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> Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue. or, how you interpret the question is part of the interview process...
by gdhvkkk 3mo ago
> Because, the lack of mention of that word IS a culture issue.
or, how you interpret the question is part of the interview process...
- latexr 3mo agoSam Altman clearly has no qualms with lying and being unethical and eventually was at the front of Y Combinator, so that question either doesn’t care for ethics, doesn’t do a good job of filtering, or specifically filters in favour of unethical behaviour.
- estearum 3mo agoOr unethical people are hard to spot, in part due to, you know... their lack of ethics.
- RA_Fisher 3mo agoIt’s well-known Brockman and his wife donated $25 million to MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Donald Trump. The main higher-level factor is our patriarchal culture (and more bad things tend to stem from places where that’s intense).
- estearum 3mo agoNot sure what this has to do with Sam being hired at YC 10 years ago
- RA_Fisher 3mo agoFair. An interesting question: how quickly can we detect something without being thwarted by anisotropy / the multiplicity of backward paths? ie- retrodiction Let’s organize the temporal order a bit. This is what some research turned up. “Groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman’s leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt’s board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O., according to Hagey.” “As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.” https://ghostarchive.org/archive/veLhW https://ghostarchive.org/archive/veLhW I read he’s a vegetarian out of concern for animals, and that’s a good moral sign (but perhaps less relevant here). Are / were there precursor concerns arising to signal back then? I don’t know.
- estearum 3mo agoI'm quite confident that the error was: "Despite potential warning signs, we believe Sam to be an ethical person" and not "We know that Sam is an unethical person, but that's either not a problem, or an actual asset when it comes to running our venture fund" The former is definitely still an error, but it's quite different from the accusation being leveled on this thread.
- RA_Fisher 3mo agoI agree. I don't think there's much public information out there about the due diligence involved in his hiring.
- latexr 3mo ago> Or unethical people are hard to spot That’s covered by my options: “doesn’t do a good job of filtering”. > due to, you know... their lack of ethics. Being unethical and being able to hide it are entirely orthogonal.
- estearum 3mo agoThose are definitely not entirely orthogonal. Especially in business where most unethical behavior starts with or is sustained by deception – which is itself unethical – the two are very much related.
- neya 3mo agoThat's really an apologist take on behalf of the world's largest VC whose companies have time and again proven ethics don't matter.