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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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...
2it'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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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...
3You'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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
1My 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.
1Just 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:
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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)
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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.
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...
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.
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?
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?
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
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."
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...
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...
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...
"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.
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1I 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
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...
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.
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
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...
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...
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”
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...
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...
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...