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 share your concern, not only about the reliability of Annie’s flashbacks, but also about the validity of the claims she’s made as a whole. As I note in my response to “Objection 4”, Annie has provided no direct evidence to corroborate her claims, to the best of my knowledge.
I also acknowledge that the links I provided (e.g. from saprea.org) do not meet rigorous standards that would enable me to label them as “scientific” or “empiric” evidence to corroborate Annie’s account. I provide them merely as a way of noting that the symptoms that Annie’s reported seem plausible.
As I mentioned, the intent of this post is to promote discussion about the claims that Annie has made, and to spread awareness of the fact that Sam has not yet responded to Annie’s (very serious claims.) This post does not claim that Annie’s claims are provably or indisputably valid. In fact, I think the opposite is true: her claims are not yet corroborated by direct evidence, and they certainly are disputable. I currently hold Sam Altman to be innocent, until proven guilty.
In spite of this, I still thought that this post was worth making, as a means of bringing attention to Annie’s claims, which I think have a nonzero probability of being true in whole or in part.
I share your concern, not only about the reliability of Annie’s flashbacks, but also about the validity of the claims she’s made as a whole. As I note in my response to “Objection 4”, Annie has provided no direct evidence to corroborate her claims, to the best of my knowledge.
This seems like a thing that, even if true, would not lead to any direct evidence? Like presumably the only evidence of the sexual abuse that persists this long is gonna be her memories, Sam Altman’s memories, and maybe other family members memories.
(Or I suppose maybe they could run a PPG test on Sam Altman to better measure his sexuality? But AFAIK such tests are somewhat noisy and basically never performed.)
Yes, I think you raise valid points. Given that Annie’s (purported) sexual abuse occurred so long ago, I agree that it is unlikely that, at this point, direct evidence of Sam’s (purported) sexual abuse of her would be able to gathered.
Deviating a bit from your reply to the more general question of “What direct evidence could be provided (e.g. by Annie) to corroborate the claims Annie is making?”—I do think that a potentially useful piece of evidence that could be provided to corroborate (some of) Annie’s claims would be proof that:
Annie’s father left her money in his will.
Annie did not receive this money, as specified in the will.
I suspect that only the people involved will ever know the truth about the sexual abuse accusation. The claim about money, although in my opinion less serious, seems much easier to investigate. (And then, we can make a probabilistic update about the other claim.)
Other accusations in the article, such as Sam not willing to link a podcast, don’t seem important to me.
Those claims would be nice to know the answer to, though I don’t know that proving those claims would prove the sexual abuse allegations, nor that disproving those claims would disprove the sexual abuse allegations. Obviously one could argue that these claims are evidence about the relative trustworthiness of Annie vs Sam, but I am not sure trustworthiness across different claims is sufficiently well-correlated in these sorts of situations that it’s a valid inference to make.
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 share your concern, not only about the reliability of Annie’s flashbacks, but also about the validity of the claims she’s made as a whole. As I note in my response to “Objection 4”, Annie has provided no direct evidence to corroborate her claims, to the best of my knowledge.
I also acknowledge that the links I provided (e.g. from saprea.org) do not meet rigorous standards that would enable me to label them as “scientific” or “empiric” evidence to corroborate Annie’s account. I provide them merely as a way of noting that the symptoms that Annie’s reported seem plausible.
As I mentioned, the intent of this post is to promote discussion about the claims that Annie has made, and to spread awareness of the fact that Sam has not yet responded to Annie’s (very serious claims.) This post does not claim that Annie’s claims are provably or indisputably valid. In fact, I think the opposite is true: her claims are not yet corroborated by direct evidence, and they certainly are disputable. I currently hold Sam Altman to be innocent, until proven guilty.
In spite of this, I still thought that this post was worth making, as a means of bringing attention to Annie’s claims, which I think have a nonzero probability of being true in whole or in part.
This seems like a thing that, even if true, would not lead to any direct evidence? Like presumably the only evidence of the sexual abuse that persists this long is gonna be her memories, Sam Altman’s memories, and maybe other family members memories.
(Or I suppose maybe they could run a PPG test on Sam Altman to better measure his sexuality? But AFAIK such tests are somewhat noisy and basically never performed.)
Yes, I think you raise valid points. Given that Annie’s (purported) sexual abuse occurred so long ago, I agree that it is unlikely that, at this point, direct evidence of Sam’s (purported) sexual abuse of her would be able to gathered.
Deviating a bit from your reply to the more general question of “What direct evidence could be provided (e.g. by Annie) to corroborate the claims Annie is making?”—I do think that a potentially useful piece of evidence that could be provided to corroborate (some of) Annie’s claims would be proof that:
Annie’s father left her money in his will.
Annie did not receive this money, as specified in the will.
I suspect that only the people involved will ever know the truth about the sexual abuse accusation. The claim about money, although in my opinion less serious, seems much easier to investigate. (And then, we can make a probabilistic update about the other claim.)
Other accusations in the article, such as Sam not willing to link a podcast, don’t seem important to me.
Those claims would be nice to know the answer to, though I don’t know that proving those claims would prove the sexual abuse allegations, nor that disproving those claims would disprove the sexual abuse allegations. Obviously one could argue that these claims are evidence about the relative trustworthiness of Annie vs Sam, but I am not sure trustworthiness across different claims is sufficiently well-correlated in these sorts of situations that it’s a valid inference to make.