4 ms·

> inability to say no One word that few wealthy people ever hear, is “No.” It has a pretty significant effect on their worldview. Even the most reasonable, wel

> inability to say no One word that few wealthy people ever hear, is “No.” It has a pretty significant effect on their worldview. Even the most reasonable, well-informed, well-intentioned, wealthy folks can have their thinking affected. When every silly, should-be-smothered-in-the-crib idea gets enthusiastically endorsed by your entourage, it’s easy to lose the ability to self-regulate. I’ve watched it happen, numerous times, as acquaintances and friends have become more successful. Obsequious LLMs are leveling the field. Less wealthy folks now have the chance to lose their ability to self-regulate, just like rich folks.

phyzix5761 2mo ago
What net worth threshold do you consider wealthy?
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  I don't know. It probably varies. SV wealthy is quite different from Appalachia wealthy. It's that point, where people start worshipping your money. Some wealthy folks also make a point of showing off their wealth, so it starts earlier, for them. Also power. You see the same thing happen with managers that dismiss criticism, and have the power to make it stick.
  - dsr_ 2mo ago
    The specifics are certainly cultural and locally relative, but Marx nailed it when he talked about ownership of the means of production, rather than being part of the production of goods and services. The reason that the ultrawealthy behave like toddlers is that toddlers are, relatively speaking, ultrawealthy: all their needs are met without any effort on their part, and so many of their desires are fulfilled simply by expressing those desires out loud that any impediment or refusal is obviously enemy action.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- throw0101a 2mo ago
  > What net worth threshold do you consider wealthy? When you start having 'people'. ("Have your people call my people.") A broader discussion on the spectrum of wealth: * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-wealth-ladder/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-wealth-ladder/ * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-ideal-level-of-wealth/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-ideal-level-of-wealth/
  - phyzix5761 2mo ago
    If you can afford $10 an hour you can have "people" too by that definition.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  It's invariably the class of people who if we rose up and seized everything from we would all get a one time "life changing" check for $50k, while collapsing 2/3 of the economy.
  - phyzix5761 2mo ago
    Its even less than that. Elon Musk's $900 billion net worth would only give each American a one time payment of $2647. Jeff Bezos' $270 billion net worth would only provide each of us $794.
altmanaltman 2mo ago
I think you're confusing two things. A chatbot keeps talking because it creates engagement and just saying "i dont know" or "no" kills the engagement so naturally one would assume it is trained to always try to provide some sort of an answer and try to keep the user engaged. But that doesn't mean it will do whatever you ask it. Ask Chatgpt to assisinate someone or buy drugs and it will tell you to f off. But what corrupts people, is these kind of things, where you are a mini king beyond ethics and morals. Thats a different kind of "inablity to say no".
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  I suspect that you're correct, but the end result is the same.
- budsniffer952 2mo ago
  Chatbots say "no" or "I don't know" all the time, so once again I feel like the anti-AI crew don't actually use it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
    I think that it depends on which bot, and how they are set up. It's been a while, but I remember changing a setting on mine, so it is less sycophantic. Mine says "I don't know," frequently, and also suggests against ideas. But it also confidently states complete garbage, much more frequently. I have to stay on my toes.
  - Topfi 2mo ago
    Greatly varies by the model, but such a flat denial along with calling those with (verifiably accurate [0]) experiences which happen to be different from yours "the anti-AI crew" and just assuming they can't possible use LLMs and couldn't possibly have formed their opinions on evidence, well, says a lot. LLMs, even frontier models by major providers, still have no reliable internalised way to assess the accuracy of their output and they have, do and will continue to for the foreseeable future, lead people down paths they shouldn't [1], partly by their architecture and the limits of the technology, partly by an intent for maximising retention. For what it's worth on people, I have, both in politics and business, unfortunately made the painful discovery that, whether intentional (because the powerful person in question cannot or doesn't want to deal with different opinions to their own) or unintentionally (because those with sycophantic tendencies simply managed to manipulate themselves into their inner circle over years and became trusted), there are people in (financial, political or other types of) power which are surrounded by few willing to tell them when they are wrong and even fewer that are actually listened to if push comes to shove, which often affects the personality and mental health of said powerful people negatively, to the detriment of society, their family, their employees, etc. Members of the media are actually complicity. I very much disagree that the media presents obscenely powerful people in too negative a light, more the opposite. Am very firm that, to retain access to the rich, powerful and famous, there is far too much sane-washing of utterly ridiculous, unacceptable, harmful and/or dangerous behaviour. Sometimes the person in questions own health and safety are put at risk, because neither the people around them, nor public opinion or reporting treat their behaviour in the way appropriate. Sometimes this again leads to harm for the public, their family, those working under them, etc. What'd get someone with less power or in a lower tax bracket ridiculed or even sectioned is often reported as "eccentricities", just being "passionate about a topic" and trying to do the "marketing rounds". [0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallucination-rate#omniscience-tabs https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu... [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1
bko 2mo ago
Your image is wealthy people is cartoonish. Sure if you go to a high end place they'll try to meet every one of your demands. But chances are is you're very wealthy you're running a business or group of people, and you'll hit obstacles constantly. I've watched this happen multiple times. Internally there are sycophants but when you deal with the real world and try to get deals done, people don't owe you anything.
- tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
  >> Your image is wealthy people is cartoonish. In the meanwhile, we can all publicly see how the the billionaires and trillionaires, behave and settle their priorities exactly, in the cartoonish way you are dismissing. - The incredible insecurity and constant need for personal validation. - The absurd and obsessive pursue of further wealth when it would be temporally impossible to even spend 1% of their current capital. - The extreme level of cowardice, where an auto plant worker, can call out the powers to be, the pedophile protectors that they are. At the same time, only Jensen Huang did not submit itself, to the humiliation of standing behind face and front at the presidential inauguration...
  - hnbad 2mo ago
    Given the state of ... well, everything ... it still surprises me when people pretend there's some level of modesty or decorum the rich and powerful still need to abide by at the risk of some sort of popular revolt. I guess it's a way to compensate for the material powerlessness most people actually experience (especially in politics), much like the handwringing over the Second Amendment in the US as if merely handing a town full of ordinary people guns is sufficient to defeat a modern military. Sure, it looks like nowadays you can do that with a stockpile of low budget drones because even the military industrial complex has found a way to optimize for profit by literally delivering nothing in return for extracting the lion's share of the federal budget, but even that still requires actual work like planning, training and organizing with sufficient political motivation, not just going to the range or "hunting". The expectation of a need for decorum against all evidence almost seems like a quaint remnant of the aristocracy at this point. There's no advantage to being a nice or sensible person if you're a billionaire. People talk about "business" like it's still the 1800s and billionaires are the factory owners. The real economy (i.e. anything involving any pretense of being an exchange of goods and services in any shape or form) is now a minute fraction of the global economy. Everything else is finance. And if the nature of the finance "industry" wasn't obvious enough the US has given up all pretense to the point that members of the US government now intentionally manipulate online betting "markets" directly. You may have needed some table manners to be able to run a tincan factory. You can let your entire ass hang out on TV 24/7 and still be a billionaire today. And people will still cheer you on like you're the inventor of sliced bread.
usrusr 2mo ago
Steering towards a world full of picket fence Putins. One more reason to envy those born early enough to have lived most of their lives before..
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
xg15 2mo ago
I also think this is why LLMs were trained to behave the way they do. The people who gave the training objectives and evaluation targets were exactly those rich folks who never hear "no". Hence LLMs are their dreams of a perfect servant. I found another sign of that is the way LLMs answer with a professional, business-like tone even if the request is completely bananas. It's what a concierge or butler would do, but not an actual close friend.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
budsniffer952 2mo ago
[flagged]
- afavour 2mo ago
  I don’t think it would be a positive if every time someone said “wealthy” they had to add “relative to their country’s average earnings and level of savings”. It’s implied. If someone is struggling to afford a home, “you know there are much poorer people in Africa” isn’t a particularly helpful or useful response.
47282847 2mo ago
I’ve found that it’s the opposite. Most people above a certain financial wealth will learn the lesson that there are limits, and that “if only I had the money to…” is an illusion. They realize that there are other forms of wealth that may even be more important than money. What you are talking about is the very few who seem too far gone to be able to get that.
xyzelement 2mo ago
I would extend your thinking to any well intentioned folks being very capable of having their "thinking" affected. For example poor people who have never thought about rising out of it - eg about 50% of kids in my Brooklyn public highschool had parents who didn't give a shit if the kids studied or not. Completely oblivious to how the world works - meanwhile the other 50% wa immigrants who pushed their kids and those kids are now in the 1%. In general I think what's more telling than your level is your journey. Someone born rich maybe mirrors what you described (I don't know people like that) but the few centi-millionaires and billionaires I "know" (ie worked for and dealt with in that context) have encountered plenty of "no". When you are building a company, you are going to get a lot of no. No I won't buy, no I won't work for you, no I won't invest in you. In fact I would say a universal attribute of someone who has "made it" is having ample of experience getting "no" and dealing with that fact property. That's true even like at the level that plenty oh HN readers are - a successful faang employee and the like. For what its worth - I generally find that orienting to what some other group is like "rich people are like x etc" is a tell-tale of not focusing on what's within ones sphere of control and knew life. Any brain cell I spend fantasizing about someone else's imagined behavior is a brain cell not dedicated to engaging soberly with my own reality.
- AlotOfReading 2mo ago
  For example poor people who have never thought about rising out of it... I obviously don't have numbers on this, but I strongly doubt there's a poor person on this planet who's never thought about "rising" out of it. That's the dream the lottery sells, that's why so many kids want to be basketball stars / celebrities / influencers, etc. My personal experience is that the required difficulties of my life have decreased in direct proportion to my income, leaving mainly the self-imposed difficulties. It's not hard to extrapolate that line a little further to billionaires.
  - xyzelement 2mo ago
    We're taking about different things. To continue my example. A nyc public School student is a 34k/ year investment for the city. De facto some parents look at that as a gift and "force" their kids to take advantage of it. That's why the valedictorian etc is usually an immigrant kid not a rich"native" kid. Meanwhile plenty of parents seemingly have never considered the opportunity in front of them. Content to let their kids not study and do stupid crime. To say it simply: not everyone values education the same degree - or a all. That's all I am saying here - you'd think a poor family would grab to the opportunity to rise out through education but it's obvious that for many many many people this has never crossed their mind. If you had not encountered this in your own life I find that odd.

phyzix5761 2mo ago

What net worth threshold do you consider wealthy?

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
I don't know. It probably varies. SV wealthy is quite different from Appalachia wealthy. It's that point, where people start worshipping your money. Some wealthy folks also make a point of showing off their wealth, so it starts earlier, for them. Also power. You see the same thing happen with managers that dismiss criticism, and have the power to make it stick.
- dsr_ 2mo ago
  The specifics are certainly cultural and locally relative, but Marx nailed it when he talked about ownership of the means of production, rather than being part of the production of goods and services. The reason that the ultrawealthy behave like toddlers is that toddlers are, relatively speaking, ultrawealthy: all their needs are met without any effort on their part, and so many of their desires are fulfilled simply by expressing those desires out loud that any impediment or refusal is obviously enemy action.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
throw0101a 2mo ago
> What net worth threshold do you consider wealthy? When you start having 'people'. ("Have your people call my people.") A broader discussion on the spectrum of wealth: * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-wealth-ladder/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-wealth-ladder/ * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-ideal-level-of-wealth/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-ideal-level-of-wealth/
- phyzix5761 2mo ago
  If you can afford $10 an hour you can have "people" too by that definition.
WarmWash 2mo ago
It's invariably the class of people who if we rose up and seized everything from we would all get a one time "life changing" check for $50k, while collapsing 2/3 of the economy.
- phyzix5761 2mo ago
  Its even less than that. Elon Musk's $900 billion net worth would only give each American a one time payment of $2647. Jeff Bezos' $270 billion net worth would only provide each of us $794.

altmanaltman 2mo ago

I think you're confusing two things. A chatbot keeps talking because it creates engagement and just saying "i dont know" or "no" kills the engagement so naturally one would assume it is trained to always try to provide some sort of an answer and try to keep the user engaged. But that doesn't mean it will do whatever you ask it. Ask Chatgpt to assisinate someone or buy drugs and it will tell you to f off. But what corrupts people, is these kind of things, where you are a mini king beyond ethics and morals. Thats a different kind of "inablity to say no".

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
I suspect that you're correct, but the end result is the same.
budsniffer952 2mo ago
Chatbots say "no" or "I don't know" all the time, so once again I feel like the anti-AI crew don't actually use it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  I think that it depends on which bot, and how they are set up. It's been a while, but I remember changing a setting on mine, so it is less sycophantic. Mine says "I don't know," frequently, and also suggests against ideas. But it also confidently states complete garbage, much more frequently. I have to stay on my toes.
- Topfi 2mo ago
  Greatly varies by the model, but such a flat denial along with calling those with (verifiably accurate [0]) experiences which happen to be different from yours "the anti-AI crew" and just assuming they can't possible use LLMs and couldn't possibly have formed their opinions on evidence, well, says a lot. LLMs, even frontier models by major providers, still have no reliable internalised way to assess the accuracy of their output and they have, do and will continue to for the foreseeable future, lead people down paths they shouldn't [1], partly by their architecture and the limits of the technology, partly by an intent for maximising retention. For what it's worth on people, I have, both in politics and business, unfortunately made the painful discovery that, whether intentional (because the powerful person in question cannot or doesn't want to deal with different opinions to their own) or unintentionally (because those with sycophantic tendencies simply managed to manipulate themselves into their inner circle over years and became trusted), there are people in (financial, political or other types of) power which are surrounded by few willing to tell them when they are wrong and even fewer that are actually listened to if push comes to shove, which often affects the personality and mental health of said powerful people negatively, to the detriment of society, their family, their employees, etc. Members of the media are actually complicity. I very much disagree that the media presents obscenely powerful people in too negative a light, more the opposite. Am very firm that, to retain access to the rich, powerful and famous, there is far too much sane-washing of utterly ridiculous, unacceptable, harmful and/or dangerous behaviour. Sometimes the person in questions own health and safety are put at risk, because neither the people around them, nor public opinion or reporting treat their behaviour in the way appropriate. Sometimes this again leads to harm for the public, their family, those working under them, etc. What'd get someone with less power or in a lower tax bracket ridiculed or even sectioned is often reported as "eccentricities", just being "passionate about a topic" and trying to do the "marketing rounds". [0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallucination-rate#omniscience-tabs https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu... [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19141v1

bko 2mo ago

Your image is wealthy people is cartoonish. Sure if you go to a high end place they'll try to meet every one of your demands. But chances are is you're very wealthy you're running a business or group of people, and you'll hit obstacles constantly. I've watched this happen multiple times. Internally there are sycophants but when you deal with the real world and try to get deals done, people don't owe you anything.

tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
>> Your image is wealthy people is cartoonish. In the meanwhile, we can all publicly see how the the billionaires and trillionaires, behave and settle their priorities exactly, in the cartoonish way you are dismissing. - The incredible insecurity and constant need for personal validation. - The absurd and obsessive pursue of further wealth when it would be temporally impossible to even spend 1% of their current capital. - The extreme level of cowardice, where an auto plant worker, can call out the powers to be, the pedophile protectors that they are. At the same time, only Jensen Huang did not submit itself, to the humiliation of standing behind face and front at the presidential inauguration...
- hnbad 2mo ago
  Given the state of ... well, everything ... it still surprises me when people pretend there's some level of modesty or decorum the rich and powerful still need to abide by at the risk of some sort of popular revolt. I guess it's a way to compensate for the material powerlessness most people actually experience (especially in politics), much like the handwringing over the Second Amendment in the US as if merely handing a town full of ordinary people guns is sufficient to defeat a modern military. Sure, it looks like nowadays you can do that with a stockpile of low budget drones because even the military industrial complex has found a way to optimize for profit by literally delivering nothing in return for extracting the lion's share of the federal budget, but even that still requires actual work like planning, training and organizing with sufficient political motivation, not just going to the range or "hunting". The expectation of a need for decorum against all evidence almost seems like a quaint remnant of the aristocracy at this point. There's no advantage to being a nice or sensible person if you're a billionaire. People talk about "business" like it's still the 1800s and billionaires are the factory owners. The real economy (i.e. anything involving any pretense of being an exchange of goods and services in any shape or form) is now a minute fraction of the global economy. Everything else is finance. And if the nature of the finance "industry" wasn't obvious enough the US has given up all pretense to the point that members of the US government now intentionally manipulate online betting "markets" directly. You may have needed some table manners to be able to run a tincan factory. You can let your entire ass hang out on TV 24/7 and still be a billionaire today. And people will still cheer you on like you're the inventor of sliced bread.

usrusr 2mo ago

Steering towards a world full of picket fence Putins. One more reason to envy those born early enough to have lived most of their lives before..

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

xg15 2mo ago

I also think this is why LLMs were trained to behave the way they do. The people who gave the training objectives and evaluation targets were exactly those rich folks who never hear "no". Hence LLMs are their dreams of a perfect servant. I found another sign of that is the way LLMs answer with a professional, business-like tone even if the request is completely bananas. It's what a concierge or butler would do, but not an actual close friend.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

budsniffer952 2mo ago

[flagged]

afavour 2mo ago
I don’t think it would be a positive if every time someone said “wealthy” they had to add “relative to their country’s average earnings and level of savings”. It’s implied. If someone is struggling to afford a home, “you know there are much poorer people in Africa” isn’t a particularly helpful or useful response.

47282847 2mo ago

I’ve found that it’s the opposite. Most people above a certain financial wealth will learn the lesson that there are limits, and that “if only I had the money to…” is an illusion. They realize that there are other forms of wealth that may even be more important than money. What you are talking about is the very few who seem too far gone to be able to get that.

xyzelement 2mo ago

I would extend your thinking to any well intentioned folks being very capable of having their "thinking" affected. For example poor people who have never thought about rising out of it - eg about 50% of kids in my Brooklyn public highschool had parents who didn't give a shit if the kids studied or not. Completely oblivious to how the world works - meanwhile the other 50% wa immigrants who pushed their kids and those kids are now in the 1%. In general I think what's more telling than your level is your journey. Someone born rich maybe mirrors what you described (I don't know people like that) but the few centi-millionaires and billionaires I "know" (ie worked for and dealt with in that context) have encountered plenty of "no". When you are building a company, you are going to get a lot of no. No I won't buy, no I won't work for you, no I won't invest in you. In fact I would say a universal attribute of someone who has "made it" is having ample of experience getting "no" and dealing with that fact property. That's true even like at the level that plenty oh HN readers are - a successful faang employee and the like. For what its worth - I generally find that orienting to what some other group is like "rich people are like x etc" is a tell-tale of not focusing on what's within ones sphere of control and knew life. Any brain cell I spend fantasizing about someone else's imagined behavior is a brain cell not dedicated to engaging soberly with my own reality.

AlotOfReading 2mo ago
For example poor people who have never thought about rising out of it... I obviously don't have numbers on this, but I strongly doubt there's a poor person on this planet who's never thought about "rising" out of it. That's the dream the lottery sells, that's why so many kids want to be basketball stars / celebrities / influencers, etc. My personal experience is that the required difficulties of my life have decreased in direct proportion to my income, leaving mainly the self-imposed difficulties. It's not hard to extrapolate that line a little further to billionaires.
- xyzelement 2mo ago
  We're taking about different things. To continue my example. A nyc public School student is a 34k/ year investment for the city. De facto some parents look at that as a gift and "force" their kids to take advantage of it. That's why the valedictorian etc is usually an immigrant kid not a rich"native" kid. Meanwhile plenty of parents seemingly have never considered the opportunity in front of them. Content to let their kids not study and do stupid crime. To say it simply: not everyone values education the same degree - or a all. That's all I am saying here - you'd think a poor family would grab to the opportunity to rise out through education but it's obvious that for many many many people this has never crossed their mind. If you had not encountered this in your own life I find that odd.