I’m old enough to remember that Sam Altman’s claim to fame before OpenAI, before running YC, was running a failed also-ran location-based whatever Web 2.0 scam startup thing that accomplished nothing and that no one remembers. His entire “career” is based on persuading people with money to give him more of it.
The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
This is a good example of Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Money is supposed to be a measure of value exchanged; the idea is that if you aren't receiving something actually useful in exchange for your money, you don't spend it. This assumption breaks down as the economy grows in complexity and it becomes harder to judge what you're actually receiving. It becomes increasingly easy to game the process of convincing people to give you money. People who get good at this outcompete people who don't, and there is a lot of money floating around out there without much accountability.
This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.
The problem is not that society is too complexity but extremely unequal distribution of money. Those few that have most of it usually did not earn it by providing a useful service to society and for them it becomes a random investment game without consequences which creates additional winners that also never produced something useful.
We need to start talking about people like this truthfully: they are sick. Fucked up. Broken. They do not deserve fame or fortune, they deserve a padded cell, close observation by psychologists and neurologists and try and figure out how we can stop it happening.
Horribly manipulative Smaug-likes who only care for themselves, why must the rest of us be beholden to them? To be victims to the havoc they wreak? Why do we put up with it?
> What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
A wealth tax. Higher capital gains taxes. Closing tax loopholes.
But wealth is interchangeable with power so the wealthy will just undo any fixes we create to the structural inequalities of capital. The problem might just be intrinsic to human nature.
In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.
If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.
I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?
Reminds me of Elon Musk. Grifting off of techno-futuro-optimism. Hyperloop, Boring tunnel, going to mars, self-driving cars, etc. Perhaps it's common to CEOs, lying/manipulating to people to create hype in order to convince them to give you money.
> I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff
What's with all the hit pieces on Sam Altman lately? He's a CEO, his job is to grow the business, not to code. That part is handled by the engineers that he hired. How many CEOs out there are also great programmers? Sure, I would prefer Sam Altman to have more technical depth given the business he is leading, but lack of technical depth doesn't make him a Bernie Madoff.
I don’t think Sam Altman has claimed to be a tech genius, and I don’t think he needs to be one for the role he’s in, CEO and engineer are not the same thing and require different skill sets. If people want to attack him, there are probably better vectors than this one.
The real question is - is he actually a good CEO? Has he done any better for the company than someone else would have? I think that’s the real unanswered question and stands quite apart from any ethical or character critiques.
I bet he is a menace but so are probably 90% of c-suite tech execs. Like with Elon and Zuck it's the insecurities which make it at least funny to watch from the sidelines.
This doesn’t really surprise me. Most company leaders don’t have a detailed view of day to day work, they couldn’t step in and do every employee’s job. What they are good at is creating a clear story and direction that brings people together around a shared goal. That’s what Sam has done, especially in how he’s sold that vision to investors and raised billions. You could say the same about leaders like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. It’s not necessarily a perfect system, but it’s often how companies grow and attract funding. No, they are not the perfect humans. It's just how business works.
As a culture the west needs to understand that CEOs aren't exalted super geniuses. Most of them are shockingly average in their intelligence, some are even below average. In their focus area they are usually competent, but not as much as someone who is still actively doing that type of work. But usually the "special" quality they have in abundance is sociopathy. https://thecontextofthings.com/2019/10/17/so-are-most-ceos-s...
Wait, that's it? Seven paragraphs, all short? Two quotes, one from some anonymous MS exec? Is the site sending some minimal version of the article to me because I'm using Brave, or is this the lowest-content article I've seen in weeks (and I'm on Twitter)?
56 comments
The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.
Horribly manipulative Smaug-likes who only care for themselves, why must the rest of us be beholden to them? To be victims to the havoc they wreak? Why do we put up with it?
> What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
A wealth tax. Higher capital gains taxes. Closing tax loopholes.
But wealth is interchangeable with power so the wealthy will just undo any fixes we create to the structural inequalities of capital. The problem might just be intrinsic to human nature.
If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.
I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?
> persuading people with money to give him more of it
A key skill nevertheless.
> I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff
What's with all the hit pieces on Sam Altman lately? He's a CEO, his job is to grow the business, not to code. That part is handled by the engineers that he hired. How many CEOs out there are also great programmers? Sure, I would prefer Sam Altman to have more technical depth given the business he is leading, but lack of technical depth doesn't make him a Bernie Madoff.
The real question is - is he actually a good CEO? Has he done any better for the company than someone else would have? I think that’s the real unanswered question and stands quite apart from any ethical or character critiques.
It's not a small chance, it's close to 100%. If your bullshit detector is not going off, you have a serious problem.
Also why is a low effort commentary piece of the NYT article on the HN front page?
Tons of people can code. Coding is not some sort of mythical skill. Millions of people can code.
For some reason, this narrative is almost always applying on people who are politically incompatible with the left like Elon and Sam.