[jbernsteiniv]

He gets my respect for that one both publicly acknowledging why he was leaving and their pantomime. I don't know how much the equity would be for each employee (the article suggests millions but that may skew by role) and I don't know if I would just be like the rest by keeping my lips tight for fear of the equity forfeiture.

It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.

[romwell]

>It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.

Incidentally, that's what Grigory Perelman, the mathematician that rejected the Fields Medal and the $1M prize that came with it, did.

It wasn't a matter of an NDA either; it was a move to make his message heard (TL;DR: "publish or perish" rat race that the academia has become is antithetical to good science).

He was (and still is) widely misunderstood in that move, but I hope people would see it more clearly now.

The enshittification processes of academic and corporate structures are not entirely dissimilar, after all, as money is at the core of corrupting either.

[edanm]

I think, when making a gesture, you need to consider its practical impact, which includes whether and how it will be understood (or not).

In the OpenAI case, the gesture of "forgoing millions of dollars" directly makes you able to do something you couldn't - speak about OpenAI publicly. In the Grigory Perelman case, obviously the message was far less clear to most people (I personally have heard of him turning down the money before and know the broad strokes of his story, but had no idea that that was the reason).

[romwell]

Consider this:

1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.

3. On a very basic level, it's very easy to understand that there's gotta be something wrong with the award if a deserving recipient turns it down. What exactly is wrong is left as an exercise to the reader — as you'd expect of a mathematician like Perelman.

Quote (from [1]):

From the few public statements made by Perelman and close colleagues, it seems he had become disillusioned with the entire field of mathematics. He was the purest of the purists, consumed with his love for mathematics, and completely uninterested in academic politics, with its relentless jockeying for position and squabbling over credit. He denounced most of his colleagues as conformists. When he opted to quit professional mathematics altogether, he offered this confusing rationale: “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice. Either to make some ugly thing or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”*

This explanation is confusing only to someone who has never tried to get a tenured position in academia.

Perelman was one of the few people to not only give the finger to the soul-crushing, dehumanizing system, but to also call it out in a way that stung.

He wasn't the only one; but the only other person I can think of is Alexander Grothendiek [2], who went as far as declaring that publishing any of his work would be against his will.

Incidentally, both are of Russian-Jewish origin/roots, and almost certainly autistic.

I find their views very understandable and relatable, but then again, I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).

[1] https://nautil.us/purest-of-the-purists-the-puzzling-case-of...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

[SJC_Hacker]

> 1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

Perelman provided a proof of the Poincare Conjecture, which had stumped mathematicians for a century.

It was also one of the seven Millenium problems https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/, and as of 2024, the only one to be solved.

Andrew Wiles became pretty well known after proving Fermat's last theorem, despite there not being an financial reward.

[romwell]

Sure, but most people have heard of Perelman due to the rejection controversy (particularly, most people in Russia, who don't care about achievements of that sort, sadly).

Granted, we're not on a forum where most people go, so I shouldn't have said "you" in that case.

[edanm]

> 1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

I think this is probably not true.

> 2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.

This is a great point and you're probably right.

> I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).

Really? What do you do nowadays?

(I glanced at your bio and website and you seem to be doing interesting things, I've also dabbled in Computational Geometry and 3d printing.)

[juped]

Perelman's point is absolutely clear if you listen to him, he's disgusted by the way credit is apportioned in mathematics, doesn't think his contribution is any greater just because it was the last one, and wants no part of the prize he considers tainted.