I see signs of Toner trying to spin things. “for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misr

I see signs of Toner trying to spin things. “for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board … [Altman gave] inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place … For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever … But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board” Thoughts: - The claim that this had been going on for years is presented as support for the decision to oust Sam. This is a spin, because an easy criticism is that, if this had been going on for so long, why didn’t Toner do anything about it years sooner? As she says herself, quoted in one of the other near-duplicate articles, all along she had been responsible as a board member for “providing independent oversight over the company,” so there was a years-long lapse in effectiveness in her oversight duties if her claims are true. - The emphasis on “all four of us who fired him” is an attempt to provide social proof that she did the reasonable thing. It’s a description of the board’s behavior rather than explaining Sam’s — the ostensible purpose of the article — so it’s rhetoric serving some other purpose.