That seems like a legit point! It’s just very important to include information like that in your post when you’re proposing corporate sabotage. In political and murky domains where there’s so much noise and adversarial spreading of false narratives, it’s really scary to see posts that just say “I’m sure we all agree <thing> is bad, now let us do underhanded and dishonorable things to attack <thing>”. You can write that independent of whether something is good or bad, and instead write it whenever something is unpopular. It’s both more truth-tracking and less scary to see someone write “I encourage you to do underhanded things to <thing> because of <list of underhanded things that we know they did>.”
You open the post with a list of things that, while bad, are at best reason to quit and protest the company, not reasons to be dishonorable. This section, as far as I can tell, was about as much as you spent actually justifying corporate sabotage:
There is more open debate than I thought ther ewould be, at least in this part of Twitter, about whether we should prefer a democratically elected government or unelected private companies to have more power. I guess this is something people disagree on, but…I don’t. This seems like an important area for more discussion.
Let’s be clear: this was not about Anthropic telling the US military not to work on autonomous weapons on its own. Altman is advocating for the government being able to require private companies (and their employees) to provide whatever services it wants, even if they don’t currently do that thing. I know the term “fascism” has been thrown around a lot, but that is Actual Fascism. Here are some other ways to use that argument:
“Why should Sam Altman decide what should be done with that billion dollars instead of the government, which reflects the will of the people?”
“Why should a private citizen get to decide they don’t want to spy on their neighbors and report any hidden jews? That should be the decision of the government, which reflects the will of the people!”
This jump to ‘fascism’ is just cheap. Are you aware that Altman has repeatedly and publicly stated:
In my conversations over the weekend, I reiterated that Anthropci should not be designated as a SCR, and that we hope the DOW offers them the same terms we’ve agreed to.
Insofar as him endorsing the government’s threat against a private company is the ‘fascism’ you’re accusing, he has spoken out against it. You may wish to make some argument about why these words are not representative of the actions he will take, but instead you decided it was fine to label someone ‘Actual Fascism’ with capitals. Please hold yourself to higher standards than this.
The biggest problem that I have with the post is that quitting your job is considered a bigger deal than giving up on being an honorable person. Seems very far out from what I consider good behavior. I myself have gone and protested outside of OpenAI due to them racing to develop AGI while being well aware that this poses an extinction-level threat to humanity, so I know is quite possible to oppose a company without acting dishonorably in the process. If you work at OpenAI and no longer believe in the ethics of the company, you can just do the decent thing and quit.
I’m sure it’s possible to write a better version of this post. I hope someone does. Believe it or not, my specialty is engineering, not rhetoric.
My assessment of Sam Altman is that he’s a very good actor, very untrustworthy, and a nihilistic power-seeker who cares very little about benefit or harm to humanity as a whole. I agree that this post alone is only weak support for that assessment. A proper “compendium of reasons not to trust Sam Altman” would probably end up being a considerably longer post.
That seems like a legit point! It’s just very important to include information like that in your post when you’re proposing corporate sabotage. In political and murky domains where there’s so much noise and adversarial spreading of false narratives, it’s really scary to see posts that just say “I’m sure we all agree <thing> is bad, now let us do underhanded and dishonorable things to attack <thing>”. You can write that independent of whether something is good or bad, and instead write it whenever something is unpopular. It’s both more truth-tracking and less scary to see someone write “I encourage you to do underhanded things to <thing> because of <list of underhanded things that we know they did>.”
You open the post with a list of things that, while bad, are at best reason to quit and protest the company, not reasons to be dishonorable. This section, as far as I can tell, was about as much as you spent actually justifying corporate sabotage:
This jump to ‘fascism’ is just cheap. Are you aware that Altman has repeatedly and publicly stated:
Insofar as him endorsing the government’s threat against a private company is the ‘fascism’ you’re accusing, he has spoken out against it. You may wish to make some argument about why these words are not representative of the actions he will take, but instead you decided it was fine to label someone ‘Actual Fascism’ with capitals. Please hold yourself to higher standards than this.
The biggest problem that I have with the post is that quitting your job is considered a bigger deal than giving up on being an honorable person. Seems very far out from what I consider good behavior. I myself have gone and protested outside of OpenAI due to them racing to develop AGI while being well aware that this poses an extinction-level threat to humanity, so I know is quite possible to oppose a company without acting dishonorably in the process. If you work at OpenAI and no longer believe in the ethics of the company, you can just do the decent thing and quit.
I’m sure it’s possible to write a better version of this post. I hope someone does. Believe it or not, my specialty is engineering, not rhetoric.
My assessment of Sam Altman is that he’s a very good actor, very untrustworthy, and a nihilistic power-seeker who cares very little about benefit or harm to humanity as a whole. I agree that this post alone is only weak support for that assessment. A proper “compendium of reasons not to trust Sam Altman” would probably end up being a considerably longer post.