It's not "cancel culture" to ask that your leaders address salacious allegations brought against them by their own family. The question of his firing is way less serious from a ethical standpoint, and yet this is what OpenAI employees are willing to stick their necks out for? That is some telling prioritization.

Burden of evidence for accusations is always on the accuser, the accused could flat out ignore and take them to a court of law and that would be perfectly reasonable.

I have no idea nor do I care about what Altman's sister accuses him of, but until it's conclusively proven in a court of law it's not something that should be used as a basis for anything of consequence.

Remember: Innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I'll start by saying that these particular claims seem to mean absolutely nothing per everything I've heard. It seems to be a mentally ill person accusing someone of something that may very well have never happened.

Innocent until proven guilty though is the standard for legal punishment, not for public outrage. It's a standard meant to constrain the use of violence against an individual, not to prevent others from adjusting their association to them.

Also, the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt". Nothing outside perhaps of mathematical truths could be proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt". There's always some outside chance one can imagine.

> Innocent until proven guilty though is the standard for legal punishment, not for public outrage.

It's still a useful barometer to calibrate one's own, individual participation in said public outrage.

For our own mental health, for our relationships with people around us, and to avoid being manipulated by dishonest people, it would behoove each and every one of us to adopt "innocent until proven guilty" regardless of whether we're legally compelled to do so.

Our required burden of proof can be lower than a court's but it should be higher than "unsubstantiated accusation by mentally ill family member that is uniformly denied by the rest of the family".

> Our required burden of proof can be lower than a court's but it should be higher than "unsubstantiated accusation by mentally ill family member that is uniformly denied by the rest of the family".

Very much agreed with this.

This morality you’ve constructed sure would lead to a lot of people never facing any sort of accountability for their actions. I’m not really in favor of handing all judgment of people over to criminal court systems. They have a higher standard since they have higher stakes.

The existence of legal process does not preclude the responsibility of the board and employees to address allegations of this seriousness. And it is serious–it is not normal to be accused of rape by a sibling. Addressing the elephant in the room is not the same thing as being guilty by default you are falsely conflating acknowledgement with punishment. The lack of pressure to at least produce a public statement while this lessor drama does speaks volumes to the lack of moral guiding principles at OpenAI.

>And it is serious–it is not normal to be accused of rape by a sibling.

Thanks, I care even less now if that's even possible.

"Woman coming out with sexual assault allegations against man of prominence." is a dime a dozen occurence; most of them just end up wasting everyone's time due to flimsy or even non-existent hard evidence. Engaging in character assassination, aka cancel culture, on the basis of such nonsense plays right into the hands of the accuser.

The court of law exists specifically to deal with these kinds of allegations, acting appropriately and as necessary within the legal process is the extent of the responsibilities and duties owed by the accused. The accused owes the court of public opinion nothing, much less character assassins such as yourself.

Choosing to look the other way instead of addressing uncomfortable questions is a choice, and the law does not absolve you of your moral obligation to practice due diligence in choice of leaders. Take it easy.

What should he do, release a statement "The allegations are not true, my sister is mentally ill"? What would be the point? It will just attract yellow press.

He wouldn't want to attract attention to it regardless of whether he is guilty of innocent. What is a disappointing moral failure though is that employees and especially the board didn't demand such. Who the heck wants to work next to someone where it is an unaddressed question of whether they did such a thing?

Let's say the employees do the thing you consider to be ethical and demand an accounting, and Altman gets up and says "it's false, it never happened."

What then? Has anything really changed? I would expect him to say the same thing regardless of its truth, so it seems to me we have no additional information: she still says it happened, the rest of the family says she's delusional, and he (obviously) says he's innocent.

Are your hypothetical morally-concerned employees satisfied now? If so, why?

If they're not satisfied, how does this not create an environment where the only thing you have to do to destroy a company is pay a {sibling, cousin, neighbor, ex-lover, etc} to claim something damaging about its CEO?

You're supposed to do an actual investigation, not just ask one party's opinion and call it a day. C'mon we're talking about his sister making this accusation not some rando gold digger I don't need to justify that some due diligence is in order. Innocent until proven guilty only works when allegations are investigated–otherwise everyone is always "innocent" because you have just chosen not to look.

Now you're moving the goalposts. Until now you've been demanding that "leaders address salacious allegations brought against them by their own family" and that they "at least produce a public statement". What you're now demanding is the purview of the law, not the board.

If her allegations are true, he should face the consequences, but they should come first through the system that is specifically designed for testing the truth of allegations that are this serious. OpenAI is under no obligation to launch an investigation themselves in response to an indictment-by-Twitter-mob.

Your inability to understand the difference between a criminal trial and the other leadership practicing due diligence regarding claims of misconduct does not mean I'm "moving the goalposts". What I've suggested from the start is normal practice for any employee at a company accused of sexual misconduct–at least at companies that take ethical violations seriously. You think Apple wouldn't investigate something like this? Forget about it. Ostensibly, based on their complete lack of acknowledgement of such serious allegations that on their surface don't have reason to immediately reject as lacking credibility, this is not one of those organizations. Take it easy.

>You're supposed to do an actual investigation,

Holding trial in a court of law is that "investigation".

>not just ask one party's opinion and call it a day.

Except that's what you've been saying OpenAI employees should do.

>C'mon we're talking about his sister making this accusation not some rando gold digger I don't need to justify that some due diligence is in order.

Presuming guilt until proven innocent is the literal opposite of due dilligence.

It doesn't matter if the accuser is a sibling, a spouse, a (ex-)lover, a friend, a stranger, or a little green man from Mars. Due dilligence is considering the allegations put forth before the court and the evidence provided to either prove or disprove those allegations, with the burden of evidence primarily lying with the accuser.

>Innocent until proven guilty only works when allegations are investigated–otherwise everyone is always "innocent" because you have just chosen not to look.

You are correct that everyone is presumed innocent of any allegations until the case is brought to a trial and judgment is passed in a court of law with no chance for further appeals. If an accuser never files a lawsuit to bring their allegation to trial, the only way we can consider the accused is that he is innocent of any allegations.

His sister is clearly mentally ill. Allegations are impossible to prove or deny. They should simply be ignored like the unhinged rantings of mentally ill people in general.

Mental illness is the norm for child abuse victims. It's not like she has a demonstrated pattern of doing this with other people, and she has appeared internally consistent over the course of years, so it should at least be addressed instead of hand waved away.

Her accusations against him are for acts that supposedly happened when she was to young have formed long term memory of them. She also thinks he is hacking her WiFi and somehow shadow banning her on multiple social media sites he has no control over. It screams of paranoid delusions.

Since when can 4-year-olds not form memories? This is neither congruent with medical literature nor experience.

Its called infantile amnesia it why people cant remember their earlychildhood as the brains not great at storing and generating autobiographical memories until about age 5. And it is well recognized in the literature.

You're misrepresenting the medical literature. It is not abnormal for children to form memories of highly personal events at that age.

This discussion is irrelevant, there is no point in entertaining the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic. There is literally no direction for this to go in.

Anyone that has professionally worked with the mentally ill knows that entertaining her claims is a complete and utter waste of time.

You are not her physician, stop pretending to speak on authority. Also, her being paranoid about the ultra-wealthy tech mogul that allegedly assaulted her is about as rational as half the tripe I hear from "sane" people on the internet everyday.

You don't need to be a physician to tell when someone is clearly mentally ill and/or making stuff up.

It must be an incredible burden always knowing the truth, when other people actually have to do investigations for that.

When someone has a giant gaping wound you don't need an expert to understand what it is.

Some forms of mental illness display themselves nearly as clearly and obviously as a giant gaping wound.

Bad things can happen to mentally ill people.

Yes, but it doesn't mean you need to entertain everything they say. Especially not paranoid delusions like "Apple and Google and Twitter are conspiring with Sam Altman to shadowban me."

I was told we’re supposed to #BelieveAllWomen.

Name one Smaug-like rich person that is just sitting on massive amounts of wealth.

That’s the point — any person sitting on massive wealth is definitionally Smaug-like, because that’s exactly what Smaug did.

But WHO is sitting on massive wealth Smaug-like? Who? That is what I asked.

> suck wealth from the poor and Smaug the money away like

What does that even mean? They buy up factories and let them sit idle?

The poor work in the factories, yet the owners of the factories get paid without having worked.

Smaug is a dragon from The Hobbit who sits on a pile of gold and plunder, not smog.

Hah didn’t even realize my comment could be read that way (yeah I do know who Smaug is)

It's based on the false premise that there is a specific amount of wealth and that's it (which also requires fixed productivity, which is a crazy premise if one knows anything about the past several hundred years or has ever read a single history textbook). So in order for someone to be rich, they had to steal it from someone else.

If you follow it to the logical conclusion, it's nothing more than repackaged original sin. All wealth, all income, is stolen from someone else with less, therefore you are all evil without exception to the extent you have anything. It's a liberal form of original sin (for humans to thrive we must alter our environment, we must save, to the extent you manage to accomplish that, you're evil, therefore you're evil for existing).

Keep in mind of course that China nicely disproved that premise in approximately the most dramatic way possible from ~1990-2020. If the pie were actually finite and had to be divided, swapped around, then China's extreme rise in wealth would have wiped out the equivalent of all of Western Europe's wealth combined.

> It's based on the false premise that there is a specific amount of wealth and that's it

Absolutely not. This is, in today's world, a perpetual cycle. Pay not keeping up with inflation, yet consumer costs across a wide range of vital services keeps increasing. This keeps the poor poor(er) and the rich rich(er).

The western financial system is based not on a finite amount of wealth, but definitely on the control of a finite amount of wealth vehicles. Consider, for example, the desperate measures that the US uses to try to curtail the access to technology by other countries such as China. Or, how the tech cartel uses their money to buy any new company that might become a competitor. In a perfect competitive system, each company and country would do their own work and not worry more than about fair competition. The modern financial system insists in controlling access to wealth across the world, while also avoiding competition.

No, it’s based on the fact that workers (often poor) generate all wealth, yet they don’t get to keep it.

In China they do get to keep more proportionally, as a class. That only happens because they form the ruling class.

And yet workers in those societies tend to end up poorer in the absolute sense. Funny how that works.

If you pay attention to history, they started out far poorer and improved quicker than in comparable countries.

Just because revolutions are more likely to happen in poor countries doesn't mean the revolutions caused the poverty.

That’s fair but I’d like to believe (and I know I’m speaking from emotion here and not any rationality) that the jury is still out on this one, and that improvement is not sustainable over the next few decades (in other words, this was a bubble). The alternative is just too hard to accept - it means we should just elect a dictator for life who knows best how to run a centrally planned economy for a low low price of not making fun of them too much and not asking inconvenient questions.

If you study further you will find out that socialist countries are and have been far more democratic than capitalist ones.

Of course, the ruling class of capitalist countries are incentivised to use their considerable power to lie about any socialist project and portray it as evil.

I grew up in a socialist country and saw how democratic it was first hand. No thanks.

I grew up in a post-socialist country. Most older people had some criticism, but overall missed socialism.

I always found it amazing to hear about workplace councils that could fire the boss or the very low rents.