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Malcolm Gladwell is not highly regarded by hipster intellectuals. This is, no doubt, because hipsters often hear their "midwit" friends riff on Gladwell and thus form an antigen to such palatable fare. But while these hipsters go off to read Foucault or Nietzsche, trying to glean meaning from a fever dream, I think Gladwell actually has a lot of valuable stuff to say.
One of his ideas was the difference between a "mystery" and a "puzzle". Forget the choice of words, they don't matter. Gladwell defines them like this (paraphrased):
A puzzle is something for which you just need more information to get the answer. For example: The files are in the safe. You need the combination to the safe.
A mystery is something for which all the required information is present, but difficult to process. Examples: The prevention of scurvy, which was learned and lost several times.
One conceit that many people enjoy is the idea that a large conspiracy is impossible, because if even one person spills the beans, the jig is up. For example, keeping the AACS encryption key secret was impossible. One person spilled the beans and it was over.
But large conspiracies are not impossible. Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.
I'm taking a long time to get to the point but I recently discovered this remarkable Reddit thread. It's simply amazing that this is buried in a random AskReddit thread.
For context, /u/yishan is Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit. /u/samaltman is Sam Altman. At the time, he was still using capital letters and, in addition to his duties as head of Y Combinator, posting on /r/buttcoin.
In the thread, Yishan explains how Sam Altman used a series of leadership crises to essentially steal control of Reddit from its parent company Conde Nast. Sam Altman chimes in to admit that, yes, this is what happened and also to taunt Yishan.
Sound familiar?
Amazing that this information was never revealed or discussed in the recent takeover of OpenAI. Or maybe it was. But no one cared. It's revealing that Sam never even bothered to delete the thread. Information is only damaging when you have a competent media and one that wants to attack you. When they're on you're side, or they don't care, there is no need to hide anything. The OpenAI board was probably right about Sam, but the focus quickly became the behavior of the board. Slow clap.
That information was revealed and discussed. It's more that no one cared, I think.
Zvi: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board (Nov. 22, 2023)
Not according to that link. That link is a user speculation (labelled with a sarcastic JUST KIDDING, which doesn't mean that he's kidding, but does mean that it's something he thinks happened, not something he has evidence for.)
Important context: /u/yishan is the former ceo of reddit, and that is sam altman replying to him.
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