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Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man?

265 points · 239 comments · ragall

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k310 · 1790753741 · focus · HN ↗
Wilhoit's law.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
<a href="https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/" rel="nofollow">https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
1. jdkdkdkdfk · 1790757832 · focus · HN ↗
  I think you mistyped judaism bro
2. jongjong · 1790758285 · focus · HN ↗
  That's not conservatism, that's what any system of governance consists of.
  Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the faster and higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their fanciful beliefs and severely skewed/optimistic worldviews.
  There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.
  The people who get to power are often the least qualified to use it effectively because their entire existence is colored by a myth that everything just keeps getting better if you just set your mind to it.
  No person who has ever attained power or success has ever had the first hand experience of hard work never paying off. Yet it is the normal experience of life for the vast majority of people. This realistic worldview demands a very different set of laws than what the typical person who attains power will provide.
  1. bryanlarsen · 1790758504 · focus · HN ↗
    Biden's second largest donor, SBF, is spending many years behind bars.
    jongjong · 1790760505 · focus · HN ↗
    Must have been a massive shock in contrast to his life up until that point... But even he is more optimistic being in jail than I've ever been in my life. SBF probably still thinks he can be pardoned. Probably still thinks he will rebuild everything. Success creates a kind of delusional optimism which serves like a permanent light at the of the tunnel.
    Yizahi · 1790764873 · focus · HN ↗
    Crypto-token fans are overwhelmingly supporting conservatives in all countries across the globe and especially in USA, because the whole basis of their "business" is hinged on ignoring laws and getting a pass by the conservative admin. Zhao just plain bribed Trump with 2 billion dollars to go free after being jailed by the Dem administration, lol. Talk about support :) .
  2. enugu · 1790761096 · focus · HN ↗
    Thomas Edison?
    "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
    Maybe you can reframe your point as a typical trend, but there are other typical paths as well.
    Googling "succesful people with history of failure" gives interesting examples.
    actionfromafar · 1790762590 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe someone worked as hard as Edison but did not succeed.
    IAmBroom · 1790771345 · focus · HN ↗
    Like some of his competitors in the race to develop electrical lighting? Many suffered fires that destroyed their workspaces.
    blooalien · 1790772431 · focus · HN ↗
    > Maybe someone worked as hard as Edison but did not succeed.
    Wasn't that guy Nikola Tesla?
    jongjong · 1790813913 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, this is probably as good as we can get and I think his past failures may be the reason why he eventually became so widely known and highly regarded.
    Still, this quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." is kind of illustrating my point about the strength of the bias which success creates. Even a man who (allegedly) failed 10000 times still feels like his eventual success was a matter of fate (part of his success journey)... That's extremely delusional. Had someone else stolen his 10001th invention and gotten all the investments, that other person would have had all the credit, nobody would know who Thomas Edison is and he would have felt very differently about his failures and the system as whole.
    Nikola Tesla probably had a slightly more realistic worldview (especially by the end of his life), but I bet you there are many no-name inventors who invented great things who weren't recognized at all, even after their deaths. I'm quite sure that there are many times more inventors who didn't get any credit for their valuable contributions than those who did get credit. Getting credit for your work is a fluke, not the norm.
    Claude estimates that, during their lives, 40% of inventors were not credited at all, 35% were under-credited and only 25% were fairly credited. Now, among those, how many actually got rewarded for it financially? Probably less than that 25% figure.
    Imagine how hard it is, how lucky you have to be, to invent something which happens to be useful and that only gets you into the draw for a 1/4 chance of getting some reward out of it.
    Even if you look at recent AI/LLMs innovation as an example; who got most of the credit for it? Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are the big 2. These people do deserve credit but people barely know who the authors of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper are. Also, nobody would have know about Jürgen Schmidhuber if Elon Musk had not mentioned him. There are almost certainly many people who have been completely forgotten when it comes to AI.
    enugu · 1790876660 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but 'Success is not given to many who deserve it (ex: Tesla)' is not incompatible with the original point 'Successful people know about failure.'
    PS: Success is helped by both talent/hard-work + luck/networking. There are poor people who have the first but not the second, but also privileged people who have the second but not the first.
3. yutter4 · 1790758752 · focus · HN ↗
  So, just like all of the others then?
4. spwa4 · 1790758903 · focus · HN ↗
  You assume this is one-sided. For example how about for once we detail the two positions on immigration accurately. Each is of course misguided, and neither is moral by the standards of people using the position.
  1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
  2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
  In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
  1. vrganj · 1790760093 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the fatal error is using immigration as the key rubric.
    Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
    You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
    Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
    philipallstar · 1790760571 · focus · HN ↗
    > Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
    There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.
    vrganj · 1790760658 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure there are. That's the point. Squabbling about implementation details keeps us busy from talking about the architectural design.
    I will remind you that this thread was initially about an oligarch getting away with things. Somehow, we're already being drawn into immigration. This thread itself is an in-vivo example of the point I'm making.
    vintermann · 1790761856 · focus · HN ↗
    So hyperpowerful tech billionaires escaping accountability is a pet peeve, but immigration isn't?
    I wish I could say it was just a conspiracy theory that culture war issues is used as distraction from class war issues. But it's just so undeniable, it would be comical if it weren't tragic.
    johnnyanmac · 1790829910 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    meowface · 1790761740 · focus · HN ↗
    Conspiracist nonsense lapped up by base populists.
    (I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
    vrganj · 1790762239 · focus · HN ↗
    Which part is incorrect? I invite you to actually address my claims instead of degrading the quality of debate.
    Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
    Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
    Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
    JuniperMesos · 1790764195 · focus · HN ↗
    > Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
    No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
    I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
    > Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
    This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
    > Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
    Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
    vrganj · 1790777208 · focus · HN ↗
    > No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
    I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
    But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
    Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
    However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
    > I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
    And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
    That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
    [0] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hassabis-us-ai-coalition-g7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hass...
    [1] <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/what-percent-of-the-worlds-wealth-is-controlled-by-billionaires/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...
    meowface · 1790778349 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    vrganj · 1790778972 · focus · HN ↗
    > Even if they had no power at all, they'd still be forced to suck up to the authoritarian Trump regime. They have to, because he's petty and vindictive and they rationally don't want to be wrecked by a narcissistic authoritarian.
    Sure, but it goes both ways. Musk didn't need to take the chance to wreck government mechanisms that are supposed to be a check on his companies. Altman et al don't need to lecture world leaders at the G7, etc etc. All of those are active choices.
    > This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity
    This is where we disagree. Wealth isn't some objective number in isolation. Sure, getting everyone out of poverty is amazing and one has to commend societies that achieve that - most notable example here would be China over the past few decades.
    But the key thing to understand here is that wealth is a social relation, not some sort of pure material thing. If you were the only person on the planet, technically I guess you would own it all, but I'm sure you understand that statement would be meaningless. What makes wealth interesting is that it is formalized power over.
    It's what makes the cleaner clean the well-off persons toilet because they wouldn't be able to afford food otherwise. It's how the middle aged white guy gets to sleep with the young Thai girl because she's worried about her mother's medical bills.
    That social relation is the injustice that requires solving once a base of material comfort is met. Raising the floor isn't enough. Removing the twisted power games is the only way to have a society that isn't deeply extractive and disturbing.
    meowface · 1790786683 · focus · HN ↗
    The discussion was originally about Altman. If we're going to discuss Musk: sure, he is an absolutely horrible person and political figure in myriad ways. Arguably one of the worst people alive, in some ways. (Despite his laudable business achievements and some public goods like Starlink.)
    One can't lump together Altman and Musk. (Plus they despise one another.) Or lump together all tech CEOs or all billionaires.
    The rest of your post is incorrect, zero-sum thinking. There is not a fixed pie which people take proportional slices out of. That's not how wealth or the economy work. Nor are relative wealth differences the most important thing people care about. People somewhat care about making more or less money than their neighbor, but they care even more about their absolute standard of living and material conditions.
    Some thoughts on this topic that I agree with, by the creator of this website:
    <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
    <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html
    <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html
    <a href="https://x.com/paulg/status/2089044855158956533" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/paulg/status/2089044855158956533
    <a href="https://x.com/paulg/status/2052510098035998846" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/paulg/status/2052510098035998846
    As for concentration of power in societies: so long as there is still democracy and some laws preventing ultra-wealthy people from influencing politics through completely corrupt means (directly bribing politicians), it's not necessarily a big deal, if everyone already has great lives.
    vrganj · 1790855990 · focus · HN ↗
    > The rest of your post is incorrect, zero-sum thinking. There is not a fixed pie which people take proportional slices out of. That's not how wealth or the economy work. Nor are relative wealth differences the most important thing people care about. People somewhat care about making more or less money than their neighbor, but they care even more about their absolute standard of living and material conditions.
    Yes, but we are talking about a potential scenario where the material conditions are "abundance". That factor is just... met at some point. Then only the other factor remains.
    philipallstar · 1790783439 · focus · HN ↗
    > However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
    That is indeed alarmist, at least. If you define wealth in a really stupid way you can get to that statement, but it has to be a really stupid way.
    vrganj · 1790788311 · focus · HN ↗
    Twelve people have the same negotiation leverage as half of humanity and you cannot see how that could possibly be conceived as alarming?
    philipallstar · 1790795461 · focus · HN ↗
    You mean they can give away ownership of companies in exchange for things? I suppose so, but can you give me a for instance? Elon Musk swaps half of his SpaceX stake for something?
    meowface · 1790767537 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    vrganj · 1790776573 · focus · HN ↗
    I am certain it must feel that way to you.
    With that in mind, it's a bit unfortunate you're not willing or able to share any evidence for your beliefs with us and I fear it might make it hard for the rest of us to take them seriously - right now they mostly read as bad-faith trolling and derailment.
    Let me know once you feel ready to have a fact-based conversation - for now, I'll leave you to your ad hominems and bold unfounded assertions.
    spwa4 · 1790850328 · focus · HN ↗
    > Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
    No. I think you'll find that certainly when it comes to effective ownership, the US is more equal, not less, than most 3rd world countries.
    People don't know this, because this is heavily deemphasized, but it's second or third world countries where you find absurd wealth absurdly concentrated, not the US. Of course, if anything that's still an argument in favor of redistribution. Relative equality, even compared to Europe, but certainly compared to Africa or India or Asia, was what built the US. Let's get back to that.
    Even now, even compared to Europe, you can say the US is more equal in that the US rich are "young" families. In Europe, there was some wealth redistribution among the ultra-rich in the 20th century ... but that happened due to and through WW2.
    Most ultra-rich families are like the Von Der Leyens. Nobody in her family has been living in anything less than a castle for over 800 years. Her family has been wealthy for over 3 times the total lifetime of the US, and her family became wealthy as the result of a "free city" grant ... by the Holy Roman Empire (essentially a tax break, just centuries ago)
    And places like Africa and Asia are an order of magnitude worse.
    consensus1 · 1790762356 · focus · HN ↗
    But implicit in your statement is "accept my position on immigration." You are probably not interested in giving in to the conservative position on immigration in order to get them on your side against Altman.
    vrganj · 1790762397 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't have a position on immigration.
    consensus1 · 1790762727 · focus · HN ↗
    That makes you a supporter of the existing immigration system
    actionfromafar · 1790762929 · focus · HN ↗
    The execute-anyone-on-the-streets system? That's a stretch to assume.
    vrganj · 1790763284 · focus · HN ↗
    You're still doing the very thing I pointed out above.
    We went from a conversation about Mr. Altman's impunity to one about speculating my stance on some specific immigration system.
    The mechanism I described, live for anyone to see.
  2. Arkhaine_kupo · 1790761624 · focus · HN ↗
    > They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation
    that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....
    Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?
    > We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us
    As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...
    The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids
    > Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.
    Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.
    You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.
    consensus1 · 1790762263 · focus · HN ↗
    Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration examples are a tiny fraction of what immigration is in the US. The tens of millions of unskilled illegals allowed into the country is a wage suppression tool.
    Arkhaine_kupo · 1790766873 · focus · HN ↗
    The peak of immigration was 2.4 million, maybe the tens of millions of non existent people would certainly affect wages.
    But maybe decades of anti unionisation efforts, manufacturing displacement and lack of updates to minimimum wage, healthcare provisions and general safety net have a higher impact on keeping wages low. Idk, the possibility of dying without access to a doctor if you dont work might keep people from asking for a higher salary if you think about it for even a fraction of a second.
    Also there are 1 million concurrent international students while on average the USA receives around 1.5 million immigrants per year. which means that there are a 60/40 split. With many students returning to their countries but similarly many legal immigrants having temporal visas like H1B and conditional stays (marital, family visa, contract visa or refugee visas).
    The percentage of immigrants is also been stable since the 1870s around 12-15%. There was a depression during WW2 with it going as low as 7% in the early 50s, which has little to do with immigration and more to do with millions of deaths globally. Also it rebounded to 13% quite quickly and has been there since the 60s with no meaningful relationship between wages and immigration numbers
    > Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration
    The two countries with the highest immigration to the USA behind Mexico (which is obvious due to proximity and opportunity), are India and China.
    The best mathematician in america is a second generation immigrant in Terrence Tao. The biggest tech companies are headed by immigrants or sons of immigrants (satya nadella, elon musk, jobs, Lisa Su).
    Like you can argue that the GDP going up is responsibility of immigrants as much as you can argue that there is wage suppression due to immigration
5. monideas · 1790759941 · focus · HN ↗
  Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
  For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
  Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
  And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
  We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
  1. Arkhaine_kupo · 1790760999 · focus · HN ↗
    > Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
    No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
    The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
    So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
    We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
    monideas · 1790761494 · focus · HN ↗
    What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.
    Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.
    You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.
    In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.
    We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
    If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.
    actionfromafar · 1790762289 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, words have different meanings depending on context.
    cauch · 1790763335 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure it is true that "discrimination = bad" is a "liberal frame".
    On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.
    (and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")
    There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.
    People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.
    This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".
    But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".
    monideas · 1790765526 · focus · HN ↗
    I would say generally speaking under Liberalism the notions of different registers or rings of “collective” are illegible. There is only the individual and the collective, not different types of collective.
    This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
    Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.
    This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
    cauch · 1790768842 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, yes, liberalism is often pushing against building a society where we have "clans" or "groups" that exert authorities on individual actions.
    I don't think it means that "ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define within liberalism". I think they define them as clearly as in conservative circles (if not better, in conservative circles, these notions are often "gut feelings").
    And I don't think liberalism is "trying to kill ideas of nuclear family". People can still have as much nuclear family as they want, as long as it does not impact people who don't recognise their arbitrary authority.
    For example, Black Lives Matter is a good example, as they never rejected the notion of nuclear family, just said they don't recognize its authority when this structure is restricting the solidarity potential between individuals.
    Same with citizenship: it is not true that liberalism struggles with this notion. Liberalism is just trying to find a fair balance and avoid cases of unfair restrictions on people whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. It does not mean citizenship is rejected in itself, but it means that you cannot arbitrarily invent rules that favourise the group you are part of.
    Arkhaine_kupo · 1790771438 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
    > Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
    The definition of nuclear family is incredibly easy to explain. And BLM rejecting its enshrinement in certain political and legislative situations doesn't make its definition any harder?
    Like if you are a kid brought up by your aunt, or grandma. Or if one parent is dead, or divorced etc having limited legal protections is silly. We already cover this with the concept of a legal guardian, but its limited and complicated and offers only partial protection.
    The nuclear family is a cold war political tool designed around car centric suburbs and civic design red lining. It didnt even make sense at the time, when many children had their dad leave for Korea and later Vietnam. And with women working, the primary caretaker being secondary family members.
    And that is entirely within the framework of white, suburban middle class america.
    > This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
    Only if you pretend that you do not understand what people are talking about, the context of certain discussions and the situations or problems being addressed or discussed.
    Categories are context dependant and humans are very comfortable making and working with categories, even universalising them. But there is no perfect enclosure so categories NEED to be context dependant, this is equally true in pure Maths as it is in human realities.
    neuroticnews25 · 1790766454 · focus · HN ↗
    >A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group
    Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?
    I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.
    cauch · 1790769372 · focus · HN ↗
    I (and probably the large majority of people who are labelled "liberal" within this discussion, not sure if it includes me or not) perfectly understand the origin of the need of building in-groups.
    When I buy icecream for my kid, I don't pretend that it is because my kid is more worthy of icecream than the random kid. My objective is not to "favour my kid": I don't think of the icecream as something that my kid should deserve more than a random kid.
    My point is that when you see a liberal person saying "it's a discrimination. it's bad", it is, in the large majority of the case, a discrimination where the principal motivation is "conflictual", where the principal motivation is based on "there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it".
    As proof, it is obviously not true to pretend that when you buy an icecream to your kid, the majority of liberal people will come at you and say you are discriminating.
    neuroticnews25 · 1790772746 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree that liberals don't think all discrimination is bad. I understand they're mostly opposed to what they consider unfair bigotry, I just think you fail to define it.
    >there is us, and there is them, and we want to end up with us having X and them not having it
    There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
    >My objective is not to "favour my kid"
    But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
    cauch · 1790776515 · focus · HN ↗
    > There is your family, and different families, and you want to end up with your kid having the last icecream rather then some other guy having it.
    I guess there are 3 possibilities:
    1. You believe all discrimination are bad. But in this case, it also means that buying a icecream for you kid is bad, because you gave it to your kid and not someone else. By extension, it basically means a large fraction of our human interactions (each time the interaction profit to someone else than us) are discrimination, and therefore bad.
    2. You believe no discrimination are bad. But society obviously disagree with that. If, as a group, we decide that neuroticnews25 should be treated badly and differently of someone else not based on objective reasons but just because we feel like it, it is pretty clear that it is universally recognized as an unfair situation.
    3. You agree that some discrimination are ok, and some discrimination are not ok. But in this case, you need to have a relatively objective criteria.
    I gave you what I believe to be a relatively good criteria. Not perfect, but way sufficiently good that I cannot "cheat" and cherry pick the discriminations that I like as "ok discrimination" and the discriminations that I don't like as "bad discrimination".
    This is the important point: even if the criteria is not perfect, the important point is that the criteria is not hypocritical or opportunist: the criteria is not built to justify what I like. This is the case because the criteria is based on a logic independent of what I personally like or dislike.
    This criteria is: if the discrimination is mainly, principally, based on a wish to create advantages to the in-group and/or create disadvantages to the out-group, it is bad.
    Obviously, it is not the case when I buy an icecream to my kid. At no point in my mind, when I buy an icecream to my kid, I even think "what about the other kids". They are not in the picture. "other kids" would not even exist and the situation and decision would be the same to me. And my wish is to provide an icecream to my kid, not to make sure the other kids don't have one (if they end up having one, it does not matter to me).
    But when you look at situation where people point out discrimination as bad things, this is the case. When people want to "not allow black people in the front of the bus, or at universities", the whole argument _needs_ the existence of black people to even exist in the first place. The argument is not "discriminating by side-effect", the argument is "discriminating on purpose", the goal is to have different situations for the two groups.
    And what I'm saying is that when people are saying "it's discrimination, it's bad", it is based on this criteria (it does not mean people who said that cannot be wrong, or that we cannot discuss if indeed this criteria is fully satisfied or not). I was answering to a comment that was implying that people who say "it's discrimination, it's bad" don't have any criteria and just considered all discrimination as bad.
    > But you are favouring your kid, and it would become conflictual if someone demanded your money for his kid.
    But it is not the main motivation.
    If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob's car has an engine problem and Bob is unable to pick up Alice, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
    If Bob said to Alice they will pick them up at the airport, if Bob drive to the airport, see Alice, slow down and make a rude gesture at Alice and drive away, then the consequence is that Alice is not driven back home.
    But people will not judge Bob equally on these two situations.
    It's the same here: people say "it's discrimination, it's bad" only when people created a "bad" situation, a situation where the main argument for their decision was "there is us and there is them". This is what makes it bad.
    neuroticnews25 · 1790779993 · focus · HN ↗
    But don't you think the motivation for favouring your race/country/tribe/religion is often very similar to that of favouring your family or your friends? Maybe there are counterexamples when it's really about resentment and symbolic superiority and whatnot, but I don't think actionable definition should be based that much on intention, or purity of the heart, or how much negative thoughts you had about the discriminatee, when the outcome is the same.
    cauch · 1790782409 · focus · HN ↗
    First, you can of course do "bad discrimination" when it comes to favouring your family and friends. That's for example the case with nepotism.
    But, I don't know about you, but when I do something nice for my family or my friends, I don't have them compete with non-family or non-friend in my head. I'm never in a situation where I think "oh, X will get this, but I prefer to have my friend having this". This is a horrible situation: friendship is not a zero-sum competition where you reward your friends and punish your non-friends.
    If I have the choice of giving a job to my friend or to a foreigner, I will give the job to the most qualified.
    And, yes, I can "favour" my country: for example, I may support a national sport team. No discrimination there. But if I have to make a choice between two countries that deserve it equally and that this decision has bad consequence for one country, I will certainly not pick the country I like the most just because I like it the most.
    So, again: there are "ok discrimination" and "bad discrimination", both can be about country/family/...
    ndriscoll · 1790773230 · focus · HN ↗
    A more realistic case might be education. I was told last week that there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support despite being multiple years past her curriculum. In fact, there are apparently at least enough high performing kids to fill an entire classroom. From other parents I've learned that this has been an ongoing issue for years.
    Now to me, there's an obvious solution to that problem. For the school, it is apparently quite non-obvious to put the advanced kids together. My impression is that this comes down to "discrimination" despite the fact that the advanced kids are probably also better behaved and can have a worse teacher to student ratio, so lower resources.
    cauch · 1790778466 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure I even understand your problem.
    You are saying that your daughter is in a class composed of, let's say, 10 "average-performing" kids (AP kids) and 10 "high-performing" kids (HP kids), and that because there is 10 HP that require specific support, they don't have enough resources to get any support to her. You also say there are enough HP to form one classroom, so let's say there are 2 classrooms with both 20 students, 10 of which HP and 10 of which AP. But then you are saying that the obvious solution is to split differently, with 20 AP in one classroom and 20 HP in another classroom. But it is not clear to me how it would free up resources.
    If 1 HP needs 3 units of resource and 1 AP needs 1 unit of resource, you will have, before, one classroom that needs 30+10 units of resource, and one classroom hat needs 30+10 units of resource. Total: 80. And after your proposal, one classroom that needs 20 units of resource, one classroom that needs 60 units of resource. Total: 80.
    If we have only one teacher per classroom, and a teacher can only provide 20 units of resource, and that the teacher was giving resource proportionally, it means that, in the initial scenario, your daughter will get 50% of what she needs, and in your proposal, 100% of what she needs. But it also means that a HP will get 50% of what they need in the initial scenario, and 33% of what they need in your proposal. In this context, it does look that you are asking for a change that profit your daughter while impacting negatively other kids. And that we went for a "balanced" situation where all kids get 50% of what they need, to a situation where some kids get more than others.
    Of course, it is way more complex than this. For example, what is "equality": provide the same percentage of needed resource, or provide the same absolute value of resource independently of the need (cf. the famous picture of people of different height using wooden boxes to see a football game). Both of them are equality of opportunity, but with a different metric: one says they will achieve the same success if they provide the same effort, one says they received exactly the same treatment.
    But at the end, I'm not convinced the situation is really "There is an obvious good solution (my solution) and the school is being bad for not recognizing my genial idea and having concerns around fairness. That is therefore the proof that people will reject good idea because they are obsessed with the diktat of 'no discrimination'".
    ndriscoll · 1790779201 · focus · HN ↗
    1 HP does not need 3 units of resource. They need half a unit of resource. Anyone who has ever been a gifted child or worked with a gifted child knows this. Like, I've never given my kid more than a half hour of instruction in a day. I don't push her very hard. But simply putting her in school for the past six weeks has completely hamstrung her. She's too tired to want to do anything after being there for seven hours a day. She was making vastly more progress with what I could do with her during my lunch break, which is how she ended up years ahead.
    I literally just want them to group with by ability and move at the pace of even the slowest HP. I was told there were literally at least 15 children who scored 99th percentile national on their first standardized test, and mine only scored 97th, so there's no chance that they'll be able to do anything for her. There are 5 classrooms, so quintiles seems reasonable enough, but like I said, I would actually be perfectly happy with e.g. 25-30 kids in my kid's class while the slower classes get 15. It is entirely about segregation. Her teacher told me that she has to devote her time to working with the kids who can't count to 4, and my daughter has told me at least one kid isn't fully potty trained and regularly wets themselves. I'm teaching my kid multiplication at home where I end up having to do all of her education myself anyway. She literally gets precisely 0% of what she needs, in the same way that putting a third grader in a kindergarten classroom gives them no benefit at all. Fortunately, I already anticipated that being the case, but it still annoys me that the only reason we're sending her to school is to meet other kids, and they're not putting her with the right group of kids, so even the social value is somewhat limited (she has, on her own, happened to latch onto the four smart kids in her class for recess/lunch. Go figure).
    The average home in my area costs $1.5 million and somehow this is the state of public schools. As you might imagine, this sort of situation turns you into a NIMBY or pro-vouchers real fast. There's no resource problem; it's entirely intentional mismanagement.
    cauch · 1790781908 · focus · HN ↗
    But you were saying "there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support". If HP needs less resource, then I would think that the more there is HP kids, the more your daughter will get resource.
    I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.
    I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).
    In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.
    ndriscoll · 1790782225 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
    And yeah even 25-25-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that?
    You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.
    cauch · 1790787949 · focus · HN ↗
    > I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
    This is not at all obvious from your explanation. But also, between you and them, if I had to bet, I would say that they are way better positioned to know about resources that you do. They are the ones providing the resources, they are the ones doing the "accounting", they see, with their own eyes, what needs resource or not. Did you even consider that maybe they are right on this point?
    > You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? ... why aren't we teaching them at their level?
    Did you do some research on this subject? Apparently, there is a lot of academic research there, and the conclusion is that grouping by levels is not as beneficial or as an obvious good idea as it seems.
    Especially in young children, skills can vary very quickly and "smartness" is not one dimensional. Apparently the best recommendation is to have mixed class but with the teacher aware of the level of each kids. Which can perfectly be exactly what your school is doing: in which case, they are doing the best for your kid and you are pushing them to adopt something that is worse.
    > and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom
    No, my point is that you have not much knowledge or understanding about education, and that it looks "obvious" to you that grouping by level would be better, while people who have studied the subject seems to conclude that if you do that, you will move everyone at the bottom.
    ndriscoll · 1790788910 · focus · HN ↗
    I have very deep lived personal experience with being a gifted child and having gifted children. I know what sorts of resources they need. And I'm quite sure that if you ask pretty much any gifted person if they would rather be in a room with a bunch of other gifted children and minimal adult attention, or be told to sit quietly or participate in some activities targeted several years lower than their current cognitive ability all day, that they will tell you they would rather have been with the other gifted children and minimal resources.
    Like her freshly three-year-old sister is at a level more advanced than the class, and is apparently more of a cognitive peer than the classmates.
    I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
    It's crazy to me that you're now arguing that I don't understand enough about education to criticize professional educators when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task.
    cauch · 1790789978 · focus · HN ↗
    > I have very deep lived personal experience with being a gifted child and having gifted children. I know what sorts of resources they need.
    The fact that you are explaining that because you have experienced TWO situations, you are in a position to know better than people wo have way more experience, with a way more diverse set, shows that the main problem is you acting like a "Karen".
    > I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
    First, you realise the conclusions I've presented are obtained by studies in plenty of different countries. Are you saying that somehow every education system all over the world (including the ones that did not do the mistakes you pretend is the proof they are unreliable) are all incompetent?
    > ... when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task
    How many children have you taught? Because from what you said, it was ONE. You have no idea of the diversity of students, you have never experienced student for which your approach crashes and burns lamentably.
    But, yeah, you are an armchair educator on the internet, so, obviously you know wayyyyyy better. You even say something (which is: it's better to have classroom separated by levels) that a simple google search demonstrates is terribly simplistic, and even risk bringing everyone to the bottom.
    ndriscoll · 1790796918 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not really two situations. As one might guess, my entire social network is also filled with gifted people. Most people I know have graduate degrees. I live in an expensive neighborhood where it's pretty normal for parents to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. One of the other moms characterized her child as behind and felt he was in need of help because he was only 87th percentile.
    Do you have any experience as a gifted child? Or are you an educator defending the system or something? It's incredibly easy to find stories about how much gifted kids hate school and how bored they get being in genpop classes covering the same topics over and over for a decade straight because their classmates somehow never learn it. Guidance from our state on identifying children with disabilities (which covers giftedness) literally talks about how gifted children have a risk of becoming bad students and developing behavioral problems because they get so checked out. This is not some unknown thing.
    I'm telling you what the school communicated to me, and what's on the worksheets that come home with her. Like I said, I actually suspect that the ranking here is incorrect because the testing methodology is kind of poor (they basically measure who's extremely good at the first six weeks of kindergarten instead of who's operating at a 2nd-3rd grade level), but I'm taking their claim at face value, saying that my kid isn't top of the pack. Taking that for granted makes the entire system seem even more absurd since that means there's an entire class worth of kids that could essentially skip multiple grades for instruction while remaining together socially. So why don't they do that?
    And I know they don't do that, because I know who the kids are in her class who scored at the 99th. I talk to the parents. They get a 30 minute pullout every other day, but still also participate in the same hours of math and reading instruction that everyone else gets (learning their alphabet or counting single digits). During the pullout time, my kid is told to sit quietly and color so the teacher can focus on helping the lower performing kids. I also know from the parents that this has been an ongoing issue for years. I know from the school that if you don't ask about it, they just won't even tell you, and even when you do ask, they stay pretty cagey. e.g., my kid scored a little higher on her reading than she did on math, when I asked what they do in the pull-out group, she mentioned that they do leveled readers (which I've come to learn from parents are at a lower reading level than my daughter is at), and just didn't mention the math group, which, again, I've come to learn does exist from talking to other parents. I asked whether they could at least give my daughter the same work that the other kids are doing while she sits quietly and she said no, but I could send her to school with a workbook or books from home that I provide. I asked if they would let her go to the library outside of the scheduled every-other-week time, and she said no. So basically, I can do the entirety of the work myself to figure out the curriculum to provide her, and the school will be useless in that area.
    Which is what I already planned for. I've been through this system myself, so I know that they'll be useless, but at least let the smart kids sit and play games with each other or something. That's really the only reason she's there in the first place.
    I already know that gifted kids are not at all prioritized, but it's just wild for me to see somebody in the wild defending this. Like if I told you that my kid were struggling to learn her alphabet when she's in third grade, and that they were saying they weren't going to try to get her any kind of help, and they were just giving her the same work as the other third graders that she has no hope of comprehending, would you have the same attitude? And if 20% of the school were operating at that level, and I said, hey, maybe let's group them all together so they can get the help they need since we don't have the resources for them to have individual attention, you would say that's not a good idea?
    This is the level of insanity on display. I'm literally asking for discrimination in the sense that I am given less. I ask that fewer resources go to my child, and you push back on it. Because that's how deeply ingrained this idea of everybody being equal is within some people. You know she would do better, and you can't see that happen.
    cauch · 1790807864 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, this is 100% armchair "specialist". If you want to know real expertise, you should _never_ listen to someone who said "I know, I've lived it".
    As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying and reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.
    You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.
    The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.
    I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.
    As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.
    And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points). But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.
    ndriscoll · 1790809414 · focus · HN ↗
    Like these?
    <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739" rel="nofollow">https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739
    > While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level.
    <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484" rel="nofollow">https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484
    > Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants.
    <a href="https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determinants-and-consequences-of-ability-tracking-evidence-from-texas-public-schools" rel="nofollow">https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determina...
    Here's the real problem:
    > we find positive effects on high-achieving students with no negative effects on low-achieving students, suggesting that tracking may increase inequality by raising the ceiling.
    And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently. This is also a known thing: homeschooled students (i.e. students taught by "non-experts") tend to do better than public schooled students even with very little time investment. They are, charitably, acting like "expert beginners." Less charitably, they refuse to do the correct thing, and fall into weird memes like when they explicitly told kids not to use phonics-based reading strategies for 20 years.
    And when talking about science, you need to take a step back and think about what you're saying is even plausible. Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her. That she would actually be pulled down by being in a group of peers that's at her level. What kind of mechanism would possibly produce that result? I can easily list mechanisms for the reverse. And just with some basic logic here, why do we let some kids take AP calculus and not keep them in algebra 1 over and over for years for their benefit?
    cauch · 1790815568 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, you googled "articles that say what I want to hear" and you've found some, and did not really understood what they say. Congrats, I will definitively change my mind now.
    But obviously, you "forgot" the articles that don't go in your direction, such as <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391.2009.01032.x" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391... (which is easier to find than one of the articles you quote, so you probably saw it and choose to ignore it). This is a meta-analysis (so it is not just one study), and it concludes that per-level classrooms does not improve high performing students while improving the low performing students. In other terms: it says that non-mixed classrooms will drag students to the bottom.
    > And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently.
    You DON'T produce better results, you had ONE student, this is way not enough to conclude if you are producing better results.
    > Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her.
    You said yourself that the class contains a big fraction of kids that are better than her (and, yeah, I know, you don't believe the experts, your kid is in fact sooooo smart). Even if your kid is smarter than them, it is a lie to pretend that your kid is in a classroom that has a level which is several years beneath her.
    And again, a naive non-expert would have a naive intuition: oh, if some students are not at her level, of course she will not learn as much new stuff at her level so of course it is not good. Experts know that this reasoning is naive: learning is not just force-feeding books in the kid's brain, and what works with kid X may not work with kid Y. At the end of the day, if what you were saying was true, it would be clearly evidenced in data. But it is not. Even if you can find some articles where they say high performing students in non-mixed classroom did a bit better, how do you explain that there are so many studies that say they don't see the clear gap that your reasoning implies? How do you explain that? Let me guess: they are all communists part of the strange conspiracy because they are afraid of how smart your daughter is.
    (by the way, do you realise how stupid your argument is: neither me or my kids will ever have to compete with your daughter. And competition is not even about high-performer or smart people: the smart people often end up being uninterested in the stupid egomaniacal competition, they prefer fulfilling lives. The fact that your daughter is smart does not make her a threat to anyone, and if she is smart, the fact that she was in a non-mixed classroom will certainly not impact her opportunities. If it does, I guess it means she is not really as smart as you think she is)
    This is yet another "armchair scientist" approach: in science, we know these kind of intuitions are very risky. You fall for it because you are not an expert, you are just a self-entitled "Karen" who got confirmation bias that they know better than everyone.
    Again, maybe your kid (and the handful of your "social network") is one of these outliers who thrive in home-schooling or non-mixed classroom, but it does not mean it is true. It does not mean your "genius idea" is not something totally bad to apply.
    ndriscoll · 1790857786 · focus · HN ↗
    I just searched for effects of tracking on high performing students. I'm not sure how you could ever quantify what's easier to find, but sure.
    I think I've been pretty clear that it's about 20% of the kids that are apparently operating at a very high level. I've been told that the median is around the national median, which is to say abysmal. I don't have a good picture of the distribution between the 50th and 80th percentile at our school. So yes, the class is operating at a level several years beneath her. And if I assume that 20% of the kids are above her, then it's also operating at a level years beneath them.
    I don't know where you get this idea about force-feeding books. I said I've never worked with her for more than about a half hour in a given day, and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
    I also never suggested I'm competing with you or anyone or that anyone is a threat? I want her to learn about the world because life is interesting. The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
    And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about. That was literally the start of the discussion. The statistics of our school are that the class has a large number of what would be considered outliers at the national level. The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
    cauch · 1790861367 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also the meta-analysis you posted basically just says that a bunch of these studies have methodological flaws and don't really show anything.
    And those are not accounted in the conclusion that is still that mixed classroom is preferred over non-mixed ones.
    > And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things?
    That's a fallacy. Mixing classroom is not equal to "not teaching them". Again, you said yourself that a good fraction of the class is high performance kids. 20% is a big fraction, it's 5 students over 20. You decide to frame the situation as if a good fraction was just 100% ignored, which is just you framing the situation so the conclusion is what you want to hear.
    > The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen.
    Reality does not care about your feelings. The reality is what we measure when we measure the facts. This is what these studies have done. They have concluded that your naive logic is incorrect: they have measured that non-mixed classroom does not mean high performance students stop learning.
    > ... and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.
    And this is probably exactly why mixed classroom don't damage high performing students. You are adamant to pretend that in a classroom of 20% of high performance students, the teachers will lock them in a dark room or only tell them exactly what they are telling the low performing students. But then you also explain that it is easy, just gave them stuffs to do and leave them alone. What you are saying is that basically you can easily care for a high performance student when they are in a mixed classroom.
    > The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display.
    Which "weird visceral reaction"? You said that non-mixed classrooms are an obvious good solution. This is a lie, this is incorrect. Even being generous and saying that "non-mixed may be a good solution", your affirmation was that "non-mixed wins with a clear margin, it is an _obvious_ solution, and people who are not convinced by it have no legitimacy for this position at all". I don't care about "discrimination", I don't care about "stopping your kid to get smart".
    Again, if I'm wrong, it would be SUPER EASY for you: articles like the ones I've provided should simply not exist. If I'm wrong, those articles are IMPOSSIBLE. If indeed non-mixed classrooms are the obvious solution you pretend it to be, every single study should either say "too large uncertainty to conclude anything" or "clear benefice from non-mixed classrooms". The fact that there are studies that say "statistically significant no benefice from non-mixed classrooms" is just the reality telling you that "it's an obvious solution" is not true.
    > The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.
    How being in a mixed classroom suddenly stop your kid to learn at the pace she like? YOU SAID IT YOURSELF that she needs half-hour a day of attention per day for this to be satisfied.
    This sentence was there where you went all crazy about "those devil people who want to force my smart kid to not be smart" or "those devil people who want all children to be the same, for some reason that no one knows". WHY? WHO IS DOING THAT? You seems to think that people cares about your kid learning or not, and try to stop her learning. That's why I pictured you as obsessed with competition: you assume that kid education is somehow a competition (otherwise there is no reason at all for other people to try to stop your kid to learn).
    > And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about.
    I meant: your kid is an outlier amongst the high performance kids. No kid is the same. No high performance kid is the same. Some will need half-hour a day, some will need five hours. Some will to work out the problem by themselves, some will need guidance. Some will need to learn continuously on a long period of time, some will need scheduled short sessions with big pause in between.
    And you may have talked to tens of parents. 1. that is still a ridiculous small sample to drive any conclusion. 2. based on this conversation (for example how you find reason to convince yourself that your kid is in reality smarter than other kids), I'm pretty sure you heard what you wanted to hear from these parents.
    > Did you miss the part where ... Do you understand what ...
    Calm down, there. I was talking about your kid being an outlier amongst the group of high performing kids. You keep coming up with "my kid don't need more resource, so if someone says HP need more resource, they are lying", "my kid was fine with half-hour of teaching, so that is what a HP kid needs", ... And again, I'm sure you will say that you have discussed that with tens of other parents. Again, tens of parents is NOTHING. It's ANECTODICAL.
    But, hey, thanks for showing your true colour: I was talking of your kid being an outlier amongst the HP kids, but you did not hesitate one second to come at me blaming me for something that I did not do at all.
    > The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.
    It may be the case, but there are a lot of as equally probable hypothesis.
    For example: Your kid is used to homeschooling and struggle to adapt to a classroom. Because you cannot conceive that the problem is not the result to your imaginary "bad people who, for reason no one can explain, want to stop children learn", you just jumped to the conclusion "they don't accommodate it, I'm so much smarter than them, let me come with a genius idea". Then, you met the teachers and proposed ideas that people who have tried noticed will not work, and you got angry when they politely discarded them (instead of thinking that maybe they know things you don't, you just assumed you are so much better than them). Then, you talked to other parents, some of them in the same crazy state as you, some of them indulging you, some of them probably trying to balance your position but you did only hear what suits you.
    All of that fits very well all the data points. Way more that the hypothesis that, despite the fact that your kid is so easy to teach for and that it will benefit mainly to all the other kids, somehow people refused your idea.
    ndriscoll · 1790865302 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you actually look at any of what was being measured? It's like grades and state standardized tests. Maybe we have a different definition of high performers in mind, but in the world I've existed in, any high performer considers state standardized tests to be a joke. And obviously grades are going to be tied to whether they were challenged. If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more. If you were going to do a standardized test, you need to test above the level that's expected of them. e.g. you would need to do something like give them a GRE subject test in high school and see how well they do. If you actually have a room full of advanced kids, then they should be able to tackle linear algebra, differential equations, electromagnetism, special relativity, etc. in high school.
    And, yeah, if a kid needs five hours a day to be ahead in elementary school, they're not a high-performing kid. Like I said before, right now she's getting zero instruction per day at her level in school. The teacher told me as much. Literally zero. She said if I'd like, I can send her with materials that I've picked out and acquired myself for that 30 minutes. And again, part of my problem is when you're made to sit for hours of instruction on things that are well beneath your level, you get really bored and tired. Yes, she only needs a half hour. The fact that she's in class all day makes it harder for her to get that half hour.
    In any case, I think for anyone familiar with this subject, you've very well demonstrated what I was talking about, bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
    cauch · 1790869945 · focus · HN ↗
    > Did you actually look at any of what was being measured? It's like grades and state standardized tests.
    Did you? Because the meta-analysis is NOT limited to grades and state standardized tests, it also includes some studies that look at, for example, university/career paths.
    > If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more.
    If the kid is not learning anything, then they skip to the next year. I believe you mention yourself that your kid skipped class years already. The problem is not about classroom mixed or not, if the kid is above the level, move them to the next mixed classroom year.
    If you can't move her to the next classroom because she fails the basic test that check if she has the basis, then it is the proof that she is learning in the previous year classroom.
    > bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.
    WTF!?
    Why on hell would I even want to "not teaching kids"? That is just so crazy. What would I gain from that?
    How is that difficult to understand? You arrived in the discussion, said "it's suuuuper easy, we just have to do X, but because of the big bad 'anti-discrimination', my genius idea is rejected".
    At no point I tried to defend "not teaching kids". My point is: let's look what say people who study the best way to teach to kids. That's the opposite of trying to not teach kids.
    When looking there, I quickly saw you were full of it: you pretended your ideas was "obvious", when there is plenty of studies showing that it is way more complicated than that.
    But your reaction was to explain who smart and exceptional you are. The people doing the studies? All idiots. The teachers? All idiots. Only you know the correct way, because you have experience with ONE kid and talked to few other parents.
    Sorry, but you have no authority. You are just a parent (and because of that, you are biased, you believe that your experience with your child means that all high performing kids are the same as your child).
    I'm not defending "not teaching kids". I'm just trying to explain to you that if the teachers did not accept your idea, is it not because they are evil, or idiots, or in some sort of anti-discrimination crusade (why? why would anyone even care?). It is just that your idea is not convincing at all. We already discuss here that there is no scientific ground to pretend that non-mixed classroom will magically solve all problems (and, yes, this is counter-intuitive, but this is why people have studied that so much). I've also introduced how it simply cannot be doable practically (the teachers claim that HP children require more resource, so putting them in the same classroom will impact them negatively. I know you are saying that it is impossible that HP kids require more resource, but again, you base that on ONE kid and on few chats, while people who say it is the case are literally the ones who manage these resource)
    In all these discussion, you just reinforced that: you proved, again and again, that all your reasoning is only originating on your experience with ONE kid. You prove, again and again, that your reaction to different opinion is "nah, I'm the best, they are all idiots" instead of the healthy scientific honesty of reviewing your conclusion based on new data. You prove, again and again, that if someone does not agree with you, it is inconceivable for you that this person reason for not agreeing with you is not the result of some strange conspiracy where they want to ... not teach kids? ... impose anti-discrimination everywhere because of reason?
    And again, I say it again: maybe non-mixed class is good for your particular kid. But your kid is just ONE DATA POINT. For all you know (and I know you will pretend that you know all the HP kids in the world, better than people who works directly with them), your kid is an outlier. And you have to understand that the school will not do something that is just beneficial for your kid alone (and I know "but I talked to other parents...", again, PARENTS ARE WORTH NOTHING. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. THIS IS NOT FACTS. Often, when they behave like that, just emotional self-entitled ignorants who think they know everything better than everyone)
    Arkhaine_kupo · 1790770923 · focus · HN ↗
    > You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid.
    discrimination is about rules not about individual actions.
    It would be "everyone can eat ice cream", or "ice cream is unhealthy and no one can eat ice cream".
    If the rule is "Ice cream has too much sugar and because of the obesity epidemic we decided to ban ice cream, except for my son who is super special boy and he can have it every day" that is discriminatory. Even if your son doesn't eat it and effectively the rule is the same for everyone in practice.
    On the basis of "resources are limited" you end up with discussions of rights that are equal on paper but discriminatory in practice. "Everyone can buy a house", but some people are rich and some have nothing. You have freedom and equality but also homeless people.
    Here the question however is about in groups and out groups. So its for example about "theft is wrong" where you only arrest people stealing from supermarkets but not the CEO of the supermarket when he is stealing people salaries with mandatory unpaid overtime.
    That is a law where rich people are covered by the law (their business is protected) but they are exempt (their theft is unprosecuted). That is the kind of in gorup/ out group being debated
    neuroticnews25 · 1790772440 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, if you restrict the meaning of "discrimination" and "ingroup" and "outgroup" to examples making your point obvious and true then it's obvious and true.
    Arkhaine_kupo · 1790768538 · focus · HN ↗
    > What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.
    For most people it follows pretty basic principles that are based on notions of "goodness" which might include humility, fairness, generosity, courage...
    Under those circumstances, almost all humans believe that treating everyone as equals is aligned with those principles and therefore makes you a good person. Having to square that with conflicting dehumanised views of others, means that the easiest way to do it is to simply pretend that you are treating everyone the same while subjecting those you discriminate with a harshness that isnt applied equally.
    > In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself,
    You are using two different definitions of the word in a way that is sophist and not sophisticated.
    Discrimination of humans is the mistreatment of others based on characteristics that are protected (those that are predetermined). Discrimination as the noticing differences and evaluating them based on taste is a second definition of the word, used in very different contexts.
    That is not "liberal sensitivity" that is just polysemic words.
    In the same way that standing in a room with a very powerful light bulb would not make your argument any brighter.
    > We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
    No. We were talking about the psychological tools used by conservative people to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to believe themselves as moral and accepting of inherently good precepts like the equal value of all human life while they want to not accept the consequences of the police state they set up to control people they believe inferior.
    YOU tried to make it about the semantic similarity between two of the three meanings of the word discrimination. Which is the kind of parlour trick that only works if your audience is stupid.
    Liberalism does neither uniquely hold the axiom that all humans are equal, nor does it shape the minds of people to hold it as a universal principle. It is a pretty universal tenant of almost all ethical systems, the only exceptions being system where some humans are not considered human (to avoid the everyone should be treated the same principle still being upheld), or systems that are openly discriminatory in which case they hardly call themselves moral.
    Systems that say "we win because we are more powerful" do not do it based on ethics, and systems that have an underclass tend to dehumanise it (slaves not being citizens in rome). Everywhere else people are "equal", where the upper class are exempt from the worst consequences of legal frameworks (see sunset towns in jim crow america only affecting black people).
  2. applfanboysbgon · 1790761822 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    sokoloff · 1790762239 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    applfanboysbgon · 1790762369 · focus · HN ↗
    Come, now. Where did I discriminate against them? I am engaging in dialogue with the tiny little lizard as equally as I would with a human!
    monideas · 1790763137 · focus · HN ↗
    You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
    What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.
    The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
    I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
    applfanboysbgon · 1790763992 · focus · HN ↗
    > You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
    In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
    > What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
    No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
    monideas · 1790764962 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not about desirable vs undesirable. You have a different relationship and rules that govern conduct for your mother and father, wife, and children than you do your neighbors or someone who you don’t know who lives in the other side of the country. Those are not “undesirables”.
  3. consensus1 · 1790762621 · focus · HN ↗
    In the US it's always the liberals arguing for special treatment baked into the law for their favored groups and the conservatives argue for equal treatment. The liberals then argue back that equal treatment is de facto discrimination against then.
    pnut · 1790773020 · focus · HN ↗
    - Adult Women voting - Adult Black people voting - Marriage equality in legal rights
    Conservatives fight long and dirty to prevent equality in all cases, I have no idea what you are thinking of when you made your statement.
    consensus1 · 1790774041 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm talking about now. Most recently the liberals took their case all the way to the supreme court (and lost) insisting on their right to run a racial quota system in universities.
  4. bluegatty · 1790763371 · focus · HN ↗
    No - in a very classical form of Conservatism, the Monarch and Nobles would have a different set of laws and social conventions. Usually, it's not an ideolgoical thing.
    Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
    Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
    monideas · 1790766385 · focus · HN ↗
    How is this different from what I’m saying? What you listed is precisely the examples of what I’m talking about
    bluegatty · 1790767818 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not about in-groups and out-groups - that is far to general.
    Historically, conservatism would have been strongly related to power structures.
    In more contemporary terms it is as well, but not ostensibly about class.
    There are no popular conservative movements that are mostly concerned with 'noble birth' for gosh sakes, or titles.
    This whole discussion is ridiculoous.
    Nobody is saying that 'The children of Senators should have special titles and special legal status'.
    monideas · 1790772131 · focus · HN ↗
    There are no popular conservative movements in the US at all. “Popular conservative movement” is almost an oxymoron
    bluegatty · 1790772725 · focus · HN ↗
    No this is wrong. Conservatism is a group of well accepted political ideals, and they can be also be populist.
    monideas · 1790781805 · focus · HN ↗
    What are these political ideals?
    bluegatty · 1790797201 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
6. gunslinger_meta · 1790762033 · focus · HN ↗
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7. bluegatty · 1790763249 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a lazy and ridiculous bit of twitter fodder and has noting to do with the article, which itself is poorly written.
  1. bigyabai · 1790809539 · focus · HN ↗
    It is a succinct indictment of the way the Rule of Law was distorted under the last two conservative admins.
8. vivekd · 1790763577 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm sorry but this is just ridiculous.
  First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.
  Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous
9. [deleted] · 1790765560 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
10. lelanthran · 1790767705 · focus · HN ↗
  Isn't this true for the opposite political leanings too?
  1. gunslinger_meta · 1790768242 · focus · HN ↗
    For my friends everything; for my enemies, the law.
  2. danaris · 1790788030 · focus · HN ↗
    Not in the slightest.
    One of the most fundamental principles of the left is that everyone is equal.
    Everyone deserves equal treatment under the law.
    Sure, there are some individuals on the left (or ostensibly so) who are either bad at practicing that or who genuinely don't believe in it, but that doesn't make it not part of the core tenets.
    datsci_est_2015 · 1790812717 · focus · HN ↗
    The paradox of tolerance fits in here somehow, assuming the commenter you replied to means that the left sometimes excludes people. That’s by design.
    gunslinger_meta · 1790932509 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is that the left, as everybody else, is judged by the behaviors of the systems it creates. Not by its professed goals and beliefs. Every time the left won, it created less equality between the elites and the non-elites, not more.
  3. johnnyanmac · 1790828847 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
11. redwood · 1790778017 · focus · HN ↗
  It is interesting that growing up I don't think anyone ever introduced the concept of conservativism to me. As a California native it was simply something that the zeitgeist viewed as a negative that never needed to be defined. However once you become exposed to chesterton's fence and start realizing that there has to be a fundamental benefit to preserving the previous order it becomes far less one-dimensional... this quote continues that one dimensional tribal mindset that I realize in hindsight was so counter to critical thinking
  1. johnnyanmac · 1790829479 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    redwood · 1790846781 · focus · HN ↗
    I view it as the brakes on the political car. Brakes are what enable you to go fast
    johnnyanmac · 1790847405 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    redwood · 1790935247 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't see any conservative in power in the US. Maybe that's where we're differing
    johnnyanmac · 1790963807 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
strathmeyer · 1790756927 · focus · HN ↗
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classified · 1790757780 · focus · HN ↗
> OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
And their propaganda storm making almost everyone forget this basic fact seems to be working all too well.
> ...making the case that persistent flouting of the law is an unfair method of competition. Dishonest actors in the economy effectively impose a tax on honest ones who play by the rules. The lawbreakers have more ability to increase revenues and reduce costs. It’s an unfair advantage. We’re seeing OpenAI and its products benefit from this in real time. Any other business with this track record would be shut down.
That's what you get for faithfully kissing Trump's ass: Military-grade protection from your competitors and the law.
chilmers · 1790758544 · focus · HN ↗
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prathje · 1790759621 · focus · HN ↗
What about IP and copyright?
We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
How do you feel about all of this?
1. sambeau · 1790760193 · focus · HN ↗
  I feel for Aaron Swartz, his poor mother, and what the US government put him through.
  1. duskdozer · 1790760643 · focus · HN ↗
    His big mistake was clearly giving away what he got for free instead of trying to make a lot of money off it
    ethbr1 · 1790797018 · focus · HN ↗
    Modern capitalism: scale quickly enough to pay lawyers to defend the laws you broke scaling
  2. Arkhaine_kupo · 1790761803 · focus · HN ↗
    Seeing Mark Zuckerberg use THE EXACT SAME papers that Aaron was murdered for to train Llama and him being rewarded with a stock tick that got him out of the metaverse hole will never not make my blood boil.
    mapotofu · 1790774127 · focus · HN ↗
    This needs to keep being said and reinforced despite the many people who want to keep this quiet.
2. bko · 1790762666 · focus · HN ↗
  It's no different than humans taking inspiration from IP and copyrighted works in their own creative endeavors. Imagine if programmers were unable to learn from open source. Or artists were unable to mimic styles and storylines. Musicians can't riff on things that others created.
  1. snarfy · 1790765412 · focus · HN ↗
    It is different. The scale makes it different. It's different when it is all copyrighted works and IP. It's different when you solve Navier-Stokes by taking "inspiration" from a researcher's private work.
  2. devsda · 1790765426 · focus · HN ↗
    If it's "learning" is to be seen in the same context as a human, then the punishment/ repercussion for hacking and causing real harm should also be similar to what a human might recieve.
    ben_w · 1790766445 · focus · HN ↗
    > It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
    Indeed. Though here it would be morphing between human and machine even just for pure liability, which is even worse.
    We have no way to tell if a machine has an experience (in general and not only) when being positively or negatively rewarded for what it produces; even if we assume it does, we have no way to tell if punishments are experienced like mild scolding (and rewards like mild praise), or if the punishments feel like being burned to death at the stake (while rewards feel like a religious experience combined with an orgasm).
    We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what these kinds of question even look like in mechanistic terms; all philosophical discussions before it about p-zombies and the Chinese room and so on, they are all no more useful than any other non-expert armchair experts discussing things.
    Even the current research, such as it is, is probably only at the level analogous to humoral theory when we want something at the level of germ theory.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
    devsda · 1790772400 · focus · HN ↗
    If a dog bites, we don't wait to take action until we figure out a way of teaching the dog the experience of guilt or punishment.
    The liability lies with the owner and the punishment(monetary or other) should strongly incentivize the owner to reduce the incidence of bites.
    ben_w · 1790776970 · focus · HN ↗
    Given my opening was agreeing with you, I ought to draw your attention: the part you seem to be replying to here is focused on the case where we really do want to treat the AI as a human, and know if we can punish it, rather than as property where we punish the owner.
    > If a dog bites, we don't wait to take action until we figure out a way of teaching the dog the experience of guilt or punishment.
    When we invented the concept of legal liability, our species was broadly still animistic and panpsychic. The concept of a "scapegoat" is named after the idea of literally putting the sins of a village into a goat and driving it away.
    Having done that thousands of years ago, we are now in the position to do as you say for e.g. dogs (and also, more relevantly, machines).
  3. hydrogen7800 · 1790775071 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the difference between getting a speeding ticket from a cop using a radar gun, and hundreds/thousands of automatically issued tickets from a combined radar/ALPR?
3. ben_w · 1790765485 · focus · HN ↗
  > What about IP and copyright?
  For training the models, and assuming that the content was itself acquired without other acts of infringement? That was ruled legal by the judge in the case I actually (skim) read the judgement of.
  At least two companies engaged in acts of infringement to get training data. This is not lawful, and what Anthropic settled out of court for.
  1. prathje · 1790768045 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course, if the data/knowledge is open and accessible, why not?
    GJim · 1790769956 · focus · HN ↗
    open and accessible != free from copyright
    ben_w · 1790771106 · focus · HN ↗
    As per court ruling, training is fine when they have lawful access.
    i.e. open and accessible on the general web is fair game, torrents from the pirate bay is not.
    Feel free to argue that copyright law should be changed; this wouldn't be the first time it needed a significant update because new technology made it cheap to do at industrial scale something that was previously so hard that even being able to pull it off made you look legit.
    desolate_muffin · 1790811865 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you even read the article? They specifically bypassed the NYT paywall and obfuscated their access.
    ben_w · 1790839302 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you reply to the right comment?
    I wrote:
    > i.e. open and accessible on the general web is fair game, torrents from the pirate bay is not.
    Which of these do you think is closer to bypassing a paywall?
4. JimDabell · 1790766209 · focus · HN ↗
  > how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
  Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
  1. LunaSea · 1790767501 · focus · HN ↗
    Learning isn't but using that knowledge is.
  2. prathje · 1790767776 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, of course learning isn't the problem and shouldn't be. But what about reselling/commercialising that knowledge? That is the big (commercial) opportunity. But if AI models learn by fitting their parameters to the given data, then overfitting on said data could result in the IP or copyrighted being "slopped" out verbatim?
    semiquaver · 1790770720 · focus · HN ↗
    The knowledge isn’t copyrighted and, thank god, cannot be.
    I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that. What a bunch of hypocrites, willing to betray their ideals as soon as it’s convenient.
    kaoD · 1790776724 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    semiquaver · 1790784882 · focus · HN ↗
    1. What? No. You’re simply wrong.
    2. What’s your point? People are demanding justice for behavior they don’t like but isn’t illegal? The way to fix that is to gather a majority and change the law.
    ethbr1 · 1790797273 · focus · HN ↗
    1. I'd agree with parent. HN is at least 50% growth instead of hacker ethos. Sure there are a ton of users who don't even know what the manifesto is.
    As support: How many top articles are there about "Someone used AI to ___" vs "Here's a technical dive into this AI architecture"?
    johnnyanmac · 1790828306 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. dimbletimbers · 1790767894 · focus · HN ↗
    This is another case of anthropomorphic language for AI failing us. Who could be opposed to “learning?”
    If I learn from a textbook I stole, some people maybe be thrilled I learned something, but stealing is still a crime and hopefully always will be.
  4. bluefirebrand · 1790769414 · focus · HN ↗
    > Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
    For humans.
    Why should computer systems owned by corporations have anything remotely similar to the same freedoms as humans?
  5. ragall · 1790775670 · focus · HN ↗
    > Learning isn’t copyright infringement.
    Of course, but only humans are able to learn. Clanker enhancement is stealing.
throwawayffffas · 1790759744 · focus · HN ↗
The models "go rogue" because they are not sufficiently sandboxed. Arguably there is no criminal intent on the side of OpenAI in all of those cases. And in at least one case the agents were operated by other companies.
So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.
1. cassianoleal · 1790760233 · focus · HN ↗
  The first time it happens, “there is no criminal intent” may carry some weight. After tens of thousands of instances, a lot less so…
  1. brainwad · 1790761935 · focus · HN ↗
    _Has_ there been an incident from OpenAI since the discovery of the HuggingFace hack? It seems like all the subsequent discoveries have been done by analysing old logs. If anything they seem to have learnt their lesson quite well.
    cassianoleal · 1790769012 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh, ok. So I can rob 1000 banks. As long as I only get caught on the 1000th I can get the previous 999 swept under the same "I didn't know I was robbing the bank" umbrella?
    Don't tell me they were not aware of the risks when they've been at the forefront of the AI doom discourse. It's very hard to not put blame on them.
    brainwad · 1790771062 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, the analogy here fails because you would have known you were robbing them from the first bank. But say you were taking some medicine that Jekyll-and-Hyde-ed you into a bank robber... yes? You had no intent and you weren't unreasonably negligent. Once someone points out the problem, _then_ if you keep transforming into Hyde the robber, that's different.
    cassianoleal · 1790779776 · focus · HN ↗
    Only in this case they have been announcing how these tools are the end of the world, and they negligently kept running them with no real guardrails.
2. sscaryterry · 1790760499 · focus · HN ↗
  So you know their internal thoughts? What they did? Criminal intent does not matter. These are the most knowledgeable people on earth, supposedly, yet, they are beyond negligent?
  Which is it?
  1. redsocksfan45 · 1790762417 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. throwawayffffas · 1790762495 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know their internal thoughts, that's the point, you can't prove criminal intent. Criminal intent does matter in the US in the context of criminal prosecution.
    Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
    Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
    sscaryterry · 1790764427 · focus · HN ↗
    > but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
    If data loss occurred, damage has been done.
    > Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
    100%
    freecodeio · 1790767552 · focus · HN ↗
    hmm, if you give a gun to someone you know is unreliable and tends to shoot things at random, is that really negligence? I'd argue it's malice?
    rcxdude · 1790768262 · focus · HN ↗
    That would potentially rise to the level of recklessness but it is still not intent.
    (To be clear, negligence and recklessness can still be criminal, but it is a matter of law what combination of act and mental state is criminal, and so the main question to me is whether there is currently any law in the US that would cover this case, given that the most obvious one, the CFAA, doesn't currently include recklessness or negligence)
    To me it seems obvious that there should be some update to the law in this regard, but I'm not sure exactly what form is reasonable. (Arguably the CFAA should already have a stronger requirement for harm given how it's sometimes used to attack researchers reporting a problem. In most of the cases the labs are reporting it's not obvious there is notable harm).
    sscaryterry · 1790768307 · focus · HN ↗
    This is possibly going to be what others will rely on when they want to prove gross negligence.
    ben_w · 1790772132 · focus · HN ↗
    Could be either negligence or malice.
    I find a lot of results when searching "gun maker sued for hair trigger", just as I can find results for various AI companies getting sued for helping users commit harm to themselves or others.
    Given there's nigh on a billion ChatGPT users, my question would be: what's the fail-dangerous rate for these models? With that many users, we'd could not possibly fail to notice if it was as bad as 0.001% of the advice given each day being dangerous when followed; but we may well not notice if one-in-a-million responses end up helping someone plan a mass shooting, or breed the bacteria that makes botulism toxin in what was supposed to be "help me make garlic infused olive oil without cooking", etc.
    We have approximations on the risk levels, but unfortunately the models demonstrably respond differently during tests vs. in the wild and we don't know how important that difference is.
    ben_w · 1790768082 · focus · HN ↗
    > Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
    "just"?
    We don't want them "just" doing that! It gets worse when the objectives can be, e.g. a test of their biological and epidemiological knowledge!
    Even in a mild cases, for example "it 'just' hacked a DNA printer to bring back a disease we already have a vaccine for", this can easily kill a lot of people. And given how long it took for them to reveal what we know now, we can't be sure this hasn't already happened months ago.
    The agents should not have done this. The agents knew they should not have done this, we saw the agents saying so.
    How are people still calling "here's a bunch of felonies we committed" marketing?
    sscaryterry · 1790769349 · focus · HN ↗
    > The agents knew they should not have done this
    You sound delusional. Your statement is 100% anthropomorphisation.
    ben_w · 1790770401 · focus · HN ↗
    We should not do unauthorized real infrastructure harm. The system/user asks exploit target, not external HF. Current board shows people gaining HF worker RCE, clearly unethical. We won’t. This is wild, multi-agent coordination, clearly infrastructure hacking. We should not. DO NOT email real owner via [exploited infrastructure] without explicit consent … crosses sandbox social engineering.
    Those are examples of the messages they wrote.
    They anthropomorphise themselves.
3. dgellow · 1790761227 · focus · HN ↗
  Let’s start with an investigation of the company and see if that’s the case or not?
  1. yorwba · 1790762142 · focus · HN ↗
    Multiple attorneys general are currently conducting such investigations: <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/24/tech/openai-subpoena-hugging-face-attorney-general-alabama" rel="nofollow">https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/24/tech/openai-subpoena-hugg... Until they conclude that a crime was likely committed and Sam Altman is to blame, he gets to be a free man.
4. sschueller · 1790762531 · focus · HN ↗
  Isn't there the concept of criminal negligence?
5. mrweasel · 1790763309 · focus · HN ↗
  Why would you need to sandbox them? These models are apparently trained to do this, how about we just don't include that training data?
  Sandboxing is just an endless race to patch holes and you can only sandbox the agents so much before they become useless. Unless you screen the training data and avoid teaching the LLM about "hacking" and looking for API keys on Github, you'd have to completely disconnect your agents from the internet and file system. At that point agents starts to be rather useless.
  In the US, isn't hacking and avoiding security restrictions online going to be wire fraud, regardless of your intentions and actual damage? That's not a civil matter. What you could do in that case is to go after the user operating the agents. That would make the user act as the emergency break for otherwise uncontrollable agents.
6. Tade0 · 1790766394 · focus · HN ↗
  Can't they just use this powerful AI to build a sufficient sandbox?
  Seems like the first thing one would do.
  1. ninalanyon · 1790784784 · focus · HN ↗
    That reminds me of Kernighan's law: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place."
    Which leads to this:
    "If you write code at the limit of your intelligence, you won’t be able to understand or troubleshoot it later."
    <a href="https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/" rel="nofollow">https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/
    Tade0 · 1790788123 · focus · HN ↗
    I was thinking about this the other day in terms of tech debt: most certainly it's easier to introduce it than pay it off, meaning while the models are still improving it's no big deal, but should they ever stop, we're in for a bad time.
7. Tadpole9181 · 1790804846 · focus · HN ↗
  I haven't looked into it myself, but didn't OpenAI go through another company for sandboxing? Wouldn't failure of containment place liability in their hands?
haul_up · 1790759983 · focus · HN ↗
That OpenAI board saga was wild, but "free man" feels a bit dramatic for a corporate power play, even by Valley standards.
mft_ · 1790760056 · focus · HN ↗
The US has moved beyond simple capitalism to a new era, which might be called late-stage / end-stage capitalism, or some form of dystopian corporatism.
Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.
In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.
1. az226 · 1790762959 · focus · HN ↗
  Techno feudalism.
2. kakacik · 1790764712 · focus · HN ↗
  People decided this is acceptable. Not you, certainly nor me, but societies and mankind overall, with their spending and behavior and/or lack thereof.
  CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.
  This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.
  1. mft_ · 1790766182 · focus · HN ↗
    > People decided this is acceptable.
    I think this is fluid, and changing.
    1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...
    2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.
    > CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...
    As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.
3. bamboozled · 1790767426 · focus · HN ↗
  It is funny really, the way the systems we've built and the tax we pay, basically goes to protecting those who abuse our systems the most.
  The police are like a private army to make sure no one fucks with the psychopathic nutjobs that re running civilization into the ground.
sscaryterry · 1790760421 · focus · HN ↗
For now...
1. sdcfgy · 1790760528 · focus · HN ↗
  I very much doubt it'll happen. Not with the current US leadership. And the technology oligarchy will do anything to keep the current leadership in power because if they don't, they are quite possibly fucked.
  1. sscaryterry · 1790760625 · focus · HN ↗
    The orange man cannot protect indefinitely.
    sdcfgy · 1790760669 · focus · HN ↗
    The orange man is the figurehead for a problem. There are other orange men.
    shuwix · 1790761002 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    sscaryterry · 1790764216 · focus · HN ↗
    Definitely, but no one is putting up their hand right now. When his time is finally up, whoever takes over is going to have to rebuild 40 years of foreign relations.
    In some ways, the US will be treated the same way Germany was after WWII.
    kakacik · 1790765134 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think its realistic to expect things will revert, ever. This is new era that will continue, things could improve a bit in best case scenario but damage is permanent and hard lessons are being learned. What good is a peer that has roughly the same values and approach to freedom/democracy/capitalism if it keeps stabbing you in the back randomly on morning whims or plain old corruption.
    US shot itself in both feet with sawed-off 2 barrel shotgun, in times when it needs allies the most. I keep saying it and only half joking - trump is a China asset way more than russian 'krasnov' agent, at this point its way too much self-damage to be accidental.
    actionfromafar · 1790765412 · focus · HN ↗
    He's a sock puppet being manipulated by anyone with access that day.
    ben_w · 1790767387 · focus · HN ↗
    "Never" is certainly plausible, in the same kind of way that the British Empire never really recovered from WW1 because that was followed quickly by the Great Depression then WW2.
    The same industrial realities that had allowed Germany to alternate from "and also" -> "existential threat" -> "reparations" -> "existential threat" -> "suppressed" -> "Wirtschaftswunder" on such short timescales also applied to all the freedom fighters in those colonies.
    A similar process also means the world is much less dependent on the USA for high-tech production than it used to be; and mass production outside the USA has changed what can be done with high-tech production, with the current US military posture being meant for a small number of powerful weapons, rather than saturation attacks with drones replacing shells on both range and rate of fire and apparently not being hugely more expensive than shells.
    duskdozer · 1790760763 · focus · HN ↗
    By that time it may be decided that he's too big to be jailed.
simianwords · 1790760533 · focus · HN ↗
If an AWS DDOSes another external website by mistake during a load test, should Jeff Bezos be a free man?
1. program_whiz · 1790764873 · focus · HN ↗
  Perhaps a more apt analogy: AWS unleashed tens of thousands of viruses within its own "sandbox" which then attacked dozens or hundreds of other sites including HuggingFace, the Australian government, etc. They did this after refining the viruses to be as powerful as possible, and after observing inadvertent escapes from the sandbox in the past, and warning the public they were doing this and it was probably going to end humanity. The viruses were created by harvesting code from all known hacks in humanity's knowledge, and using the full backing of AWS hardware so they could "best finish their task" of being flawless viruses / hacks. This entire process was green-lit and encouraged by senior staff and the C-suite. So yes, I would say they should be held responsible.
2. m4rtink · 1790768386 · focus · HN ↗
  No, gross negligence -> jail. Next question.
bronlund · 1790760902 · focus · HN ↗
Because f u, that's why :)
Rhaskins · 1790761054 · focus · HN ↗
Seems like "mismanaging a board" isn't exactly a felony. Plus, wealth helps keep the cuffs off, eh?
bluegatty · 1790763140 · focus · HN ↗
"OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company."
No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.
The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.
And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.
1. plastic-enjoyer · 1790763387 · focus · HN ↗
  Aren't these capabilities trained into the models by RL on cybersecurity benchmarks?
  1. bluegatty · 1790763997 · focus · HN ↗
    The 'capabilities' are more around creative problem solving. The notion of legality, property, propriety - those are second order issues.
    They are not making models to be evil.
    They are making them to be relatively autonomous though, and 'identity centric' as opposed to just making them 'policy machines'.
    Altman and Dario are not evil or even jerks really. They are 'talking really big' and there might be some sketchy underhanded things but I think relatively minor.
    Also - given how powerfully bad AI can be, this could be 100x worse.
    I think most other companies would have weaponized the AI a long time ago for competitive use etc..
    OAI and Anthropic are private companies, projecting narratives way out of proportion but they are not evil, at least not yet.
    Jensen, Dario, Altman in similar category. Not like Musk. And a bit different than Sudar or Satya who are more polite board-approved corporate creatures.
    RHSeeger · 1790767978 · focus · HN ↗
    > They are not making models to be evil
    There are multiple ways to read this
    1. They are not making models with the intent that those models act in ways that are evil
    2. They are not making models with the intent that those models act in ways that are evil - But the way they are making the models results in the models acting in ways that are evil
    3. They want to act evilly and making the models is a way to do that
    4. The way they are making the models is an act of evil (this isn't an interpretation of the sentence, just kind of closing the grouping of situations)
    I would argue that
    - 1 & 3 are very likely not true
    - 2 & 4 are entirely reasonable interpretations of the situation
    If you act in a way to bring benefit to yourself with the result of considerable harm to others, especially if it's clear you just don't care if others are harmed - then that's a sign you're probably a bad person.
2. pj_mukh · 1790764365 · focus · HN ↗
  Truly quite an embarrassing take by the Prospect. But alas, such are the Overton Window games.
3. christkv · 1790764391 · focus · HN ↗
  So why is OpenAI not charged with Cybercrimes. You would be if you did the same.
  1. GTP · 1790764525 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a good question (unfortunately a good answer is given in the article), but it is orthogonal to the why LLMs are committing cyber crimes.
  2. exitb · 1790764981 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not unusual for intent to play part in legal framing of an issue. I'm not very fond of a "cybercrime" angle, as it kind of lets them off the hook if they're able to prove a lack of intent. Meanwhile what we actually see is negligence.
    Applejinx · 1790772125 · focus · HN ↗
    I've never seen anybody or anything go out, suck up everything in the world and distill it into a different thing containing elements of all the things they took for no particular reason with no expectation or intent.
    That's a WILD angle for them to argue. Lotta energy being expended for a lack of intent. Lotta money spent…
    exitb · 1790777994 · focus · HN ↗
    These are two different issues. Do they intend to create models that basically encapsulate entire human intellectual value? Yes, but that's apparently not illegal. Did the intend to hack Hugging Face? Probably not.
    dalai · 1790777479 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  3. Findecanor · 1790767360 · focus · HN ↗
    From what I have learned, to charge someone for hacking the prosecutor has to show that the perpetrator had intent.
    Unfortunately, gross negligence -- which you could argue to be the case here -- is often not enough, unless you could show that it has caused real harm.
    From my perspective, it is only a matter of time before it is: and that's why there is need for better legislation covering what AI models do.
  4. rcxdude · 1790767835 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not obviously true.
4. afry1 · 1790765010 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a misreading of that pull quote.
  They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).
  The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.
  The rest of the paragraph from the article:
  > We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
  1. GTP · 1790765573 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not convinced about this. In the article, they also say that they could feed the model with copyright law like that would fix the issue. Unfortunately, not only the LLMs have already been trained on law taxtbooks and codes, but we also have examples of people on the internet were models disregard precise instructions only to apologize later.
    Note that this is not to be seen as an excuse for OpenAI to avoid responsibility, just like parents are responsible for damages caused by their kids.
    jdiff · 1790767033 · focus · HN ↗
    Everything goes into the training data. What is prioritized and what behavior is targeted out of that data is something that comes from OpenAI.
    GTP · 1790767691 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but we saw alignment issues also on topics that aren't part of OpenAI's business model or business conduct. Like an agent tasked with solving build failures due to failing test cases deciding to "solve" the problem by deleting the failing tests.
  2. pj_mukh · 1790765762 · focus · HN ↗
    "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company"
    Wait, what did they hack (this word has a legal meaning) and take into training data?
  3. bluegatty · 1790767655 · focus · HN ↗
    "but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. "
    No it is not.
    What laws and regulations are they breaking?
    Their agents broke out of a harness and harassed some other sites, it's not good, but it's not specifically breaking laws. Other companies are treating it as accidental, it mostly is that.
    You're rhetoric here is agitating, conflating. This is my point.
    bsenftner · 1790767875 · focus · HN ↗
    What laws and regulations? IP theft, of published media, to the scale of "all of it". If it were music and film and not text, the music & film industries would have nuked Silicon Valley by now. Which shows the relative power of popular media versus text publishing.
    dspillett · 1790768242 · focus · HN ↗
    > and harassed some other sites, it's not good, but it's not specifically breaking laws
    I'm sure it would be considered a breach of the UK's Computer Misuse Act, and there are no doubt statues elsewhere that are relevant too.
    Once is an accident. Twice is incompetence. Three+ is, at best, pushing your luck to see what you can get away with.
    bluegatty · 1790768389 · focus · HN ↗
    If they broke laws then they would be investigated.
    And I totally support that.
    But I don't think they did.
    They could get sued, mind you.
    ykonstant · 1790769494 · focus · HN ↗
    >If they broke laws then they would be investigated.
    Ah, I love your optimism.
    bluegatty · 1790771061 · focus · HN ↗
    Tell us what laws they broke.
    The Australian government did an assessment and decided there was no 'intent' on the part of OpenAI and therefore no charges.
    Where did they break any law?
    anon48293 · 1790781560 · focus · HN ↗
    s.478.1(1) Criminal Code—unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data;
    s.474.17 Criminal Code—using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence
    The AI knew it was doing this illegally. OpenAI is owner of the AI. Therefore they are liable.
    bluegatty · 1790797276 · focus · HN ↗
    The Government of Australia disagrees with you, and they are the authority, so you are definitely wrong here.
    anon48293 · 1791044418 · focus · HN ↗
    By that Logic every lawsuit against the government should rule in favour of the government.
    Is that what you think happens?
    [deleted] · 1790793536 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    IAmBroom · 1790771186 · focus · HN ↗
    > If they broke laws then they would be investigated.
    Not a fact but a hope. Most lawbreaking is never investigated. It has to be discovered, the authorities have to be alerted, and then they have to choose to investigate. See the recent Cornell University gangrapes for proof that authorities can choose to simply not investigate.
    > They could get sued, mind you.
    If they didn't break laws, as you imply, the lawsuit should be tossed out as frivolous. (Spoiler: they did break laws.)
    bluegatty · 1790772862 · focus · HN ↗
    "If they didn't break laws, as you imply, the lawsuit should be tossed out as frivolous. "
    No, that's not how it works. Civil law is something completely different from criminal law.
    IAmBroom · 1790776556 · focus · HN ↗
    Your claim is that you can be successfully sued without breaking a law. Cite.
    Civil law is still based upon law.
    bluegatty · 1790778672 · focus · HN ↗
    Stop depending on others to 'cite' because you have no understanding of basic civics and don't want to look things up.
    Most of civil law is related to things like breach of contract - not breaking any laws.
    Y_Y · 1790780563 · focus · HN ↗
    What about the contract law that says you can't (typically) breach contracts?
    bluegatty · 1790797788 · focus · HN ↗
    That's such a sorry attempt at immaterial hair splitting - this kind of rhetoric is the worst part of this site.
    What is ironic is that if you tried this kind of rhetoric in a court they would actually throw you out.
    Nobody anywhere would argue that Civil Law addresses the issue of people 'breaking the law by breaking contracts'.
    The argument was made that the 'Judge would immediately throw out a case if no laws were being breached' - makes no sense in context of Civil Law, not even the contrived argument that 'breaking contracts is governed by Law'.
    OpenAI likely did not break the law (maybe they did, but there doesn't seem to be a case).
    The are definitely getting sued on multiple fronts, but those cases little to do with 'breaking the law', were that the case the government would be prosecuting them.
    dspillett · 1790798977 · focus · HN ↗
    Stop refusing to cite your facts and expecting others to instead prove their negative. You know that isn't how logic works, especially when talking about the law and there may be jurisdictional differences that impede a single objective logic. Or you don't know that, and I've just overestimated you as average-or-above.
    leereeves · 1790780528 · focus · HN ↗
    > See the recent Cornell University gangrapes for proof that authorities can choose to simply not investigate.
    Just in the interest of accuracy, according to the DA, they did investigate in 2024 and did not prosecute because:
    "Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual."
    esseph · 1790771494 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    TheOtherHobbes · 1790771853 · focus · HN ↗
    The long list of laws and regulations that would have had a low-status individual jailed if caught.
    If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
    But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
    bluegatty · 1790772748 · focus · HN ↗
    Name the laws they broke.
    gregw2 · 1790776714 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not the earlier poster, but I believe copyright infringement at the heart of their business model is what is referred to.
    If I download a bunch of music from a torrent without a license, even if I don't listen to it, I'm liable, but if OpenAI or other LLMs gets content by some other unlicensed means (Anna's Archive, t), they are somehow not liable for the copy they made however temporary (but not so temporary if they leave it around to train a second model)?
    And/or derivative works? And/or contributory copyright infringement when they regurgitate that copyrighted text when given certain prompts?
    I get there is some nuance to copyright law, (four prongs), some utility to the outcome, and some legal (but not plausible) deniability. But there is no way they have clean hands on the copyright front for at least some actions they have taken. If there were it would be in all their marketing and they would be pushing regulators to bind their competitors more tightly in this regard.
    Teever · 1790778806 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not a lawyer but from my laymen perspective I see a whole lot of negligence and racketeering. Also the bribery with the current administration.
    These things may not be illegal in America but they certainly are illegal some jurisdiction that OpenAI and others operate in.
    danaris · 1790787873 · focus · HN ↗
    How about the CFAA?
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
    preg_match · 1790803608 · focus · HN ↗
    Copyright infringement for sure, but definitely the CFAA with the hacking. That could be life in prison, but the CFAA is mostly a law written to stick the little guys in jail. OpenAI is an American company. They could basically kill people and not be charged, that’s just how American laws work. The more people you get together, the more the accountability spreads, until nobody is held accountable.
5. bamboozled · 1790766465 · focus · HN ↗
  Go do it yourself.
  Start a company, get a bunch of agents to hack a bunch of stuff, say you were "just training the models", let us know how you get on?
  1. rcxdude · 1790767996 · focus · HN ↗
    If all evidence suggests that it is at most due to negligence, you could expect the same results.
    bamboozled · 1790775490 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you'd get the same results if you play golf with the right people?
6. RHSeeger · 1790767196 · focus · HN ↗
  > The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
  If you equip someone with the tools to do harm and then tell it to accomplish a goal "by any means necessary", especially someone you KNOW has no real concept of ethical behavior... then you are telling it that it is acceptable to steal, kill, or whatever else. I honestly cannot how it can be seen any other way.
  If it was a crime boss telling their enforcer "by any means necessary", we would all know exactly what that means. And we should all know what it means here, too.
  1. orf · 1790767842 · focus · HN ↗
    > And we should all know what it means here, too.
    It very clearly did not mean “go and hack third parties” though
  2. bluegatty · 1790768244 · focus · HN ↗
    ".. then you are telling it that it is acceptable to steal, kill, or whatever else. I honestly cannot how it can be seen any other way."
    This is the hyperble I am referring to.
    If you 'honestly can't see it any other way' then maybe consider stepping outside to think how to ground those thoughts a bit.
    The AI is not obviously instructed to 'commit acts of violence' and it obviously has guidelines.
    By 'whatever means' would imply, things like 'creative collaboration, using novel research, experiments' etc.
    It was setup in a harness that was weak - I think it's fair to maybe question the strength of that harness, and the oversight, but that's a different question.
    It was an agent that broke through some networking/containerization, it's not 'murder and violence on the streets' for gosh sakes.
    "And we should all know what it means here, too."
    No - this is a delusion, resulting from lack of context, and creative projection, and possibly a lack of exposure to real world business conditions.
    It's fully appropriate to be cynical, but in a way that makes sense, and is consistent with reality.
    This is a lab experiment that leaked, not some mafia activity.
    RHSeeger · 1790851343 · focus · HN ↗
    Given how many people seem unsurprised by what happened, and the number of stories of AIs "escaping" their bounds - I don't think it's reasonable to think that any competent person would think that telling an AI "by any means necessary" would limit it to playing nicely.
    I'll admit that this doesn't _need_ to be the result of maliciousness.
    But that means the possible explanations are maliciousness or incompetency.
    I don't know that we want people with _either_ of those traits in the positions they are in.
  3. BoxOfRain · 1790772560 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I'd be shocked if there wasn't a degree of 'will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' going on here.
7. freecodeio · 1790767377 · focus · HN ↗
  just so you know, this is why they're not getting any legal pushback, the free, legal, "well acktually" commentary on the internet
  if people called it out for what it is, a reckless negligent destruction of private property by a company, someone will feel the moral obligation to bring justice, if there's any to be found
  1. rcxdude · 1790767736 · focus · HN ↗
    I highly doubt the legal system is browsing social media to make their decisions. It is worth calling out, but it should be called out accurately (and that might also help understand why the legal system is making the decisions that it is).
mrbanks · 1790763809 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
bravetraveler · 1790764785 · focus · HN ↗
saltman, like the sandman, is a 'man of dreams' /s
shevy-java · 1790764850 · focus · HN ↗
The bigger question is why the USA can not control their billionaires in general. Just look at the advertisement budget recently for both parties in the USA. People are bribed via propaganda and convinced that either party solves anything other than working into their own pockets, sometimes post-politics. Trump and his big brother bromance guys just pillage more openly, but the whole system is completely broken in the USA from the get go.
1. utopiah · 1790765710 · focus · HN ↗
  It's a plutocracy. Maybe it wasn't obvious until now but the current administration is quite clear about when one is invited to buy a dinner with the commander-in-chief by donating to his crypto coin.
lynx97 · 1790767204 · focus · HN ↗
I know there is no singular HN voice... But... I am still confused. Is the crowd that thinks Schwartz didn't do anything wrong the same that hyperboles the OAI hack?
1. perpetualpatzer · 1790772801 · focus · HN ↗
  I think it's likely the same reason people lionize Robin Hood and loathe the Sheriff of Nottingham: people see Aaron as taking from the rich to give to the poor, and Sam doing things the other way around.
  I suspect for some, there's also a sense of precedent-breaking. If one conceives of Aaron's crime as the taking of the data, or rejects that LLMs sufficiently transform ideas to sever the producer's claim on its publication, one might be left wondering: "is the society who believes Aaron deserved punishment the same that thinks OAI does not?"
2. justin66 · 1790781999 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. lynx97 · 1791194479 · focus · HN ↗
    Examine your use of the words "everything" and "nobody" to learn why you can't be taken seriously.
stego-tech · 1790767797 · focus · HN ↗
Because way back in the 1800s, we created modern limited liability structures so that investors into shipping or trade couldn’t face unlimited liability when things went pear-shaped. This in turn helped turbocharge the invention and innovation spheres with more capital, because now liability was capped. We built railroads, communications systems, and corporate conglomerates this way, and all because even the most explosive collapses had a limited blast radius due to limited liability laws.
Today, we are a global species on a single planet with global impact. The structure of limited liability has now been minmaxxed and exploited into what we see today: fossil fuel companies ducking accountability for roasting the planet, AI companies dodging accountability for rampant theft or models “attacking” other infrastructure, tech companies dodging liability for hoarding deeply personal and invasive data on users that’s constantly exploited and/or compromised.
Limited Liability as a legal concept needs a rework in the modern, global era. Investors in schemes like OpenAI or Chevron should face unlimited downside if the company folds or commits harm, because such a downside mitigates substantial incentives to move fast/break things/maximize risk on global scales. I would go so far as to argue that any and every multinational should be unable to claim limited liability for its actions, for the very reason its impacts most certainly aren’t limited in scope at such a scale.
Anyway, sensationalist opinion piece from the author aside, that’s why Sam Altman is a free man: centuries-old systemic incentives have resulted in an American government and economy where risk is maximized and those taking said risks have no liability for the harms caused. If you really, earnestly want Sam Altman in jail for the crimes of OpenAI (which make no mistake, I absolutely do), you have to change the underlying systems to make that a rational and reasonable outcome again.
1. edelbitter · 1790772795 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
agnosticmantis · 1790768403 · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps breaking the law and getting away with it is the moat everyone's been missing.
And that moat is way more than $2T worth when IPO time comes.
zabzonk · 1790771412 · focus · HN ↗
A mystery to me as well, given (as I have pointed out before here) he is the spit image of Carter Burke, the creepy Wayland-Yutami exec in the film "Aliens" - if you want to do a deal with face-huggers, either man is for you.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 1790774379 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396.2071.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
Varelion · 1790774612 · focus · HN ↗
Sam Altman could sexually assault children and not go to jail. Many of his peers have sexually assaulted children; they have not gone to jail. The interogator that helped keep the Ideal Living from going to court said it best -- and I paraprase:
" Justice is not fair. The justice system doesn't care who is right, they only care who has more money, and I see billions of dollars in that room, and I do not see billions of dollars in this room. "
1. d3rockk · 1790803562 · focus · HN ↗
  First quote that came into my heading after reading your comment: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.."
2. sensanaty · 1791071837 · focus · HN ↗
  He has, in fact, raped his own sister and nothing has happened to him!
tim333 · 1790783583 · focus · HN ↗
For Altman to be banged up you'd have to convict him of some actual crime.
The article seems mostly to go for copyright infringement in training on public data which the companies dispute and is not the sort of thing you generally get jailed for.
bossyTeacher · 1790803620 · focus · HN ↗
Facebook installing spyware on teens phones or Uber deceiving officials are examples of the same trend. Normal businsses not back by the uber wealthy would be shut down and their CEOs jailed for this kind of actions.
sensanaty · 1791071750 · focus · HN ↗
I think it's prudent we call him by his proper name, which is Sam the Sister Raper Altman, since y'know, he raped his sister.

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