I found it incredible that such brilliant and attractive people would be dumb enough to risk it all for the relatively paltry gains that embezzlement can earn. I kept looking to see the underlying motivations...
In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke takes a starfighter and flies to another planet, pursues training with Yoda etc. I'm pretty sure the other timelines in the movie don't reasonably match up and I don't recall this causing a big hullabaloo.
What people will blithely accept in a popular movie tells you something about their mental processes. It tells you something about how tolerant they will be of half-truths and stories not quite adding up IRL. And some people like exploiting that fact for some reason.
They usually have an excuse -- "I'm some minority group or other and we never get a fair shake." But the reality is, as the author says, they just like it for some reason.
Most people have partial info and make decisions based on simple rubrics, not comprehensive overviews of some unknown future. People routinely see what they want to see -- "Look! Free money -- again!" -- and blithely ignore inconvenient truths -- "Oops! Arrested again."
Comments suggesting "right to be forgotten" is problematic are correct. It typically just teaches people they can get away with it.
1. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston tend to keep their private life private.
2. If I'm correct, it seems unlikely Paul told anyone he hired Sam to protect his personal interests as a married man nervous about his pretty younger wife working closely with another men.
3. If I'm correct, he probably didn't even tell Jessica because that would have come off as "I don't trust you" and not "I am worried about his behavior."
I spent several years trying to figure this out and I did not keep track of my sources because it was a personal interest, not an "argument" I was trying to make. But here is pg talking about Jessica Livingston and YC:
YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us.
Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal it.
That wasn't the "scandal" I had in mind. I was wondering "How in the heck did one of three male co-founders ask her for a date, her say yes and this not turn into three male co-founders fighting over who gets the girl instead of focusing on developing the business?"
I have hung out on HN for over 14 years and took a personal interest in "How in the heck did a pretty young woman co-found a company with three men, date one of them and not have this turn into a debacle and scandal in the headlines???" It took quite a few years for the details behind the founding of YC to come out:
1. Jessica Livingston did not co-found a company with three random men.
2. She and Paul Graham were dating, she was job hunting and being jerked around and he said one day "Why don't we start a company?"
3. Within a day or so, he called his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to come on board like part time or something and they said "yes."
4. They initially hid their personal relationship as a dating couple to try to appear professional.
So they have a long history of being very private people and because I am a woman who has struggled to get any traction and blah blah blah, when I learned Sam was gay, I figured "Ah, that's probably the real reason he was appointed President of YC: Paul Graham wanted to protect his marriage while retiring from YC and was concerned about his pretty, younger wife working closely with a man other than himself. So he appointed a gay guy to take over 45 percent of his duties."*
So if that had anything to do with the hiring decision, not announcing the firing would be in line with long-standing personal policy to keep his private life private and not talk to the world about his marriage to Jessica Livingston and it wouldn't exactly be shocking if that meant it (hiring him) wasn't the wisest business move.
She eventually also retired from YC, so her being there while Paul Graham is home with the kids is no longer relevant to who runs things at YC. They are both founders and presumably major stock holders, I imagine they both still have influence there.
/"wild speculation" from an outsider who has never met any of these people but did sort of politely cyberstalk Jessica Livingston for some years trying to figure "How does a woman become a successful business founder?"
* "45 percent" because Paul said somewhere that he continued to do "office hours" with program participants and called that "10 percent" of what he did at YC before retiring. They also hired Dan Gackle to take over as moderator of Hacker News when Paul Graham stepped down.
So Paul was not replaced by Sam Altman. They hired two full-time employees that I know of and Paul continued to work part-time at the business while his wife worked full-time and presumably kept Paul up-to-date about daily goings-on over breakfast/dinner, so he likely continued to have significant influence on company decisions and day-to-day stuff invisibly via his wife.
I think the most charitable interpretation of this phenomenon is that bureaucracy is hell and the entire organization tends to get put on a leash pegged to the level of incompetence of whomever is in charge of #thing.
I was molested as a child. I know a fair amount about abuse.
There isn't always a clear bright line between ignorance and abuse. Assuming the worst can make the problem worse.
People tend to not be paragons of virtue who have all the answers for everything they run into. Some people can be helped to become better parents.
I thought long and hard about that while sending care packages to a couple of welfare moms. Declaring them unfit moms and having their kids taken and placed in foster care wasn't some magic solution that guaranteed a fabulous outcome, so I chose to try to help them succeed to whatever degree I could, on a limited budget and from a distance.
They routinely recommend pro inflammatory foods like peanut butter. It's an inflammatory condition.
They recommend sugary foods. It's a condition that puts one at high risk of diabetes.
They recommend ice cream as a high fat, high calorie food. It's a condition that predisposes people to having trouble tolerating milk and milk products, especially from cows.
If the parent is abusive, trying to get their cooperation in fixing the problem may be an effective means to out them.
They had absolutely no reason to believe I was abusing him. Most likely, they were just trying to cover their own butts and err in that direction rather than in the direction of "what's best for this child?"
That's without getting into larger concerns of "What on earth is wrong with the world that a junk food diet is the medically recommended diet for a serious medical condition?"
You are missing the part where I harmed his health to comply with their expectations. He was fine and does better on a high quality diet than on a junk food diet.
My oldest son has special needs. He's 2e -- gifted and learning disabled -- and has a serious medical condition associated with being very underweight.
I put him in preschool to get him to talk. He could use sentences but wasn't.
At the start of kindergarten, first, second and third grade, I spoke with the teacher, explained he was difficult, let them know I welcomed communication on any issue. They were thrilled and relieved. Parents are often part of the problem.
By fourth grade, my son was no longer obviously "the weird kid." That teacher reported me to the social worker for letting him know up front my child was difficult and please don't hesitate to discuss things with me.
The social worker called me, we talked for a bit. She knew both my kids. Laughed it off as a silly misunderstanding. Months later, his teacher let me know he did eventually get the memo that my child had quirky interpretations of social things.
After my son finally got a proper diagnosis for his medical issue, he gained twenty pounds in one year and this did wonders for his social skills. Then he lost five pounds.
He still felt better than he ever had and neither of us were concerned. His medical team implied I was in danger of being reported to children's services as an abusive mother.
Because his condition predisposes people to being very underweight, pediatric clinics for the condition routinely include a dietitian and yet the standard recommended diet is "junk food" because it's high salt, high fat, high calorie and cheap.
I had not been feeding him junk food, but I dutifully put a big bowl of snacks in the middle of the coffee table. He regained 2.5 pounds, they decided that was adequate and didn't need more follow up visits.
We got home and, with no longer being under threat of being turned in as a neglectful or abusive parent, the first thing he did was hand me the bowl and tell me "We are never doing this again. I feel terrible!"
We resumed feeding him a high quality diet in line with the high fat, high salt, high calorie recommendations.
It's awful to be so protective of your children and be accused of abusing them based on no real evidence. I wish this project well.
These are not "personal circumstances." Laws have been written to intentionally disenfranchise Black Americans, to intentionally criminalize Black Americans, etc.
This is probably not even the right debate to be having. It's just the debate or goal that historically oppressed and mistreated groups feel is maybe attainable.
In a world where Black Americans can't reasonably expect the authorities to not shoot them essentially for being Black in America, they can ask for racist, pro-slavery symbols or guns or similar to be edited out of popular fiction or removed from public spaces in the form of statues and maybe get it.
I recall reading that some Black artist was told his song about wanting to kill the cops was not okay. Cops can kill Blacks. Blacks can't sing about how that makes them feel.
So not all people are equally allowed to express their artistic vision or their feelings or their lived reality and it's too much to ask to be treated like human beings or even allowed a voice of their own, so the ask is for others to tone it down as a hoped for step in the right direction.
I don't know what the solution is. I wish we (in the US) fed people in prison better and had enough decent affordable housing for starters but even those modest goals seem completely out of reach.
My oldest was checked for ADHD in kindergarten and the ruled out ADHD because he paid more attention to longer sentences. It would be some years before I would learn that he was basically suffering from "bored gifted kid syndrome (TM)" and not ADHD.
He also has some health issues and can't pay attention when he's under the weather.
There can be lots of reasons someone has trouble concentrating at times.
ADHD is supposed to be a diagnosis of last resort that they give after eliminating all other possibilities. It's useful to know the root cause of whatever problems you may be having.
Some studies and some individuals report benefiting from certain nutritional supplements if you get a diagnosis and want to treat it without medication per se.
In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke takes a starfighter and flies to another planet, pursues training with Yoda etc. I'm pretty sure the other timelines in the movie don't reasonably match up and I don't recall this causing a big hullabaloo.
What people will blithely accept in a popular movie tells you something about their mental processes. It tells you something about how tolerant they will be of half-truths and stories not quite adding up IRL. And some people like exploiting that fact for some reason.
They usually have an excuse -- "I'm some minority group or other and we never get a fair shake." But the reality is, as the author says, they just like it for some reason.
Most people have partial info and make decisions based on simple rubrics, not comprehensive overviews of some unknown future. People routinely see what they want to see -- "Look! Free money -- again!" -- and blithely ignore inconvenient truths -- "Oops! Arrested again."
Comments suggesting "right to be forgotten" is problematic are correct. It typically just teaches people they can get away with it.