What makes you think he has no technical ability?

It seems more likely to me, given his background (programming from 8, accepted to Stanford CS) that he has technical aptitude, but he has even more dealmaking ability.

https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-... - Patrick Collison says he had technical conversations on Lisp machine implementations and iframe security policies, which to me is a measure of some depth.

And on hype, I think the carefully staged GPT PR over the years had an element of controlled hype. I remember them talking about how they couldn't release it because of how e.g. spammers could use it - https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18224704/ai-machine-learn...

(They weren't entirely wrong, there's a flood of junk text out there now. Twitter popular posts have their replies flooded by AI-generated "on topic" responses by bots. Content mills are switching to AI.)

It's funny, but I adopted a similar approach, and it's amazing how the tides turn in your favor when your name is on everyone's lips. I'm nothing special, but I have an eye for quality people and a great reputation (thanks to it), so I'm the one who keeps getting the calls.

Also, some people would rather be shot than talk in front of a crowd or get up in front an audience. I used to have panic attacks during introductions in small meetings, and now I'm the one who spots the nervous professionals and helps them feel that they belong.

Anyway, that's all to say there's value in it. I don't personally enrich myself off of it, but if I could offer a correction to your dim view of the imperfect, the world isn't actually run by intimidatingly charismatic, beautiful geniuses, and I have found that helping people that have the simple capacity for success connect and communicate isn't a worthless skill.

It’s actually much less confusing than that. It’s clear he has a knack for becoming a favorite son of billionaire oligarchs who see him as useful.

Which, assuming he’s like everyone else who’s done that, was accomplished by a combination of flattery and willingness to operate on behalf of the ruling class totally untethered from any principles whatsoever.

It's pretty incredible that the upper echelons have so thoroughly psyopped everyone below them that the public runs confused around in an endless maze of ideology, false pretexts and stirred up drama.

This way only insiders recognise the most fundamental realpolitical power struggles of all ages; that the "very confusing" wars, coups or power grabs is not very complex at all but always - almost as a physical principle - stemming from the richest members of society pulling the strings to benefit themselves.

Then some note or some FOIA request will be released in 40 years about the orchestration and no one will care.

Just follow the money, or the networks of people and it's easy to see the undercurrents of class warfare, elite power via the security state or oligarch clubs siphoning money and power away from the public, but that's called conspiracy these days and is dangerous (to the ruling classes).

Yeah this stuff isn't rocket science. If you shut the fuck up and play along and don't make people uncomfortable you get a kitchen renovation and a vacation home and a job for your kid. It's the oldest game there is.

Take a look at the highly conspiratorial website https://www.opensecrets.org for an example of how i enquire by looking at sources and money flow helping me realise most politicians are bought by lobby groups working for the owning classes and vote thereafter, not "sincere belief in ideology".

This "you're just a conspiracy nut" perspective for looking at actual networks of power and sources, became common after journalism pretty much died with local media as they shifted to ownership from a few parent conglomerates all working for elite interest.

Now news is about "ideas" and "events" not key players, money and networks of power ultimately benefiting the richest that kan in turn easily sway public opinion without resistance through PR, think tanks and media ownership.

I don't know when you think this rather beautiful "sincere belief in ideology" became the primary driver of history and politics, to me that's a highly naive after a bachelors in History and a love for the pretty standard historiographical realpolitical and resource oriented lenses adjacent to works like Guns, Germs and Steel.

> Take a look at the highly conspiratorial website https://www.opensecrets.org for an example of how i enquire by looking at sources and money flow helping me realise most politicians are bought by lobby groups working for the owning classes and vote thereafter, not "sincere belief in ideology".

Generally when I see people use this they're misreading it. For instance, they'll see donations from people working at Google to a campaign and think they're donations "by Google" to a campaign, but companies can't donate to campaigns. It's also unlikely politicians sincerely care that much about a campaign donation capped at $3000.

In general if you think things are about the money you should be happy with politics, because the highest-raising politicians are Bernie Sanders and crew with $25 Actblue donations. But what actually happens is that they raise more money than Republican politicians and then still lose elections in red states. Republican voters and politicians both actually believe what they're saying.

The two parties both represent the same class interests with slight differences in a thin veneer of identity politics.

There's never been an alternative to vote for, and every attempt gets smeared in the media owned by the two-party system representing the oligarchs.

Candidates like Bernie who's still in line with most of above policies are showcased as alternatives but the distribution of power is never challenged outside of the arena of identity political circus boosted by conglomerate media.

Obama was also good example of this, PR outsider on the surface but in reality funded by the same bankers and continued global US adventurism.

Politics is downstream from elite interests when they own the media, the parties, the candidates and intermingle with the security state to take care of the rest.

This becomes especially apparent when looking back at the media landscape pre mergers, where a plurality of opinion and research existed from well respected classical journalists challenging local and state power, in what would today be smeared as conspiracy theorising or anti-patriotism while the overton window has become microscopic unless towing the line for the unfathomably rich.

You just typed a bunch of vague stuff because you can't actually respond to me.

> There's never been an alternative to vote for, and every attempt gets smeared in the media owned by the two-party system representing the oligarchs.

The two parties aren't controlled by anyone except primary voters. There is hardly any mechanism in the US to stop anyone who wants from joining either party, as long as you can get votes.

This is an unusual case of other countries' politics infecting ours; in other countries the parties actually can fire people and control their candidate list. Here they can't do anything.

Also the US doesn't have oligarchs. That's a specific word with a specific meaning. Closest you can get would be defense contractor CEOs but those just aren't that important here; you probably only know one.

That's an incredibly unintelligent "everything is fine move along" comment. Seeing how it contains nothing of value whatsover, I'm surprised it's this short, usually they're several paragraphs. These people are sometimes known as the lazy ones amongst the unintelligent ones.

The average normie "everything is fine" position is not that intelligent. The problem is that the first level cynical reaction is /even worse/.

That's why it's a minority position. Most people aren't low-openness conspiracy theorists.

It's like the midwit meme where the people at both ends agree.

You're just proving their point by calling what they wrote conspiracy theory, without refuting or even interacting with a single thing they actually said, to claim politics is "actually never" about money or power grabs, and "almost always" about sincerely held beliefs. That's just laughable.

Why did you put words in quotes that aren't what I said?

Do you think we invaded Iraq for their oil, or that anyone profited from it? (Answer to both is no.)

> Politics is largely about sincerely-held ideologies

Close. Politics is about interests. It’s about who gets the resources and who gets status and dignity and who doesn’t.

There are a lot of sincerely held ideologies that rise up around those questions. But if you don’t analyze politics through that lens you’re fucking delusional.

> It’s about who gets the resources and who gets status and dignity and who doesn’t.

These three things are all opposing; you can't "and" them. And you shouldn't put the first one first, as people in the first world are generally too rich to care about it, and when they do care they never put any work into figuring out what would benefit them.

Thus you get votes for president based on gas prices, trust fund kids being communists, Mississippi continually voting 100% for the party that keeps them at the bottom of every state ranking, people thinking the Iraq War was for oil, people thinking the current Ukraine War is good for Russia, and so on.

nb when I said sincerely held ideologies I meant for the people in politics; voters largely have sincerely held nonsensical positions they haven't thought about much, or in other words are "cross-pressured".

> mildly surly sloth

I had to read that twice, but it was well worth it.

Graham doesn't say Altman is smart. He says he's driven. They're not the same thing.

Quite frankly, every time I read one of Altman's essays I am seriously underwhelmed as far as smartness goes.