Comment by rglullis
4 months ago
> 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.
When people are described as sociopathic it’s not about any particular lie, but the relationship that the person has with the truth, which is that they will lie when it suits them and tell the truth when it suits them and they don’t seem to distinguish morally between them. And more than that, they treat people the same way, and will use them while it suits them and then dispose of them when they are inconvenient.
Perhaps that is some of the problem. That is not what a sociopath is. There are specific criteria, and while it may come as a shock to some, there are ethical sociopaths out there. They do the right thing not because they feel it to be the right thing to do, but because they think it is a rational way to live their lives.
What you are thinking of are people who do bad things. Most of those people are not sociopaths. Often they are hurting in some way, sometimes they are just living the only life they know. Most of them feel they are doing the best they can. It is extremely comforting to pathologize these people because then it's not something we could have prevented by providing a better society. It rules out the hard options of empathising with them, or reasoning with them to find common ground.
The term othering has come into use in recent years. The concept has existed through the ages, but that's the latest label for it.
This is what it looks like.
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.
> I cannot find a single action of anyone that cannot be construed as an attempt to get them power/money/influence
Try the other way around, via negativa. We definitely can find plenty of examples of people stepping out of positions of power, deciding not to do something because of moral conflict, etc. Is there any case of such action from Sam?
Fuck, anyone with any semblance of moral fortitude would refuse to take money from the Saudis. But he had no problem to do it.
> joined an AI research organisation at a time when everybody thought the big advances were much further away than they turned out to be.
No, this is selection bias. What he did was to put himself in a position where he could have his fingers on any and every possible pie, and then when of these things turned out to be something believed to be valuable by people with money, then he manouvered himself to be in the driver seat.
>No, this is selection bias. What he did was to put himself in a position where he could have his fingers on any and every possible pie, and then when of these things turned out to be something believed to be valuable by people with money, then he manouvered himself to be in the driver seat.
Thank you I was just going to point this out.