Those comments have merit. Brushing comments off because you look down your nose at the choices or priorities of others ought to be called out. Besides, the bit about "people not building anything at all themselves" is at best a non sequitur distraction that lowers the writing quality of the post. There's no defending it.
I don't think it's fair to say he's looking down his nose at people that don't build anything if he's responding to those people saying him and his friends aren't building things that are hard enough.
It's simply using the targets own values to point out their hypocrisy. You don't insult based on the things you would personally would be offended by.
What hypocrisy? Since when does someone have to build a start-up top be entitled to opinions about what important start-up priorities ought to be, or what the social impact of current start-ups is, or whether current start-ups actually pursue the creation of value for society or not?
I don't see any other way of interpreting a comment like "usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves" -- something completely non-sequitur to the question of whether or not their criticism has merit -- aside from haughty superiority complex that working near the bleeding edge of what start-ups do somehow entitles you to a more valid opinion about whether or not start-ups create actual value or pursue fundamentally important work.
There is no hypocrisy in an OSS developer who has no interest in start-ups pointing out how questionable it is that start-ups actually add value or pursue fundamentally important work. Similarly, there's no hypocrisy in a regular employee of a tech firm pointing that out. Or a single mother who works two retail jobs and couldn't possibly be expected to "build something".
Their opinions about the social value of start-ups still matters absolutely every bit as much as Sam Altman's opinion of the social value of start-ups. Positioning one's self near the bleeding edge of start-ups might entitle you to have a more legitimate opinion about business matters, funding matters, certain technology matters ... but it absolutely does not entitle you to consider your opinions about social value to be more legitimate than someone else's just because they "don't build anything."
It reminds me of John Terry's ridiculous comments earlier in the British soccer season, saying that soccer pundit Robbie Savage is not entitled to make analytical criticism of soccer performance because he (Savage) didn't play on a team that won at a high level during his playing career [0].
It's a bit of nonsense. And I definitely believe that seeing it seep into this post needlessly is at least suggestive of a passive aggressive feeling against people who, while not themselves caring about personally building a start-up, still do care about the lack of social value present in our current start-up culture.
I find the idea that startups need to have social value or that there exists such a thing as "fundamentally important work" to be one of entitlement and self importance. As if it's owed to the critic that Sam/Silicon Valley be trying to help them in some way.
As for hypocritical, it's seems pretty clear to me that demanding someone undertake incredibly risky, intense, life consuming work for the purpose of bettering society, while they themselves do not, would qualify. I'm not sure how it wouldn't.
Your analogy doesn't work because that's just evaluating people based on their own personal goals, not saying they should have loftier ones. If Robbie Savage was saying that professional soccer players should be donating their high salaries to charity, or building houses instead of playing a silly game, that would be hypocrisy.
It's not the least bit entitled to expect anyone to produce social value as a side effect of their living.
Further, I don't think anyone is saying Silicon Valley has to produce this value. It's not mandatory. Folks are just going to have their opinion, a low opinion, if you don't.
If you don't care that many people see the side effect of Silicon Valley as on net socially and value destructive, that's fine. No one is speaking to you who doesn't care.
But it's absurd to equate an appraisal of the social side effects of something with entitlement or a "demand for help."
