This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how OpenAI and most companies operate. The board is a check on power. In most companies they will have to approve of high level decisions: moving to a new office space or closing a new acquisition. But they have 0 day to day control. If they tell the CEO to fire these 10 people and he doesn't do it, that's it. They can't do it themselves, they can't tell the CEO's underlings to do it. They have 0 options besides getting a new CEO. OpenAI's board had less control even than this.

Tweeting "Altman is not following our directions and we don't want to fire him, but we really want him to start doing what we ask" is a sure fire way to collapse your company and make you sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons. It's admitting that you won't use the one tool that you actually do have. I'm certain the board threatened to fire Sam before this unless he made X changes. I'm certain Sam never made all of those X changes. Therefore they can either follow through on their threat or lose. Turns out following through on their threat was meaningless because Sam owns OpenAI both with tacit power and the corporate structure.

It's about asking the right questions to get the right info. I feel like your example actually disproves your point. In my perspective asking for someone's top 5 movies of the year is going to much more accurately predict if they liked Oppenheimer than asking if they liked Oppenheimer directly. The direct question will imply that you have some interest in Oppenheimer and are probably expecting them to either like it or at least have a strong opinion of it. Their inference will then affect the accuracy of their answer.

There haven't been many good movies released in 2023 so if someone doesn't include Oppenheimer in their top 5 list then they probably didn't like the movie and you know your question didn't bias them towards any particular opinion.

In my experience the best way to sate hunger is to have multiple gallon jugs of water lying around and drinking too much water when you feel hungry. I know this is a little off topic, but it's likely a better solution than bulimia.

I have a family member who used to vomit daily. I never noticed any negative effects on him from it, apart from the rapid weight loss; which I guess is the point. I guess the general disgust other people felt around him when he went off to go throw up was a pretty negative effect. Also his weight loss looked unhealthy. He had twig arms, still had a lot of stomach fat, and was generally much more irritable than usual.

He might be thinking of whistleblower protections? But really, I've done a bit of research into this just now and I don't see any legal protections for not following company policy on e-mails. I would err on side of listen to company policy unless you want to get fired.

There's rules about discovery that definitely make the auto-delete practices helpful. Deleting suspicious records based on their content is fraudulent and can land you in jail or with bigger damages if you're ever caught. But having a standard policy of deleting all messages after X amount of days is protected until you have positive knowledge that there's impending litigation.

I agree. I further recommend sticking to in person unless you have no reason to believe that your calls are automatically recorded or being tapped. Records of WHO you called are pretty easy to get too so if you have a history of only 1 call per week with your engineering team but all of a sudden have 20 calls with them in one day right after knowledge of a big incident occurred that can be used against you.

Also I don't see why you think cryonics doesn't make sense as alternative option.

I was responding to this point. The "cryonics is better than nothing" argument doesn't make cryonics an alternative option to immortality by friendly AI. If Bob thinks cryonics has a 10% chance of making him immortal and thinks AI will have a 20% chance of making him immortal and an 80% chance of destroying the world, then the superhuman AI route is more likely to lead to Bob's immortality than cryonics.

I think a lot of people haven't fully considered how amazing immortality is. Your 7th observation is probably very accurate too. Socially sophisticated people want others to believe they're fighting for the greater good rather than their own self interest. That doesn't mean they're necessarily lying.

I think the point of the statement is: wait until the probability of you dying before you next get an opportunity to push the button is > 1-P then push the button.