pythagoras5015's Shortform

I've recently updated & added new information to my posts about the claims of Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, in which Annie alleges that Sam sexually abused her when she was a child. 

I have made many updates to my post since I originally published it back in October 2023, so depending on when you last read my post (which is now a series of 11 posts, since the original got so long (144,510 words) that it was causing the LessWrong editor & my browser to lag & crash when I tried to edit it), there may be a substantial amount of information I've added that is new to you.

Over the past few days, I've added in portions of transcripts from the 153 podcast episodes that Annie has published on her podcast. I found them quite worrying and disturbing, unfortunately. In her podcast episodes, which Annie published throughout 2018-2025, Annie has talked about:

- wanting to kill herself as a child, in association with having an extreme fear of death (leading to a variety of downstream mental health problems), a strong desire to control whether or not she died, and emotional distress over not being able to control when she might die
- "from a young age, definitely would be very focused on the fact that we're not all going to be here -- when I was really little, actually, I had a compulsive thing to tell my parents I love them every night before bedtime because I was afraid they would die in the middle of the night, or if in case the last thing I told them had to be, I love you"
- fear of/discomfort with change beginning at a young age
- being an "overthinking" three year old
- at a young age, going vegetarian and imposing a plethora of food rules upon herself and her eating in order to satisfy her strong desire to control her life, and "having one older brother who wasn't knowing about it"
- having multiple eating disorders, and going through cycles of restricting and bingeing with food & eating
- when she grew older, not remembering well parts of her childhood that her mother would tell stories about
- smoking weed
- her interest in astrology, and her more general interest in frameworks that help her put labels on things and people
- a mix of scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas/frameworks
- teaching and doing yoga
- crying while doing yoga poses, specifically while stretching/working her hips in Pigeon Pose
- health issues, e.g. with Annie's Achilles tendon (and other tendons), ovarian cysts, walking boot, etc.
- Anine's feelings, emotions, and mind-body connection
- "not having words for feelings"
- being stuck in extremist, black-and-white thinking patterns
- having a disordered central nervous system, emotional "spikes"
- persistent desires for safety and control
- having OCD (Obsessive–compulsive disorder)
- struggling with internal voices in her head shaming her (which she seems to have traced back to the shaming she received from her mother as a child)
- feeling like she has many internal child-like "internal parts", or an "inner child"
- beginning in ~2020-2021: occasionally talking about going no-contact with her relatives (i.e. her 3 brothers and her mother)
- being told to not share "family secrets"
- participating in "women's circles...where someone shares whatever they want to share and no one says a damn thing. No one says a word. There's no response."
- trauma, and flight-fight, freeze, or fawn reactions
- doing EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)
- doing sex work and sex therapy
- being homeless, houseless, and low on money or in "survival mode" for extended periods
- more specific (and saddening/concerning) details about the 2 sexual assaults Annie claims she experienced 
- etc.

I still have to think about all of this more. For now, a few quick/unpolished thoughts of mine:

- Annie has been quite self-consistent over a long period of time. To me, her claims have indeed changed from (e.g.) 2017 to 2025, but not in a "pervasively contradict each other" way, more in a "Annie seems to have slowly settled upon certain explanations for strange experiences and behaviors in her personal life that she didn't understand for a long time" way.

- In her podcast episodes, Annie does talk about smoking weed, astrology, and a mix of scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas. This does undermine her credibility a bit, I think. I personally don't believe in astrology, smoke weed, or believe in pseudo-scientific ideas. But I have read through (transcripts of) >200 hours worth of Annie's podcasts, and to me, Annie doesn't seem "nuts", "insane", "delusional", or anything like that.


I do want to note that this, and my 11 posts, are just my personal opinion/views. I always feel sorta weird about having "the" post(s) on LessWrong about Annie Altman's claims. From what I can tell, my posts have received quite a lot of downvotes, and the majority of the upvotes I received on my original (now "Part 1") post were on earlier versions of my post (from 2023 to early 2024), so I hope my posts don't give the false impression of being "what LessWrong thinks about the situation", or something like that. I've spent a lot of time compiling and reading through the information in my posts, but I think there many people who are smarter and/or more rational than me who will be able to think about this information better than I can. I neither claim nor want a monopoly on this information and its interpretation. 

Feel free to leave a comment or give feedback, criticism, etc. I may not be able to respond to everything immediately, and I may not have a great response for every comment, but I'll try my best.