Hi Oli — I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.
I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.
It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam’s reference to ‘nice apartments’ in the interview:
“I don’t know, I kind of like nice apartments. … I’m not really that much of a consumer exactly. It’s never been what’s important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets.”
Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.
In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the ‘crypto’ social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.
Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.
Thanks for your in depth response to this question by the way, its really appreciated and exactly what I was looking for from this post! It is pretty strange that no one reached out to you in a professional capacity to correct this, but that certainly isn’t your fault!
Makes sense, seems like a sad failure of communication :(
Looks like on my side I had an illusion of transparency which made me feel like you must very likely know about this, which made me expect that a conversation about this would end up more stressful than it probably would have been. I expected that even if you didn’t do it intentionally (which I thought was plausible, but even at the time not very likely), I still expected that there was some subconscious or semi-intentional bias that I would have had to deal with that would have made the conversation pretty difficult. I do know think it’s very likely that the conversation would have just gone fine, and maybe would have successfully raised some flags.
I do wonder whether there was some way to catch this kind of thing. I wonder whether if the podcasts would be reliably posted to the forum with transcripts (which I think would be a great idea anyways), there is a higher chance someone would have left a comment pointing out the inconsistency (I think I at least would have been more likely to do that).
My guess is there are also various other lessons to take away from this, and I am interested in more detail on what you and other people at 80k did know about, but doesn’t seem necessary to go into right now. I appreciate you replying here.
Hi Oli — I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.
I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.
It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam’s reference to ‘nice apartments’ in the interview:
Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.
In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the ‘crypto’ social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.
Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.
Hey Rob,
Thanks for your in depth response to this question by the way, its really appreciated and exactly what I was looking for from this post! It is pretty strange that no one reached out to you in a professional capacity to correct this, but that certainly isn’t your fault!
Makes sense, seems like a sad failure of communication :(
Looks like on my side I had an illusion of transparency which made me feel like you must very likely know about this, which made me expect that a conversation about this would end up more stressful than it probably would have been. I expected that even if you didn’t do it intentionally (which I thought was plausible, but even at the time not very likely), I still expected that there was some subconscious or semi-intentional bias that I would have had to deal with that would have made the conversation pretty difficult. I do know think it’s very likely that the conversation would have just gone fine, and maybe would have successfully raised some flags.
I do wonder whether there was some way to catch this kind of thing. I wonder whether if the podcasts would be reliably posted to the forum with transcripts (which I think would be a great idea anyways), there is a higher chance someone would have left a comment pointing out the inconsistency (I think I at least would have been more likely to do that).
My guess is there are also various other lessons to take away from this, and I am interested in more detail on what you and other people at 80k did know about, but doesn’t seem necessary to go into right now. I appreciate you replying here.