One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can't.

Throughout my life, what colleagues/friends are unwilling to remark plainly on has been the most telling factor of someone’s character to me.

This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character.

Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.

I have been in or next to a number of social circles with such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge certain Facts that are known about some members, because it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy.

Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives...

People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost.

It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.

Maybe they have ADHD because the symptoms fit, if they really do acknowledge the problem yet cannot fix it.

that's not ADHD. People with ADHD would improve - it may take a LOT of time, but it will happen. Quite often they will go to the extreme and come in way too early. My bet would be on Cluster B personality trait e.g. lack of empathy and constant need for attention and validation.

ADHD frequently co-occurs with other conditions.

That is not always true and not always with everyone. Many people who have ADHD have unsolvable time blindness. They don't mean to do it but their brain chemistry literally disallows them from not doing so in many cases.

Correct. It's been a lifelong struggle for me. I have found outside ways to address it, but even in my 30's I will forget to eat meals or do chores if I don't set disruptive alarms to do so.

That's exactly my point! you do set alarms, you seek the solution. You feel bad when running late so you mask or compensate. If you lack empathy or seek attention, you wouldn't do those things.

To be clear, I am ADHD (executive-type) and am empathetic to my friend. All considered I am quite fond of my time spent with them. But in regards to developing a model for ones character I don't think it is very helpful to allow disabilities to shape them. It is simply impossible to share the individual essence related and is better understood through the manifestation which is ultimately shared. And regardless I would hope they would seek this diagnosis as a function of their own introspection according to my account of the phenomenon, not some extrapolation. [0]

To engage with your curiosity of their situation though, they spend a lot of time at poker tables, sitting for 8+ hours. I would assume this is not a common enjoyment for most ADHD minds. From my experience as soon as I'm out the action for a string of hands I'm completely checked out of any rigid strategy. Now sit me at a blackjack table and I can crank hands until the morning! But here I am being fed action and drinks basically on demand.

[0] I'm just thinking out loud here, not accusing you of making any claim related

I would say I didn't mean the statement that generally - it was contextual to the topic.

i.e. If your friends wont remark on your penmanship, who cares? If they wont remark on how you treat service workers at a restaurant, that's probably concerning.

I should've edited my comment, on reflection my example doesn't fit! I think rincebrain had a nice way of wording what I now believe to be your intent!

You mention many proxies of Musk who post negative content about Altman.

In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman has similar proxies?

How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?

Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like Hackernews?

> where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long

For anyone unfamiliar with this process, the New Yorker documentary is well worth the watch: https://www.netflix.com/title/81770824

Thanks for sharing! I saw the 100 years exhibit in person, which was really interesting. I was especially moved by the display of and context around the Hiroshima issue. I didn’t know there was also a documentary, and I’m excited to see it

Calling your own article all those things is a major turn-off.

This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today, where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity. The real world rigor of The New Yorker’s editorial standards and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those aren’t in favor in the tech industry currently.

> ... where every word is chosen carefully...

In light of that...

> "Texts from this period show Altman coördinating closely with Nadella"

Why did you make the odd choice of a diaresis on this word?

if this isn’t a joke - new yorker style uses a diaresis when a word has a repeated vowel where the second vowel is part of a different syllable. coördinate, coöperate, and reëlect are probably the most common places where this comes up

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

It is how you properly tell apart a coop which houses chickens from a coöp which is a business entity owned by its members

Ah yes, the diaresis will relieve those confused chicken farmers! A thousand thanks to The New Yorker.

With this in mind, I think you would be the perfect investigative journalist to track down the archives of The National Enquirer.

This was our "hometown" gossip paper in South Florida, and you should have seen the pictures and stuff that they did print. And this was after threats of celebrity lawsuits in the mid-1970's had curtailed any tendency to exaggerate.

Back when almost nobody outside of New York had heard of Trump, he started coming down to play golf and made quite an impression among the well-established Florida real-estate operators. They could see right through him like any other fake millionaire from New York, which were a dime a dozen. There was just a general consensus among many visitors that what happens in South Florida stays in South Florida. Epstein grew up in this environment.

You would see pictures of him with unidentified non-Stormy dates, and some insinuation in the gossip column but you knew they were holding back from anything that could not be truly verified.

By the time of his presidential run, it looks like he had become well acquainted with David Pecker who owned the Enquirer. I wouldn't be surprised when he sold the publishing company that there are archives somewhere that contain all the supporting stuff that was unverified at the time. When Trump & Epstein were much younger running buddies for so long.

There is something disturbing about the idea that 8 hours must be spent by editors deliberating about each sentence in a piece like this. It's almost like you're reinforcing the idea of just how powerful this power-seeking human has become.

We're all here worried about calling the guy liar liar pants on fire, but maybe none of that matters to him as long as he comes away looking even more powerful? That's what he's so successful optimizing for.

How neo-medieval peasant of me to feel this awe - great piece. Insane world we live in.