[EarthBlues]

I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion.

There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just doesn’t seem to me to beget a workable understanding of reality.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that I like reading HN, and I’d like it if this place didn’t descend into the kind of friend-enemy thinking so prevalent on much of the internet.

[jmward01]

> I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion.

Agreed. Making this level clam requires a lot more evidence. It would have been better if the author presented this idea as something like 'YC better watch out, quality does matter' or something like that. Even then they would need to bring in more evidence and outside examples of industries where this trend took hold.

[ninetyninenine]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697929

Only punishment and court judgement requires that level of evidence.

Corruption often never gets exposed at all and at best is only revealed through weaker anecdotal evidence or even rumors.

A blurry picture is often better than no picture at all. Form your own opinion about my link above. If it’s actually true, then that post I made is likely the only thing you’ll ever read about it.

[jmward01]

To make my comment clearer, the article made many statements like:

> If the main appeal of joining YC isn’t the mentorship but the prestige of being able to write "YC W22" in your Twitter bio and on your company’s landing page

and

> Take Harvard, for instance: the reason they don’t accept a higher percentage of applicants isn’t because they can’t scale—they have the resources to build more facilities or could even switch to remote like YC—but because they choose not to.

These statements are made with no backing evidence for them. They could be right, but without any evidence that they are I just have to take it on faith that they are, which I won't. At least link to another article making the case for these statements.

This is just bad writing and it is a problem with modern journalism and blogging. The author may, or may not, have a great point, but they did nothing to actually argue their point except point out one tweet at the end. Even that was predicated on the many statements before being true. Take away all the unsubstantiated claims in this article and you are left with, at best, a re-tweet and an argument that Dorai is being a little overly defensive and that may indicate something worth looking into.

[s1artibartfast]

The solution to a low volume of information isn't to place extra emphasis on weak data.

A blurry picture is better than none, but this behavior seems like taking a blurry picture, creatively extrapolating it to crystal clarity, and then fervently claiming it is reality.

Confidence and conviction in an arbitrary belief can help an idea compete in an information poor environment, but that doesnt mean it isn't delusional.

[tines]

> martialed

I think you mean “marshaled,” correct?

[lupire]

It's used as an attack, so both.

[nsokolsky]

Yep, ideally OP should formalize their theory into a bet and accept people to bet against them. Say, $5k on OpenAI <insert some horrible outcome> in 10 years. Money could be kept in escrow with a trusted third party.

[ninetyninenine]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697929

Hn claims to be largely independent of the YC fund. But we will never know the full truth.