they worked somewhere that made a job switch or career progression work out well enough to start getting paid more circa mid '10s. That said, a solid chunk ended up in smaller companies, government, or non-tech companies that needed devs, and I think for many of them it didn't work out or lead to years of low pay before being able to get more on track. For many, it seems like things didn't really lead to big benefits until the pandemic, which I think unlocked opportunities for more folks to work remote.

Back to speaking more generally, I think many more people probably could have reaped the benefits of home ownership than did so in the '08 to '19 interval because houses seemed to stay cheap all over the country for much of that period. But many folks in the age bracket seem like they either (a) didn't realize they could afford to when houses were quite cheap, (b) actually couldn't (student loans?) or (c) were afraid to, because that whole generation never feels secure in a job or their ability to find a job if their current one cuts them, and got somewhat chilled by the foreclosures they saw in the '08 crash. Many of these folks I think only realized how this was screwing them when rents started to skyrocket, though I don't think I clearly have a sense of how student loans play out - I do think college enrollment as a percentage of high school graduates was pretty high, but I'm not sure how big a percentage of those enrolled in high cost vs low cost situations in both absolutes and loans.

But IMO it's important to realize that for most typical workers in those years, median income was not high enough for single income to invest significantly beyond their house if they did save towards home ownership. The number of folks who didn't know how to find anything gainful to do with their degrees and so went back to school for master's or higher in those '08 - '11 years seems significant to me. I personally know plenty of folks who got masters degrees or better in various fields and basically eke out a living doing stuff like writing website copy, teaching at charter schools, and various other things that don't pay well and seem likely to be sort of demoralizing for someone with an advanced degree.

So IMO it's only with two income households and above median incomes that you can realistically do both (invest and own housing) over those years, particularly if there are any student loans. And during those years marriage ages have gone up.

The thing I'm seeing now is that folks who did get housing are kind of stuck doubling or tripling their payment to get a large place if they want to have kids, etc. Which will likely further negate many folks' ability to participate in the market. Or lead to further birth rate decline.

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim was repeated on the website of the SPAC itself until the story ran. And the SPAC is run by… Sam Altman.

> And the SPAC is run by… Sam Altman. Yes, but this comes with the assumption that Sam writes and reviews the website copy, PR statements and S1 form submissions, which any organization of significant size, the CEO does not. I could believe Elon does though.

Its assumed that many many people involved in an already really cloaked investment vehicle know that Sam is not. Thats the point. Not that Sam wrote it, that the organization signed off on it.

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Dang, I appreciate the transparency and general policy in such situations. As well as undowning the story Do you think there will ever be in band signaling of when (or perhaps even why) a post was artificially depressed by moderation? Particularly aimed at cases where people are already using tools like https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=40710417 on posts like this where more people have already seen the…

I understand the theory—surely publishing more data would reassure everyone and help settle things—but this is based on an assumption which in my experience is false: that these dynamics are rational. I don't think that's how they work at all, so I don't have faith that earnestly publishing a moderation log would improve things. On the contrary, I find it easier to imagine it making things worse. Why? Because there w…

Reading through the linked comment (and it's linked algolia feed) I'll add that public mod actions are less aimed at the making interactions with small and loud subset who will never engage rationally themselves any better and more aimed at helping the rest of the community easily ignore said subset. If the typical rational user will have seen many posts about YC critical news not related to celebrity gossip they will immediately know such claims are unfounded and have public references to it. Right now it's instead much easier to find 10 examples of this type of public comment thread where things may look gray or look at the public data analytics and find 10 examples that appear to confirm the viewpoint that topic $x articles are silently downweighted more often than they should be than it is for anyone but the mod team or those who send constant emails to provide even one bit of pre-existing hard proof to the contrary that doesn't carry the risk of looking like it was formed after the fact.

Specifically on a full moderation log your links also show how it would be troublesome in some ways I perhaps hadn't thought as deeply about. After all even if you moderate 9999 things right the same crowd is going to want to parade the 1 - now with more details as to why. At the same time I still think the same set of people are going to complain either way and the data isn't really helpful to them as much as the rest of the people anyways. I realize I'm extraordinarily unlikely to budge your views on this due to volume of experience/thought/interaction with this topic you've had but just count me in the selfish "I'd rather the log/actions were public for us average user and then your half a day of emailing was explaining the details to the troublesome bunch rather than with the average user spending time trying to understand".

I'll close with a smaller push of "and even if the site never does a full moderation log, not signaling moderated post/comment actions at any level only feeds that small group on believing everything unpopular they say is being censored 100% of the time instead of x% of the time". With that I'll leave you some peace on the matter :). Thanks for the time and reading through (yet another) user's view on this and for the good moderation of the site as always.

Re: Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

#89
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That mistake is that it's not true. Altman has earned a name for himself in the truth-telling/transparency department. He wasn't briefly sacked for his fashion sense. In the article they quote Marc Fagel, who previously served as the regional director for the SEC's office in San Francisco: "Misstating the qualifications of executives is something the SEC takes seriously,"

Ok please remind me when the SEC takes action.

You'll probably be waiting until the cows come home for that reminder
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