Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes

[-]Joseph Miller2y6214

Can anyone comment on the likelihood of her forgetting the abuse she experienced as a 4 year old and then remembering it at ~26 years old? Given the other circumstances this seems quite likely to be a false memory, but I am not familiar with the research on this topic.

[-]Kaj_Sotala2y6429

Bessel van der Kolk claimed the following in The Body Keeps the Score:

There have in fact been hundreds of scientific publications spanning well over a century documenting how the memory of trauma can be repressed, only to resurface years or decades later. Memory loss has been reported in people who have experienced natural disasters, accidents, war trauma, kidnapping, torture, concentration camps, and physical and sexual abuse. Total memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidence ranging from 19 percent to 38 percent. This issue is not particularly controversial: As early as 1980 the DSM-III recognized the existence of memory loss for traumatic events in the diagnostic criteria for dissociative amnesia: “an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by normal forgetfulness.” Memory loss has been part of the criteria for PTSD since that diagnosis was first introduced.
One of the most interesting studies of repressed memory was conducted by Dr. Linda Meyer Williams, which began when she was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s

... (read more)

[-]jacob_cannell2y5828

Remembering and imagination share the same pathways and are difficult to distinguish at the neuro circuit level. The idea of recovered memories was already discredited decades ago after the peak of the satanic ritual abuse hysteria/panic of the 80's. At its peak some parents were jailed based on testimonies of children, children that had been coerced (both deliberately and indirectly) into recanting fantastical, increasingly outlandish tales of satanic baby eating rituals. The FBI even eventually investigated and found 0 evidence, but the turning point was when some lawyers and psychiatrists started winning lawsuits against the psychologists and social workers at the center of the recovered memory movement.

Memories change every time they are rehearsed/reimagined; the magnitude of such change varies and can be significant, and the thin separation between imaginings (imagined memories, memories/stories of others, etc) and 'factual' memories doesn't really erode so much as not really exist in the first place.

Nonetheless, some people's detailed memories from childhood are probably largely accurate, but some detailed childhood memories are complete confabulations based on internalization of external evidence, and some are later confabulations based on attempts to remember or recall and extensive dwelling on the past, and some are complete fiction. No way with current tech to distinguish between, even for the rememberer.

[-]Lukas_Gloor2y266

I know someone who recovered memories of repeated abuse including from the age of four later in their teenage years. The parents could corroborate a lot of circumstances around those memories, which suggests that they're likely broadly accurate. For instance, things like "they told their mother about the abuse when they were four, and the mother remembered that this conversation happened." Or "the parents spoke to the abuser and he basically admitted it." There was also suicidal ideation at around age six (similarity to Annie's story). In addition, the person remembers things like, when playing with children's toy figures (human-like animals), they would not play with these toy figures like ordinary children and instead think about plots that involve bleeding between legs and sexual assault. (This is much more detailed than Annie’s story, but remembering panic attacks as the first memory and having them as a child at least seems like evidence that she was strongly affected by something that had happened.)

Note that the person in question recovered these memories alone years before having any therapy.

It's probably easier to remember abuse (or for this to manifest itself in child beha... (read more)

[-]Elizabeth2y139

The chances she remembers it accurately? very small.

But the chances a four year old who was abused accurately remembers the abuse? also very small, because they're so young and because trauma messes with memory formation.

So barring psychosis it seems pretty likely to me that something happened, but that she isn't an accurate witness to specifics.

2solomon alon2y

From my understanding it’s incredibly unlikely. There are roughly two possibilities. 1. This a false memory implanted by her therapist. 2. She always had the memory but only realized what it was later or only decided to act on it later. Note often time children don’t process sexual assault as an incredibly traumatic until years later. either because a therapist brings a memory to the forefront or something happens to bring the memory to the forefront or even just learning about what sex is can cuase the memoru to be traumatic.

7Lukas_Gloor2y

The opposite is common, though. I know someone who had this happened and they remembered that sexual assault felt distinctly very bad even before knowing what sex was. (And see my other comment on resurfacing memories.)

6Gareth Davidson2y

To share an alternate anecdote, a friend of mine was accused by a family member of abuse as a child, which turned out to be a false memory created during a severe and prolonged period of mental illness. Ten years after she apologised and says she doesn't believe it happened, he still finds it difficult to forgive her and has mental health issues caused by the stigma (not that there was any really, she made a lot of other extremely unlikely clams) Not this this influences my position from the default stance of "dunno", but I thought I'd share for balance.

[-][anonymous]2y5929

Does anyone know what the base rate is for estranged family members making accusations against celebrity relatives? That's a pretty important factor here e.g. it's possible that journalists at reputable outlets are willing to write misleading stories about AI safety university groups because they have true statistics that they can cite (or use clever linguistic tricks and other tools of the trade to straight-up lie about those statistics in plausibly deniable ways, which sadly also still happens even at the most reputable outlets), but can't write honest stories about accusations from estranged family members because of journalistic ethics.

Or maybe editors at news outlets and other varieties of corporate executives all have estranged family members so there's a norm against it, which sometimes holds and sometimes doesn't. All of it centers around what the base rate is, a single number, which I don't know. But it's impossible to investigate this topic in a truthseeking way and simultaneously not attempt to find the number that all the other calculations indisputably revolve around. The base rate of false rape accusations for normal people is incredibly low, likely because the victim... (read more)

[-]Viliam2y2318

it's possible that journalists at reputable outlets are willing to write misleading stories about AI safety university groups because they have true statistics that they can cite

My guess would be that student groups accused of being "apocalyptic" are much less likely to sue you for libel than billionaires accused of child sex abuse. That seems more important than base rates.

[-]James_Miller2y120

Most journalists trying to investigate this story would attempt to interview Annie Altman. The base rate (converted to whatever heuristic the journalist used) would be influenced by whether she agreed to the interview and if she did how she came across. The reference class wouldn't just be "estranged family members making accusations against celebrity relatives".

[-]ChristianKl2y*164

She also makes claims that can be factually checked. When it comes to the money from her dad's there are going to be legal documents that describe what happened in that process.

5pythagoras50152y

Good point. I don't currently know that rate, but agree that it would be helpful in analyzing this matter.

[-]Adam Zerner2y4657

I'm confused about and skeptical of the justifiability of all the downvotes this post received.

If the allegations are true, well, I'm not sure how important exactly it is, but it seems at least like it passes the bar of "worth knowing about" pretty easily.
If something passes that bar pretty easily, I guess the next question is how plausible it is. If it's incredibly implausible, then downvoting seems reasonable. I only skimmed through the post and some of the comments, but it doesn't seem like the allegations are obviously implausible.
Once something passes through filters (1) and (2), some other reasons I could think of for why it might be worth downvoting are if the post does a poor job of arguing, is very difficult to understand, or is very hostile and contentious. None of these things seem to be the case here though.

[-]Lukas_Gloor2y1613

Strongly agree!

I have mixed feelings about the convincingness of the accusations. Some aspects seem quite convincing to me, others very much not.

In most contexts, I'm still going to advocate for treating Sam Altman as though it's 100% that he's innocent, because that's what I think is the right policy in light of uncorroborated accusations. However, in the context of "should I look into this more or at least keep an eye on the possibility of dark triad psychology?," I definitely think this passes the bar of "yes, this is relevant to know."

I thought it was very strange to interpret this post as "gossip," as one commenter did.

[-]Ben Pace2y*4529

Yikes, I'm finding this quite emotionally difficult to read, and I didn't expect any of this.

Amongst many disturbing things, Annie reports:

Shadowbanning across all platforms except onlyfans and pornhub. Also had 6 months of hacking into almost all my accounts and wifi when I first started the podcast"

I don't currently see how this could work out. Shadowbanning on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook (and more) is something the mods on each of those platforms controls, I am unclear how a young Sam Altman could've accomplished this.

Hypotheses:

Sam and his allies engaged in a systematic campaign to report a lot of her content to mods on each of these platforms and somehow knew how to specifically cause shadowbanning on all of these platforms.
This was done when Sam was a significant figure in YC / Silicon Valley and he reached out directly to senior people in those companies to make a shadowbanning request.
She was shadowbanned on these platforms for sex work / other unusual content and inaccurately attributes it to Sam.
She is mistaken about what happened, or something close by happened once (e.g. he reported her to a subreddit mod who took mod action against her) and she is exaggerating this.
The claim is fabricated for other reasons (not very in touch with reality, attention, etc).

I'd certainly be interested to know what evidence led her to believe she had been widely shadowbanned.

7pythagoras50152y

Update: While I don't consider this evidence of a widespread shadowbanning effort, some commenters on Hacker News claim that a post regarding Annie's claims that Sam sexually assaulted her at age 4 has been being repeatedly removed. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072 2. https://twitter.com/JOSourcing/status/1710390512455401888 I have updated this post to include this information as well (c.f. item 3.a. in "What Annie has stated on her X account.")

[-]jefftk2y181

some commenters on Hacker News claim that a post regarding Annie's claims that Sam sexually assaulted her at age 4 has been being repeatedly removed.

It's possible that Sam or HN/YC have been abusing their mod powers, but this is also consistent with manual flagging by legitimate users. There's an active contingent of HN users who think this kind of post is a "gossipy distraction", and so it's very common for posts like this to be hidden via flagging even when they're not about someone involved with HN/YC.

(While HN does have a shadowbanning system, where your posts are not shown by default and only users who've manually set showdead=true can see them, it looks like that term is being misapplied here.)

7pythagoras50152y

I also find Annie's claims emotionally difficult to read. Annie's claims are very serious. Though, as I have acknowledged, their validity has yet to be convincingly established. I also would be interested to know what evidence led her to believe she had been widely shadowbanned. In general, I would be interested to hear more from Annie, Sam, or those close to this.

2Gunnar_Zarncke6mo

The good thing is that at least those actions on larger platforms leave evidence that can be established by the court.

[-]Roko2y4017

The simplest hypothesis that explains all this evidence is that Annie Altman is suffering from psychosis, and this would be obvious if we weren't all caught up in the metoo world order.

E.g. the belief that all her devices, and her wifi were hacked, and that she has been shadowbanned from all internet platforms seems like the kind of thing that someone suffering from psychosis would believe. It's not a rational belief. It's called a persecutory delusion.

The idea that her mental health problems were caused by a sexual assault early in her life is topsy turvy; actually, she's mentally ill which has caused her to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction and make the accusation, and irresponsible D-tier amateur journos are taking advantage of the situation.

This post is basically a perfect exemplar of how a psychotic person behaves. E.g.

Annie has moved more than 20 times in the past year.

The base rate for psychosis is about 1-3% and she's at the most common age for it too.

This 1-3% is much higher than the probability that the abuse happened, and the total internet shadowbanning happened, that multiple family members are conspiring against her, and the part where she was illeg... (read more)

[-]Seth Herd2y5731

You're assuming the two alternatives are that everything she's said is true and accurate, or else nothing is. It does not require psychosis to make wrong interpretations or to have mild paranoia. It merely requires not being a dedicated rationalist, and/or having a hard life. I'm pretty sure that being abused would help cause paranoia, helping her to get some stuff wrong.

Unfortunately, it's going to be impossible to disentangle this without more specific evidence. Psychology is complicated. Both real recovered memories and fabricated memories seem to be common.

You didn't bother estimating the base rate of sexual abuse by siblings. While that's very hard to figure out, it's very likely in the same neighborhood as your 1-3% psychosis. And it's even harder to study or estimate. So this isn't going to help much in resolving the issue.

-4Roko2y

I disagree, that seems extraordinarily high to me.

2ROM2y

I'm disappointed you didn't engage with Seth's claim that you're assuming all the claims made are either collectively true or collectively false. Is it true that someone with psychosis (assuming your judgement is correct) making an allegation of sexual abuse is more likely to be lying/mistaken than not? I.e someone with psychosis making a claim like the above is less likely than someone without psychosis to be accurately interpreting reality, but is their claim more likely to be false than not? Your argument leans heavily on her having psychosis. Do people with psychosis make more false allegations of sexual assault that true allegations? Breiding et al., 2014 estimates that around 19.3% of women in the US have been sexually assaulted. Assuming the rate is similar for people with psychosis, more than 1 in 5 women with psychosis would need to make false allegations for the base assumption to be "person has psychosis therefore their sexual assault claim is more likely false than true". On reflection this part wasn't a good point.

-9wolflow2y

[-]titotal2y3729

Bayes can judge you now: your analysis is half-arsed, which is not a good look when discussing a matter as serious as this.

All you’ve done is provide one misleading statistic. The base rate of experiencing psychosis may be 1-3%, but the base rate of psychotic disorders is much lower, at 0.25% or so.

But the most important factor is one that is very hard to estimate, which is what percentage of people with psychosis manifest that psychosis as false memories of being groped by a sibling. If the psychosis had involved seeing space aliens, we would be having a different discussion.

We would then have to compare this with the rate of teenagers groping their toddler siblings. This is also very difficult. A few studies claim that somewhere around 20% of women are sexually abused as children, but I don’t have a breakdown of that by source of abuse and age, etc. Obviously the figure for our particular subset of assault cases will be significantly lower, but I don’t know by how much.

I thinks it’s highly likely that the number of women groped as a toddler by a sibling is much higher than the number of women who falsely claim to be groped as a toddler by a si... (read more)

-8Roko2y

[-]Ape in the coat2y2019

It's true that a hundred years ago, women making such allegations were dismissid as being psychotic. This doesn't mean that these dissmissed women were indeed psychotic and/or wrong in their allegitions. Pre-me-too perception of the world is at least not necessarily more accurate.

If anything, happening of Me-Too movement is an evidence in favor of base rates of sexual assault being highter. You can't use it existence to lower the probability estimate of this particular allegation being true, without contradicting conservation of expected evidence.

Similarly, with mental health issues. They can be downstream of sexual abuse or they can lead to falsly believing that you were abused. Priviledging one hypothesis over the other requires some kind of evidence. What are the rates of abused person developping mental health issues, similar to what can be observed of Annie Altman? What are the rates of people with similar to Annie Altman issues having delusions about sexual assault?

The base rate for psychosis is about 1-3% and she's at the most common age for it too.
This 1-3% is much higher than the probability that the abuse happened, and the total internet shadowbanning happened, that multi

... (read more)

[-]pythagoras50152y1514

I think you make multiple valid points which are similar to the points I've made in my post, but I do think our stances differ in a few ways.

I think that you are certainly correct that psychosis, or a similar type of mental illness / disorder, is a plausible explanatory hypothesis for Annie making the claims that she has.

However, though I do recognize that the simplicity of a hypothesis is a boon to its plausibility, I do not share your belief that we have been unknowingly subsumed by the "MeToo world order", which has damaged our rationalism and obstructed our ability to recognize this as being obviously the simplest hypothesis. (Though perhaps this is a overly dramatic / inaccurate representation of your assertion.)

While I do agree that this post may encapsulate behavior representative of a person suffering from psychosis, or a similar mental illness, I see the hypothesis space as primarily dual, where mental illness / misrepresentation-of-reality-type hypotheses form one primary subspace, but there exists another primary subspace wherein the behavior detailed in this post is indeed representative of a person who has gone through the things which Annie has claimed she has.

I do appreciate your inclusion of quantitative rates; I think your analysis benefits from it.

3Roko2y

Why not? A priori when a person makes a bunch of unlikely accusations in public, it would have been reasonable to first consider this as evidence of them not being truthful and sane. Since people are often not sane and/or liars, this is an important epistemic subroutine to have otherwise you are vulnerable to manipulation. I don't really want to make this into a huge battle; you almost certainly don't have anything to change my mind (because I'm right) and I almost certainly won't change your mind (because your position is good for signaling/popular). I've mostly given up on these kind of battles because the supply of mindkilled virtue signaling is essentially limitless - but if you are going to disagree and take the epistemic high ground on LW I think you should have to justify yourself or retract the point.

[-]Pee Doom2y158

The wifi hacking also immediately struck me as reminiscent of paranoid psychosis. Though a significant amount of psychosis-like things are apparently downstream of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, but I forget the numbers on this.

[-]Roko2y3219

She could also have some real trauma. Note that it doesn't have to be the thing that is claimed. Once we are in the realm of a mentally ill person's delusions (and I have seen this up close), the sky really is the limit.

3green_leaf2y

How hard is it to hack somebody's wifi? Also, a traumatized person attributing a seemingly hacked wifi to their serious abuser doesn't need to mean any mental illness.

[-]Roko2y119

doesn't need to mean any mental illness

We are being Bayesian. It's a hypothesis that explains the visible evidence very well. It also has a relatively high prior probability (a few percent).

-7green_leaf2y

1xiann2y

Assuming Sam was an abuser, what would hacking wifi signals do that the level of shadowbanning described not do? It strikes me as unlikely because it doesn't seem to have much reward in the world where Sam is the abuser.

72723142y

I agree, although I'm not sure it's entirely due to the "metoo world order." It's probably partly that, but it's also partly that it's considered impolite to point out when someone is mentally ill. In part this is because unfortunately doing so can strengthen a paranoid person's feeling of persecution. When a friend of mine suffered a psychotic break, she had many technology related delusions, and she reached out to me for advice because I work in technology. I wasn't sure how to handle it so I consulted a professional. Under their advice, I gave her general advice on how to protect herself from breaches (strong passwords, HTTPS everywhere extension, etc.) and didn't otherwise try to disillusion her. My role as a friend was to stay her friend, not try to break her delusions. Paranoid people already have enough enemies, imaginary though they may be. Of course, once delusions have been put into print, it's now a public forum. (One might question the ethics of publishing such an article). But politeness norms often extend into public forums.

-16Roko2y

0adrusi2y

This hypothesis seems like it should be at or near the top of the list. It explains a lot of Sam's alleged behavior. If she's exhibiting signs of psychosis then he might be trying to get her to get care, which would explain the strings-attached access to resources. Possibly she is either altering the story or misunderstanding about her inheritance being conditional on Zoloft, it might have been an antipsychotic instead. On the other hand, while psychosis can manifest in subtle ways, I'm skeptical that someone whose psychosis is severe enough that they'd be unable to maintain stable employment or housing would be able to host a podcast where their psychosis isn't clearly visible. (I haven't listened to it yet, but I would expect it to be obvious enough that others would have pointed it out) A variation on this hypothesis that I find more likely is that Annie is psychologically unwell in exactly the ways she says she is, and out of some mixture of concern for her wellbeing and fear that her instability could hurt his own reputation or business interests, Sam has used some amount of coercion to get her to seek psychiatric care. She then justifiably got upset about her rich and powerful family members using their financial power to coerce her into taking drugs she knows she doesn't want to take. You don't have to be psychotic to develop some paranoia in a situation like that.

[-]ladyv2y3219

Scratching my head over whether logic/rational arguments/opining on probabilities by random internet people is the best path toward finding out what's capital-T true here. This doesn't seem to be a case where you can pull up the evidence, look at base rates, and calculate whether Annie is telling the truth or not based on probabilities.

It sounds like Annie has struggled with mental health issues from quite an early age -- as young as 5 or 6, which also manifested later as physical health issues, and what's disturbing to me is the repeated lack of support from her family members throughout.

It saddens me that she has tried to speak to her mother and brothers about what happened and has been repeatedly ignored or invalidated. And that despite her being the primary beneficiary of her father's 401K, her family chose to withhold the money she would have used to take time off work to restore her health. When she requested that Sam help promote her podcast he denied her request because it didn't make sense for his business. Sam and their mom denied her request for financial support so she wouldn't have to turn to sex work to make ends meet.

It actually sounds like her family has... (read more)

3pythagoras50152y

Sorry for the delayed response - yes, I think this kind of gets at the heart of the matter. I think, though I did a pretty good job with being rational in this post, and trying to make rational, unbiased claims from/using the information that exists, I could have been a bit more refined and clear-cut. I honestly feel a bit bad, because this is an important issue, and I hope I didn't screw things up by (unintentionally) presenting things in a irrational or biased way. I'll try to be very rational and unbiased in this comment. I think my statement that I was "trying to figure out the truth" in an earlier comment was misguided and imprecise. You were keen to notice this. In a situation like this, there are large amounts of uncertainty, and there is currently no proof of misconduct (that I've seen.) I think what this post does is {provide a (relatively) accurate description of the state of affairs regarding Annie's claims.} I do feel pretty good about the way in which I presented the information relevant to this matter in this post. Though I don't want to necessarily "take shots" at Elizabeth Weil, whose nymag article provided basically the only significant written third-party acknowledgment of Annie's claims, I will say that I prefer the (hopefully, more) objective, straight-from-the-source, uncertainty-acknowledging approach I've taken here. The key thing here is that, currently, the primary information we have is: 1. Claims that Annie has made on social media, as well as a few pictures of her from when she was sick that she took, and a few screenshots of her social media that potentially indicate, but do not provably or definitively, indicate that she experienced shadowbanning, let alone that the low engagement/shadowbanning occured because of Sam. It is important to avoid the conjunction fallacy: Let A = the event that Annie Altman, or (digital) media relating to her did indeed experience shadowbanning, low engagement, etc. Let B = the event that

[-]Siebe2y1614

Just coming to this now, after Altman's firing (which seems unrelated?)

At age 5, she began waking up in the middle of the night, needing to take a bath to calm her anxiety. By 6, she thought about suicide, though she didn’t know the word."

To me, this adds a lot of validity to the whole story and I haven't seen these points made:

Becoming suicidal at such an early age isn't normal, and very likely has a strong environmental cause (like being abused, or losing a loved one)
The bathing to relieve anxiety is typical sexual trauma behavior (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3577979/)

Of course, we don't know for sure that she told the truth that this started at that age, but we can definitely not dismiss it.

On the recovered memories: I listen to a lot of podcasts where people talk about their own trauma and healing (with respected therapists). It's very common in those that people start realizing in adulthood that something was wrong in their childhood, and increasingly figure out why they've always felt so 'off'.

On the shadowbanning & hacking: This part feels more tenuous to me, especially the shadowbanning. But I don't think this disqualifies the rest of the story. She's had a really hard life and surely would have trust issues, and her brother is a powerful man.

[-]tailcalled2y1511

Also a practical question about how to interpret this is how reliable flashbacks that occur many years later the event without memory of the event in the time inbetween are. My guess would be that the answer is "we don't really know".

Like as far as I understand, dissociation is A Thing, but the people who talk about it still don't have a solid understanding of how it can or cannot work, and are often mistaken about the science of it and of trauma? (In particular overestimating the validity of some of the science.)

And conversely, some recovered memories are fake, but the people who talk about this tend to deny the possibility of dissociation and don't really have any scalable way of determining the validity or invalidity of such memories, so they just round it off to always being fake without having solid support for that?

5pythagoras50152y

I share your concern, not only about the reliability of Annie's flashbacks, but also about the validity of the claims she's made as a whole. As I note in my response to "Objection 4", Annie has provided no direct evidence to corroborate her claims, to the best of my knowledge. I also acknowledge that the links I provided (e.g. from saprea.org) do not meet rigorous standards that would enable me to label them as "scientific" or "empiric" evidence to corroborate Annie's account. I provide them merely as a way of noting that the symptoms that Annie's reported seem plausible. As I mentioned, the intent of this post is to promote discussion about the claims that Annie has made, and to spread awareness of the fact that Sam has not yet responded to Annie's (very serious claims.) This post does not claim that Annie's claims are provably or indisputably valid. In fact, I think the opposite is true: her claims are not yet corroborated by direct evidence, and they certainly are disputable. I currently hold Sam Altman to be innocent, until proven guilty. In spite of this, I still thought that this post was worth making, as a means of bringing attention to Annie's claims, which I think have a nonzero probability of being true in whole or in part.

6tailcalled2y

This seems like a thing that, even if true, would not lead to any direct evidence? Like presumably the only evidence of the sexual abuse that persists this long is gonna be her memories, Sam Altman's memories, and maybe other family members memories. (Or I suppose maybe they could run a PPG test on Sam Altman to better measure his sexuality? But AFAIK such tests are somewhat noisy and basically never performed.)

7pythagoras50152y

Yes, I think you raise valid points. Given that Annie's (purported) sexual abuse occurred so long ago, I agree that it is unlikely that, at this point, direct evidence of Sam's (purported) sexual abuse of her would be able to gathered. Deviating a bit from your reply to the more general question of "What direct evidence could be provided (e.g. by Annie) to corroborate the claims Annie is making?" -- I do think that a potentially useful piece of evidence that could be provided to corroborate (some of) Annie's claims would be proof that: 1. Annie's father left her money in his will. 2. Annie did not receive this money, as specified in the will.

5Viliam2y

I suspect that only the people involved will ever know the truth about the sexual abuse accusation. The claim about money, although in my opinion less serious, seems much easier to investigate. (And then, we can make a probabilistic update about the other claim.) Other accusations in the article, such as Sam not willing to link a podcast, don't seem important to me.

2tailcalled2y

Those claims would be nice to know the answer to, though I don't know that proving those claims would prove the sexual abuse allegations, nor that disproving those claims would disprove the sexual abuse allegations. Obviously one could argue that these claims are evidence about the relative trustworthiness of Annie vs Sam, but I am not sure trustworthiness across different claims is sufficiently well-correlated in these sorts of situations that it's a valid inference to make.

[-]tailcalled2y151

I'm trying to square Sam Altman sexually abusing her with Sam Altman being gay. The best theory I can come up with to square them is that maybe he is bisexual and pretends to be gay to hide the sexual abuse. Alternatively maybe being sufficiently high in the disgust/taboo factor of sexual interests cancels out being gay when the context involves sexually assaulting a minor family member. I suppose the latter story would have less complexity penalty since it also explains the incest attraction and assault and not just the gynephilia.

[-]Muireall2y1613

My understanding is that perpetrator sexuality has little to do with the gender of chosen victims in child sexual abuse. If Annie was four years old and Sam thirteen at the time, I don't think attraction to women played much of a role either way.

3tailcalled2y

Ehh, idk. Obviously pedophiles are much more likely to sexually assault children than teliophiles are, and from what I've heard pedophiles are more likely to have no particular preference (or only weak preferences) for whether their victims are male or female. But pedophilic child molesters tend to have strong preferences for children, which is in tension with Sam Altman being attracted to adult men. Alternatively I've heard that some teliophiles molest children out of opportunism, but that seems somewhat counterintuitive to me (in order to see children as a sexual opportunity, wouldn't they need to be attracted to them?). It's less counterintuitive if we're talking about teens (sexual attractiveness to teliophiles tends to gradually increase due to age, rather than suddenly spiking up at the age of consent), but that doesn't square with Annie being four years old. I'm pretty sure this type of child molester tends to have a correspondence between their preference for adults's sex and their preference for children's sex, but I also think their preference for children's sex is weaker than their preference for adult's sex. These explanations are all making reference to the perpetrator's sexuality, though of course in much more complex and nuanced ways than gay/straight/bi.

[-]DanielFilan2y123

[epistemic status: i know nothing]

Isn't it not so uncommon for people's sexualities to change over time? I'd think puberty especially would be a time when things would shift.

7pythagoras50152y

Annie gives her opinion here: Annie Altman on X: "I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you." / X (twitter.com) I do acknowledge that this may not provide an entirely satisfactory explanation of why a 13-year-old Sam (purportedly) chose to sexually abuse a 4-year-old Annie Altman. Nevertheless, I do not think that {a 13-year-old Sam Altman sexually abusing a 4-year-old Annie Altman} is mutually exclusive with {Sam Altman coming out as gay as a teenager, and being openly gay since then.}

1tailcalled2y

I saw this interpretation but it seems psychologically unrealistic to me. Why would a person who is questioning their sexuality would sexually assault a minor family member? People generally aren't attracted to their family members or to children, so it wouldn't be very diagnostic, and it is a strong norm violation that seems unnecessary for exploring one's sexuality.

6pythagoras50152y

I think the points you make are somewhat valid. I don't entirely agree with the reasoning from which they originate. While I agree that: -- Yes, it is not necessary for a person exploring their sexuality to do so by sexually assaulting a younger family member -- Yes, providing "13-year-old Sam Altman was exploring his sexuality" as the explanatory motive of 13-year-old Sam's sexual assault of 4-year-old Annie is not entirely satisfactory}, I do not agree that: -- 13-year-old Sam Altman choosing to explore his sexuality by sexuality assaulting his 4-year-old sister is a psychologically infeasible (I do acknowledge that this is not exactly the claim you are making.) I also think that Annie may not have been fully literal in her provision of "13-year-old Sam Altman was exploring his sexuality" as the explanatory motive for him sexually assaulting her.

-1tailcalled2y

Maybe it would be more appropriate for me to say "less psychologically realistic than all the other alternatives that are on the table so far".

3House Beaver2y

Many gay men frequently date girls during their adolescence. A survey shows that gay male teenagers are several times more likely to conceive girls than straight male teenagers. Many male homosexuals frequently "explore" or "challenge themselves" during the early stages of sexual awakening, and then fully embrace themselves at a later stage. Annie may be a sacrificed experimental object (if the allegations are true). Some of Anne's tweets do not seem to appear in this article. I have seen Anne (Twitter) claim that her brother once touched her pussy and anus. The so-called sexual harassment (if the allegations are true) may not necessarily be driven by sexual desire. The gay boy who touched his sister's genitals may only be confirming (in reality rather than in pornographic magazines) whether he would be sexually aroused by a woman. We don't know if he had sexual contact with girls of his age during adolescence. We don't know why he chose a four year old girl (if the accusation is true), perhaps we adults cannot understand the emotional world of an adolescent.

1npostavs2y

Does "conceive" mean "have sex with" here? Because according to what I think of as the standard definition of that word, you would be saying that gay male teenagers are more likely to produce female offspring (which sounds pretty silly). Did the survey use that word?

5tailcalled2y

House Beaver is talking about surveys which find a correlation between saying one is gay and saying one has impregnated someone/become pregnant. So like House Beaver's idea is if those who say they are gay teen boys in surveys also have a greater tendency to say they've impregnated someone, then House Beaver thinks this is probably because gay teen boys are more likely to impregnated teen girls than straight teen boys are. Whereas I'd be inclined to say it's because some teens find it funny to say they are 7 foot tall blind gang members who are addicted to heroin.

1tailcalled2y

I'm aware of phenomena like beards and repression. But these seem driven by social norms, whereas molesting your sister seems counteracted by social norms. Out of the two possibilities of "the survey is wrong" and "gay male teenagers are several times more likely to conceive girls than straight male teenagers", which do you honestly think is more likely?

[-]Shmi2y14-10

When has this become a "gossip about the outgroup" site?

4DPiepgrass2y

Neither Sam nor Annie count as "the outgroup". I'm sure some LWers disagree with Sam about how to manage the development of AGI, but if Sam visited LW I expect it would be a respectful two-way discussion, not a flame war like you'd expect with an "outgroup". (caveat: I don't know how attitudes about Sam will change as a result of the recent drama at OpenAI.)

-31frontier642y

[-]Adam Zerner2y133

If hypothetically we knew that the allegations were true, what actions would make sense for the AI Safety community to take? And how helpful would they be in reducing the chance of existential risks?

[-]Raemon2y121

Quick mod note: Some new users have showed up commenting on this post. I've been erring on the side of approving them even when they wouldn't meet our usual quality guidelines because this seems like a topic where silencing information could be worse than usual.

[-]ChristianKl2y116

When it comes to remembering a childhood event that supposedly happened in 1998 in 2020, even if a process produced the memory that doesn't mean that it really happened. There are plenty of cases of "Satanistic ritual abuse" where there are memories but where we generally think those memories are not matching to real events.

Annie wanted to talk on air about the psychological phenomenon of projection: what we put on other people. The brothers steered the conversation into the idea of feedback — specifically, how to give feedback at work. After she posted the show online, Annie hoped her siblings, particularly Sam, would share it. He’d contributed to their brothers’ careers. Jack’s company, Lattice, had been through YC. “I was like, ‘You could just tweet the link. That would help. You don’t want to share your sister’s podcast that you came on?’” He did not. “Jack and Sam said it didn’t align with their businesses.”" I find this account to be plausible, yet do not think it entirely dispels the objection.

The fact that Sam and the other brothers showed up for the podcast suggests that they wanted to support her at that moment in time.

It seems that something happened that mad... (read more)

[-]lemonhope2y100

Re: plausibility of shadowban claims: You can pay clickfarms to mark someone as spam.

[-]unparadoxed2y104

Out of curiosity, is the motivation of this post to try to collate/figure out the truth/rationality of what actually happened? Or rather just a convenient place that is less susceptible to (alleged) censorship compared to other sites?

7pythagoras50152y

My motivation is pure. I am trying to (rationally) figure out the truth. Though, I'd be epistemologically naive if I expected you to believe me just because I told you "I'm a good person, trust me!". Also -- I could care less about what people opine (without backing logical/rational arguments.) I could have chosen to do a big long rant with a bunch of clickbait-y quips and half-truthisms on X to try to jack up engagement and suck ad revenue out of X like a leach, but luckily I'm not an asshole (in my humble opinion, lol), so I came here instead. (Not to imply that you said that; I just say this more in an attempt to convey my motives and character.) I came to this site in particular because: 1. I thought its users would probably understand the significance of a claim that Sam Altman has been quietly hiding the fact that he sexually assaulted his 4-year-old sister. 2. I thought that its users would be good at calling me out on any logical/irrational bullshit that I (unintentionally) propagated. I want to be right, not to feel right. Say what you will about LessWrong, but its users do love to be quite exacting in their arguments about whether or not they think a person is making rational arguments. Indeed, I've modified this post, and my replies, many times in response to comments I've received in a way that I think has been to the benefit of the clarity of this post and its conveyance of my position. I'm glad that my karma score has jumped all over the place as I've updated my post - it means that LessWrong users are actually thinking critically about the degree to which I am being rational. It seems to me, at this point, one of two things is true: 1. Annie Altman is lying left, right,. and center, or is deluded, disconnected from reality, or just misinformed/misunderstanding things to the point that she believes she is telling the truth when she is not. 2. She is not lying (at least, to some degree.) Yes, I know we can wonder about base rates and what ment

[-]Elizabeth2y159

I have been pleasantly surprised by the job you've done with this post, but I really don't like your frame here.

We can debate whether Sam Altman's alleged offenses are relevant to this forum, but I don't think there's any case to be made that his sister's mental health or honesty is relevant to anyone here. In which case the question isn't "is Annie lying?", it's "what did Sam Altman do? is it a pattern" and perhaps "is there any additional context we should know?"^[1].

^{^}
In particular, children who commit sexual assault are often playing out their past abuse by adults. I believe this is less true the older the child is, and can't immediately find numbers for 13 year olds.

[-]pythagoras50152y1912

The points you make are valid. You also make a good point about the importance of additional context.

I think I may have miscommunicated myself to some extent, based on the fact that I largely agree with your reply here.

The most clear, and most general framing of my motives is this:

My overarching, most fundamental desire is for humanity to have a positive AI future.
Because of this, I want to do my best to determine the validity of a claim(s) such as Annie's that asserts that the CEO of the world's (leading) artificial intelligence company / research org / lab / whatever you want to call it may actually be a person of highly questionable morals. The whole reason we got OpenAI in the first place is, apparently, because Elon freaked out when Larry Page called him a 'specist' back in 2013. (I will not bother commenting on whether or not I think this was ultimately a good thing. ) I very much want the person leading the development of and (attempts at) alignment of superintelligence to be a good person.
The reason I have made this post here is because of (2), not because I thought that this forum was the right place to worry about the mental health of Annie Altman. While obvio

... (read more)

2Viliam2y

I am curious how specifically you intend to figure out the truth of "something happened in private when I was 4 years old" claim. What kind of research could bring more light to this topic?

[-]Lukas_Gloor2y137

One benefit of boosting the visibility of accusations like this is that it makes it easier for others to come forward as well, should there be a pattern with other abuse victims. Or even just other people possibly having had highly concerning experiences of a non-sexual but still interpersonally exploitative nature.

If this doesn't happen, it's probabilistic evidence against the worst tail scenarios of character traits, which would be helpful if we could significantly discount that.

It's frustrating that we may never know, but one way to think about this is "we'd at least want to find out the truth in the worlds where it's easy to find out."

-5unparadoxed2y

[-]WillPetillo2y93

I'd like to add some nuance to the "innocent until proven guilty" assumption in the concluding remarks.

Standard of evidence is a major question in legal matters and heavily context-dependent. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a popular understanding of the standard for criminal guilt and it makes sense for that to be "beyond a reasonable doubt" because the question at hand is whether a state founded on principles of liberty should take away the freedom of one of its citizens. Other legal disputes, such as in civil liability, have different stan... (read more)

[-]Jackson Silver2y71

I've been thinking about these allegations often in the context of Altman's firing circus a few months ago. I've known multiple people who suffered early childhood abuse/sexual trauma - and even dated one for a few tumultuous years a decade ago. I had a perfectly normal, happy childhood myself, and eventually came to learn that this disconnect between who they were most times vs times of high-stress was tremendously unintuitive (and initially intriguing) for me. It also seemed to facilitate an certain meticulousness in duplicity/compartmentalization of pre... (read more)

[-]tglpr2y6-2

One fact you're missing in your otherwise rather thorough collection of internet expression by Annie Altman:

You state several times that Sam Altman offered to by Annie Altman a house. However, she wrote in her Medium article that it was clear she would have no direct ownership of that house. In other words, Sam was buying a house for himself, and letting his sister live in it, on the condition of her silence and complicity:

"We spoke on the phone three times, and through these conversations I began to suspect the offer was another attempt at control. It see... (read more)

[-]Yaakov A Sternberg2y60

1. There isn't a shred of evidence for her accusations.
2. He was just 13 years old (undeveloped PFC).

Saying "Annie has not yet provided what I would consider direct / indisputable proof that her claims are true" is a gross understatement. Not only isn't there "direct / indisputable proof", there isn't a shred of evidence to support her accusation, and in fact there are aspects of the claim that seem rather dubious (such SA getting her shadowbanned "across all platforms except onlyfans and pornhub", which aside from being difficult to pull off, seems incons... (read more)

9jjaksic2y

What direct evidence can someone provide to prove that they were abused as a child? (Note that most 4-year-olds know nothing about sex or sexual abuse, leave alone how to respond to it; nor would they be able to record it.) In Annie's case there's a good amount of circumstantial evidence, e.g. suicidal thoughts, anxiety and depression at a very young age, which are PTSD symptoms typical for victims of childhood sexual abuse. Beyond this, I can't imagine what other evidence she could possibly provide, even if it happened 100%. My son was abused by a preschool teacher when he was 3 (not sexually, but verbally and physically). Once he told us that the teacher hit him and described how. We called his classmate's parents, and his classmate described what happened in the exact same way; then he shut his ears (as if trying to block the memory of my son crying) and said that he's afraid to talk about it. Both kids were terrified of going back to school, and my son had major PTSD and anxerty for over a year. We immediately reported abuse to all levels of the school administration, the county school licensing board, and the police. The teacher denied it and the school didn't have cameras. The final conclusion of the process was that "there's no evidence", which to the school was as good as "it didn't happen". The teacher continues to teach there to this day. 2 years later our son still remembers that teacher as being generally awful, but he seems to have suppressed the memory of this specific incident, because it was too painful. If it's impossible to prove child abuse even when two parents (who know it happened, are supportive and know what they're doing) start the process immediately and go through all available channels, what chance does a 4-year-old have whose caregivers are either unaware or not supportive? What chance does a person have if they remember or realize what had happened after 20 years? If you personally were abused as a child, how would you prove it? Si

[-]siclabomines2y63

Thus, I must currently hold Sam Altman guilty

*innocent

2pythagoras50152y

My mistake. Fixed it. Thanks for pointing that out!

[-]xiann2y5-3

I know this post will seem very insensitive, so I understand if it gets downvoted (though I would also say that's the very reason sympathy-exploitation tactics work), but I would like to posit a 3rd fork to the "How to Interpret This" section: That Annie suffers from a combination of narcissistic personality disorder and false memory creation in service of the envy that disorder spawns. If someone attempted to fabricate a story that was both maximally sympathy-inducing and reputation-threatening for the target, I don't think you could do much better than t... (read more)

4jjaksic2y

Are a person's mental disorders (especially ones that started in early childhood) the person's own fault, or are they possibly a consequence of trauma or abuse? If you abuse someone as a child, they are very likely to develop some mental disorders (the greater the abuse, the more severe and long-lasting they're likely to be). Is it then fair to say, "This person's claims of abuse have no merit, just look at their mental disorders" (as in, a "crazy person's" claims should not be believed)?

[-]tglpr2y41

Shadow banning of people in sex work is quite common. Doesn't necessarily mean it's targeted against her. If she put up any sexually explicit content of any kind or mentions "sex work" on platforms like Instagram, it results pretty quickly in her posts no longer showing up on a general feed, and her being only searchable when her name is explicitly written by a direct connection/follower.

"Shadow banning" is a common thing on the internet that people in the sex industry have complained about for years as an unfair form of censorship:

https://www.modalitygrou... (read more)

[-]SebastianG2y4-15

When I saw the topic, my first thought is that the epistemics of discussions of this sort (he said - she said stories about sins and perceptions) are inherently bad and cause more harm to those who engage with them than good. But the post isn't terrible quality.

Nonetheless, I am pre-committing to downvoting any future post about the personal relationships of famous people, which I take to be the category of thing, I am objecting to.

[-]SebastianG2y118

I stand by this comment.

What could cause me to change my mind? Here are my cruxes.

If character assessment posts about particular people can be shown to cause a useful actions or ways of thinking for readers more often than they distract readers by unverifiable gossip.

If character assessment posts about particular people is used as a case study for reasoning about particular people to teach a broader lesson.

If character assessment posts about particular people allows community members to protect themselves from a real danger.

However, my beliefs are that these types of posts are juicy gossip that fuel idle speculation and status hierarchy games and serve no purpose except to make those who engage with content worse people who think more simplistically about human behavior and motivation. Even though this particular post is done fairly well for what it is, I think it is "bad form" and, perhaps, on the wrong site.

7Adam Zerner2y

It makes me happy to see such a cruxy comment like this. Thanks. The cruxes seem reasonable. However, I feel like it's appropriate to upvote/downvote based on how confident you are on your position for each of them. Like, if it's really clear that a particular post will have the consequence of pushing people really far towards distracting gossip and away from useful actions, then downvote. If the opposite, maybe upvote. If it's unclear, probably do nothing. Because this post is about the person who might be the most powerful person in the domain of AI, and thus is perhaps the most important person in the entire world, or even perhaps throughout history, I think it's actually a decently important topic. Because of magnitude, not probability. Like, even if there is a low probability that we figure out the truth, and of P(useful action | figure out truth), the magnitude of the positive impact could very well be large, and so it seems to me like a topic that is plausibly worth exploring. Enough that I upvoted it. I think I personally have a tendency to see people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and get caught up in thinking they're so awesome, and then am a victim of the halo effect. I find concrete examples of "wait, they frequently do things that aren't very awesome" helpful. I suspect the same is true for many others.

3Adam Zerner2y

It makes things more difficult, but by wielding Bayescraft appropriately, discussion and updating can certainly still occur. I think that is usually true. However, it is still true that some people should be having the conversation. I like what Raemon proposed about some sort of "jury duty".

[-]Aleena Vigoda1y30

This is my first post in Less Wrong — I discovered rationalism very recently (like, during Less Online recent) and am still learning the LW vocab/exploring concepts etc so please bear with me!

In fact, my comment is more of a question: I'd like to contribute a viewpoint coming from personal anecdote rather than factual evidence. Most of the discourse I'm reading is references to studies or statistical analysis. There are some impersonal anecdotes, eg people bringing up neighbours and friends-of-friends, so it does look like there's some leeway.

H... (read more)

[-]9ixiPeLGk2y32

It's hard to know if any of the information is true, but starting with the lowest hanging fruit:

Why insist she needs to be on Zoloft to receive the money from her father's will?

It does seem like a type of economic abuse not give her financial stability or insist on certain terms for it.

Sexually abused or not, she is not well if she has to do survival sex work. Why not provide her with modest financial stability with no strings attached, it can't be worse than the situation she is in now.

It's hard to see where Sam Altman is coming from on this when he helpe... (read more)

[-]Ejnar Håkonsen2y3-2

3 factors I haven't seen highlighted:

1) While the base rate for sexual abuse, by a sibling, of a toddler is already extremely low (sexual abuse of children is somewhat rare. 'Abuse of toddlers' and 'abuse by siblings' are both much rarer subsets), the claim that both of her brothers were abusing a sibling toddler makes it drastically rarer. Even for identical twins, more mundane sexual preferences such as homosexuality only have ~33% correlation. Both her brothers having the outrageously rare sexual proclivity to abuse a toddler sister is close to astronom... (read more)

3DPiepgrass2y

Annie didn't say specifically that Jack sexually abused her, though; her language indicated some unspecified lesser abuse that may or may not have been sexual.

[-]James_Miller2y3-39

"I would like to note that this is my first post on LessWrong." I find this troubling given the nature of this post. It would have been better if this post was made by someone with a long history of posting to LessWrong, or someone writing under a real name that could be traced to a real identity. As someone very concerned with AI existential risk, I greatly worry that the movement might be discredited. I am not accusing the author of this post of engaging in improper actions.

[-]jimrandomh2y2631

You should think less about PR and more about truth.

[-]James_Miller2y134

By "discredited" I didn't mean receive bad but undeserved publicity. I meant operate in a way that would cause reasonable people to distrust you.

[-]pythagoras50152y*148

I understand your concerns, and appreciate your note that you are not accusing me of engaging in improper actions.

Your points are valid. I do acknowledge that the circumstances under which I am making this post, as well as my various departures from objective writing -- that is, the instances in this post in which I depart from {solely providing information detailing what Annie has claimed -- naturally raise concerns about the motives driving my creation of this post.

I will say:

Regarding the fact that this is my first LessWrong post -- I acknowledge that this is unfortunate considering the gravity of the issue which this post addresses.
Regarding my anonymity -- I purposefully chose to make this post anonymously. This post discusses a very, very serious topic - the fact that Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, is claiming that he has severely (e.g. sexually) abused her. If Annie's claims turn out to be (provably) true, this would likely warrant an immediate dismissal of Sam Altman from his current position position as CEO of OpenAI, as well as from a variety of other impactful positions he currently holds. Given the gravity of this post and its potential ramifications, I chose

... (read more)

[-]DPiepgrass2y22

While Annie didn't reply to the "confirm/deny" tweet, she did quote-tweet it―twice:

Wow, thank you. This feels like a study guide version of a big chunk of my therapy discussions. Yes can confirm accuracy. Need some time to process, and then can specify details of what happened with both my Dad and Grandma’s will and trust
Thank you more than words for your time and attention researching. All accurate in the current form, except there was no lawyer connected to the “I’ll give you rent and physical therapy money if you go back on Zoloft”

[-]agrippa2y20

However, Annie has not yet provided what I would consider direct / indisputable proof that her claims are true. Thus, rationally, I must consider Sam Altman innocent.

This is an interesting view on rationality that I hadn't considered

[-]denyeverywhere2y-1-1

My default is that people shouldn't be judged by random strangers on the internet over the claims of other random strangers on the internet. As random strangers to Sam, we should not want to be in judgment of him over the claims of some other random stranger. This isn't good or normal or healthy.

Moreover, it is unlikely that we will devote the required amount of time & effort to really know what we're talking about, which we should if we're going to attack him or signal boost attacks. And if we are going to devote the great amount of time necessary, co... (read more)

[-]Review Bot1y-20

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

[+]GodlySynapse2y-8-3

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
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96

Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes

96

96

Introduction

I have restructured this post

Outline of the series of posts

Note

Outline

Author's Notes

Next post