The alternative here is accepting it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Sam Altman decided it would be a good idea to have an ex-employee (of no particular import) murdered for expressing their opinion on Twitter.

> Sam Altman decided

What is more plausible is a "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" [1] situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

Especially given his whole cult of personality schtick

I know a lot of people hate Altman with a passion, but I haven't encountered that depth of feeling going in the other direction.

The strongest advocation I have seen for him has be to say that he is an extremely persuasive and talented organiser with vision. The only thing that distinguishes that from any other superlative laden blurb you could find about just about any tech CEO is the persuasive attribute.

Surely that’s not the only alternative? I can think of countless others.

Personally I do not want to start any conspiracies myself by listing them, but this is hardly a binary choice

I can't tell. Are you saying it's not?

have you seen the lengths to which Sama goes to silence ex-employees using legal means like cancelling vested equity and super-aggressive NDAs. there have been multiple articles written on that. its not far fetched to imagine & definitely not conspiratorial if you factor in the fact that now openAI has $40B worth of saudi investments. that regime is known to some of most vicious atrocities including that reporter.

this would be sending a clear message to future whistleblowers.

it wasnt sam. it was the federal government who has many state assets installed in openAI. would this be the first time a global power murdered someone for trying to blow the whistle?

Ironically, despite the name "Hacker News", I've noticed many are quick to adopt the official narrative largely unquestioningly

If a hacker just went against the official narrative as a knee jerk reaction that would make them more like a rebellious teenager no?

In a sense you are agreeing that this as tragic as it is probable needs no further discussion

The spirit is completely gone, isn't it? When a hacker was mysteriously hanged in 1988, people discussed it for years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker)

Now everyone is accusing others of "conspiracy theories" and browbeating everyone to follow the party line.

I'll just leave this here: "High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.3790), previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27806447.

Most here on HN seem to have fairly high critical thinking ability.

hacker news has always been hacker the same way a hot dog is a dog.

I don't think it's a coincidence. The correlation is that some whistleblowers are troubled people. And sometimes troubled people kill themselves.

I'll add that part of my view is largely colored by having known the Facebook whistleblower before she became the FB whistleblower. She was an acquaintance of a woman I dated. She told me personal information about her sex life that is inappropriate to talk about with someone you've just met. I don't even remember what she told me, just that she was kind of a creep, which is a surprising thing to think of a woman.

Further bias I have is that if the whistleblower has released information that we already know, let's call it a "nothingburger", they're more likely to be troubled. It comes off as risky, attention-seeking behavior.

(To add, I doubt the Boeing whistleblower killed himself. Not sure about Epstein (mentioned elsewhere in the thread), but he's not a whistleblower, just a tremendously evil piece of shit, so I think that could easily be suicide knowing he faced a lifetime of assrape in prison.)

Because it’s almost always correct and feeding oxygen to conspiracies further pollutes the space and numbs people to when there really are sinister actors at play.

I think it’s a tricky situation. Most of the time it’s noise and unproductive. But we also don’t want to sterilize the environment so far that we can’t ever question things. There’s a tricky balance.

because HN is influenced by the CIA. its a major clearinghouse of ideas and what is written in these comments is read by disproportionately wealthy and influential people.