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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#771

Post by palmotea »

latexr wrote: post #618
arionhardison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG said something along the lines of: "There should be no truth that is increasingly unpopular to speak." If you don't believe what I shared is true, address that directly. But seeing my post sitting at 1 point and [flagged] after 2 hours is not OK. Just as DJT can't flag away his issues, you shouldn't be able to do so on HN. One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability,…

> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings. That has never been the case, because HN is frequented by humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it means they are blind to their own shortcomings. Being robotic about the world is no way to live—that’s how you ge…

>> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings.

> That has never been the case, because HN is frequented by humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it means they are blind to their own shortcomings.

Yes, and HN is full of people like that: simultaneously arrogant and stupid software engineers whose arrogance is founded on their own ignorance and self-regard. "Grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings" actually sounds like a smokescreen to obscure one's bias and feelings from oneself.

> Being robotic about the world is no way to live—that’s how you get people who are so concerned with nitpicks and “ackshually” that they completely lose sight of what’s important. They become easy to manipulate because they are more concerned with the letter of the law than its spirit or true justice.

They're also easy to manipulate, because their emotions can be appealed to without them having enough awareness to be on guard. For instance: you can manipulate many software engineers by working your position into the form of a technical "system" (e.g. Econ 101) then praise them for being smart little boys for understanding and believing it.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#772

Post by bombcar »

surajrmal wrote: post #697
bombcar wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should perhaps be generalized as "employees usually match the general consensus of their peer-group". Before everyone considered Meta to be ersatz drug dealers, they'd report that they feel what everyone feels. Google was "do no evil" until they had to choose between that and making the money. The culture has to be not only professed but tested.

Depending on what part of Google you work for, you can absolutely feel good about what you do. The vast majority of employees don't work on ads or adjacent areas. I've never seen another company actually care for non profit related externalities so much. People talk about it like it's the same as Haliburton or Oracle and that's not true.

The snide response is "of COURSE you can care about non-profit related externalities when your giant evil ad business is bringing in absolute dump loads of cash".

And there's something true there; few companies are Snidely Whiplash evil (maybe the lawnmower but even that is just what it is) - and having large amounts of cash affords you options in many areas.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#773

Post by nonameiguess »

strgrd wrote: post #688

I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable: > “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N…

I don't follow public figures or news anywhere near enough to have a meaningful opinion on Sam Altman, but I find one interesting snippet here, which is that there is a straightforward prediction in there. He did say ten to twenty years and it's only been ten, but still, I can't think of a single good or service that families need or commonly want that is an order of magnitude cheaper. It makes me wonder if he's become any less confident of this or any other prediction.

I don't want to be holier than him or thou or anyone else, but it is the kind of thing I've found of myself quite a bit. I made a lot of confident predictions about the future 15-25 years ago on the Internet, and even though I'm not a public figure and nobody will ever hold me to task for being wrong, I can see it for myself. The predictions are still there. They weren't universally wrong, but I didn't do much better than chance. It's a big reason I no longer bother to make predictions. I have no idea what the future will bring and I'm comfortable with the uncertainty. It doesn't feel like very many people on the Internet are.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#775

Post by profdevloper »

arionhardison wrote: post #167
edbaskerville wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more details? It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things. 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim. 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer. 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs I was working for a company called NationBuilder a…

Maybe just Occam's Razor -- any time I've seen Sam talk in public he just seems to be a neurotic, anxious individual that would have a hard time interacting with people in any normal context. In a world of infinite variables it's hard to say that his aversion was due to your race -- there's really not much to go on here.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#776

Post by Noumenon72 »

taurath wrote: post #540
fontain wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of representing the allegations, finding the right balance between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the allegations without dismissing them. That said, "recovering" memories as a therapy does not pass any sort of sniff test and it does…

> recovering" memories as a therapy Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy that leaned heavily on suggestion or was associated often with fairly coercive interrogations during the 80s CSA panic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria > Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them. Agree, though I think th…

I'm confused by what you're saying. Can you help me reconcile your first post

> It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

with

> Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy

I read your first post as standing up for recovered memory therapy and I can't find how the discussion of dissociation makes a difference. Does Fontain have it right that by "recovered memory" you mean "things people happened to remember on their own"?

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#778

Post by Lerc »

rglullis wrote: post #639
Lerc wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake. My prima facie view o…

> what information would significantly change your views Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power/money/influence. You can't find it. The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.

I cannot find a single action of anyone that cannot be construed as an attempt to get them power/money/influence. I can believe that a persons intentions are good, but I can't make everyone in the world do that, and that is what you are asking.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"

To play your game, he got married, had a child, and joined an AI research organisation at a time when everybody thought the big advances were much further away than they turned out to be.

You could still construe those actions as evil if you choose to see them as evil.

I'm not going to claim that Sam Altman is not a sociopath, I lack the information and knowledge of psychology to make that determination. On the other hand I have not detected those attributes in anyone who has claimed he is a sociopath.

It seems odd that people seem to take offense at the notion that arbitrary people do not reach a conclusion that requires specialised expert knowledge and a decent amount of irrefutable evidence.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#779

Post by stackedinserter »

nerdyadventurer wrote: post #486

Why would anyone trust him at all? their tech is used to bomb children, all of these rich folks are immoral only about their selfish gain.

> bomb children

Looks like that's the only thing that happens in every war, according to useful westerners.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#780

Post by profdevloper »

interstice wrote: post #632
mememememememo wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extranordinary claim needs a bit more evidence than one datapoint where in his defense maybe he is scared of anyone he doesn't know trying to talk on the street.

Also mentioned was that more evidence is not hard to find

If this is noteworthy, the burden of proof should be on the poster, not the reader to substantiate these claims.
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