I agree that the first sentence of your original comment is an interesting observation and that there might be an interesting thought here in how this situation interacted with gender dynamics.
I don’t like the rest of your comment though, since it seems to reduce the role of the female board members to their gender and is a bit suggestive in a way that doesn’t actually seem helpful to understand the situation.
We should probably reserve judgement until the final board members are announced.
That being said, I agree: this is one of the top AI organisations in the world. How much the new board reflects the values of humanity in general, rather than a tiny slice of tech guys, might have serious consequences on the future.
Thank you for clarifying the voting system for me. So my comment most likely irritated some folks with lots of karma.
I certainly don’t want to say things that irritate folks in the EA community . I was giving voice to what I might hear from some of my women friends, something like: “Yes Helen Toner was an EA, but she was a woman who was questioning what Altman was doing too.” According to this article, Altman tried to push out Helen Toner “because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company.” But she was on a board whose responsibility to make sure that AI serves humanity. So here job was in some sense to be critical of the company when it might be diverging from the mission of serving humanity. So when she tries to do her job, some founder-guy tries to her because the public discussion about the issue might be critical of something he implemented?
I think this information indicates that there is not only an EA/non-EA dimension to that precursor event, but I think most women would recognize that there is also a gender/power/authority dimension to that precursor event.
In spite of such considerations, I also agree with the idea that we should not focus on differences, conflict and divisions. And now I will more fully understand the karma cost of irritating someone who has much more karma than me on the forum.
Thank you for the feedback on my comment. It has been informative.
So my comment most likely irritated some folks with lots of karma.
I don’t know if this is true. Fwiw, I upvoted your comment pretty early on when it was double-digits negative, but I didn’t strong-upvote because I almost never strong-upvote (low-effort) comments.
I think this information indicates that there is not only an EA/non-EA dimension to that precursor event, but I think most women would recognize that there is also a gender/power/authority dimension to that precursor event.
Yeah I think that’s element is definitely there. It might not be big however. My own guess is that both EA/non-EA and gender dynamics are relatively small for the precursor event, compared to just “Yes-man to Sam” vs “doesn’t buy his aura and is sometimes willing to disagree with Sam.” Maybe gender dynamics or EA dynamics exacerbated it; eg, Sam would be more willing to respect billionaire male tech CEOs on the board than uppity women or weird social-movement people. But this is just speculation.
The vote system is explained here. Theoretically a strong upvote from a power user could reach +16 votes, although I think the maximum anyone’s gotten to is +10.
I think the system is kinda weird (although it benefits me), but it’s better now that the agreevotes are counted equally.
Mousing over the original comment, it currently has 69 votes which has somehow managed to average to a karma of 1. Seems to have split the crowd exactly evenly.
Your original comment, based on no evidence whatsoever, assuming the worst motivations of a stranger, and stretching to indulge the most divisive and identitarian explanation of events, gets rejected, and your reaction is to play the victim and pretend it confirms your hypothesis.
Robert’s comment raised the possibility of sexism playing a role (“many layers”) in what happened. I don’t think he was obliged to cite sources for the proposition that sexism exists in at least parts of the AI industry in a four-line comment. That has been a topic of discussion on a number of past threads.
The comment remains a controversial one, with lots of upvotes and downvotes almost cancelling each other out. To be clear, I don’t think it is a particularly good comment. I also don’t think it is a −14 comment based on the prevailing standards in this forum. Voting a comment below −9 collapses it into a single-line view, largely hiding it.
For that to be possible, it would require that Open AI was NOT sexist when it brought on two female board members. It somehow BECAME sexist later, after which it fired them both (as well as two other male board members, also known as the entire board), and imagines that event had little connection to the fact that these very board members had nearly destroyed the $100B company over which they were stewards in the preceding four days.
It’s a grotesque calumny. That’s all it is. It’s immoral race/sex baiting and should be called out as such rather than entertained, unless he has actual information about events he declined to share in his original post.
I am amazed that the EA community has such a negative reaction to someone pointing out the possibilities of institutional/AI-leadership sexism.
Within minutes my comment got −14 karma points. Interesting!
I agree that the first sentence of your original comment is an interesting observation and that there might be an interesting thought here in how this situation interacted with gender dynamics.
I don’t like the rest of your comment though, since it seems to reduce the role of the female board members to their gender and is a bit suggestive in a way that doesn’t actually seem helpful to understand the situation.
We should probably reserve judgement until the final board members are announced.
That being said, I agree: this is one of the top AI organisations in the world. How much the new board reflects the values of humanity in general, rather than a tiny slice of tech guys, might have serious consequences on the future.
Thank you for clarifying the voting system for me. So my comment most likely irritated some folks with lots of karma.
I certainly don’t want to say things that irritate folks in the EA community . I was giving voice to what I might hear from some of my women friends, something like: “Yes Helen Toner was an EA, but she was a woman who was questioning what Altman was doing too.” According to this article, Altman tried to push out Helen Toner “because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company.” But she was on a board whose responsibility to make sure that AI serves humanity. So here job was in some sense to be critical of the company when it might be diverging from the mission of serving humanity. So when she tries to do her job, some founder-guy tries to her because the public discussion about the issue might be critical of something he implemented?
I think this information indicates that there is not only an EA/non-EA dimension to that precursor event, but I think most women would recognize that there is also a gender/power/authority dimension to that precursor event.
In spite of such considerations, I also agree with the idea that we should not focus on differences, conflict and divisions. And now I will more fully understand the karma cost of irritating someone who has much more karma than me on the forum.
Thank you for the feedback on my comment. It has been informative.
It’s common enough that the initial net karma doesn’t resemble the long term net karma, I wouldn’t read too much into it :)
I don’t know if this is true. Fwiw, I upvoted your comment pretty early on when it was double-digits negative, but I didn’t strong-upvote because I almost never strong-upvote (low-effort) comments.
Yeah I think that’s element is definitely there. It might not be big however. My own guess is that both EA/non-EA and gender dynamics are relatively small for the precursor event, compared to just “Yes-man to Sam” vs “doesn’t buy his aura and is sometimes willing to disagree with Sam.” Maybe gender dynamics or EA dynamics exacerbated it; eg, Sam would be more willing to respect billionaire male tech CEOs on the board than uppity women or weird social-movement people. But this is just speculation.
The forum has a thing where people with more karma have more upvote/downvote power (at least this was a thing last year. I presume it still is).
This means that even though you got −14 in minutes, that might just be 2 people downvoting in total.
Worth keeping in mind.
Someone else feel free to point out I am mistaken if I am indeed mistaken.
The vote system is explained here. Theoretically a strong upvote from a power user could reach +16 votes, although I think the maximum anyone’s gotten to is +10.
I think the system is kinda weird (although it benefits me), but it’s better now that the agreevotes are counted equally.
Mousing over the original comment, it currently has 69 votes which has somehow managed to average to a karma of 1. Seems to have split the crowd exactly evenly.
Your original comment, based on no evidence whatsoever, assuming the worst motivations of a stranger, and stretching to indulge the most divisive and identitarian explanation of events, gets rejected, and your reaction is to play the victim and pretend it confirms your hypothesis.
That’s why.
Robert’s comment raised the possibility of sexism playing a role (“many layers”) in what happened. I don’t think he was obliged to cite sources for the proposition that sexism exists in at least parts of the AI industry in a four-line comment. That has been a topic of discussion on a number of past threads.
The comment remains a controversial one, with lots of upvotes and downvotes almost cancelling each other out. To be clear, I don’t think it is a particularly good comment. I also don’t think it is a −14 comment based on the prevailing standards in this forum. Voting a comment below −9 collapses it into a single-line view, largely hiding it.
A possibility?
For that to be possible, it would require that Open AI was NOT sexist when it brought on two female board members. It somehow BECAME sexist later, after which it fired them both (as well as two other male board members, also known as the entire board), and imagines that event had little connection to the fact that these very board members had nearly destroyed the $100B company over which they were stewards in the preceding four days.
It’s a grotesque calumny. That’s all it is. It’s immoral race/sex baiting and should be called out as such rather than entertained, unless he has actual information about events he declined to share in his original post.