CinnasVerses @ CinnasVerses @awful.systems

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5 mo. ago

invest

If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.

You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker

GeneSmith who told LessWrong "How to Make Superbabies" also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don't call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.

CFAR lists nine employees with six-figure salaries plus a president. Oliver Habryka is one of those employees at the lower end of the pay scale. LightCone lists Habryka with a $3,000 honorarium and $110,000 in other salaries and expenses which looks like one or two system administrators or IT technicians. In 2024 Lightcone Infrastructure gave most of its expenses to something called Lightcone Research which actually operates LessWrong, and I predict that in 2026 LightCone will give most of the money raised to CFAR to pay the mortgage on the Rose Garden property and be very worried about Robot God.

In December LightCone raised $1.6 million of donations plus a 12.5% matching donation from the Survival and Flourishing Fund. They threatened to shut down if they didn't raise $1.4 million and wanted at least $2 million.

Jaan and SFC (Jaan Tallinn and the Survival and Flourishing Corp) helped us fund the above-mentioned settlement with the FTX estate (providing $1.7M in funding). This was structured as a virtual "advance" against future potential donations, where Jaan expects to only donate 50% of future recommendations made to us via things like the SFF, until the other 50% add up to $1.29M in "garnished" funding. This means for the foreseeable future, our funding from the SFF is cut in half.

Lightcone Infrastructure did not list any large liabilities like this on its 2024 form 990, but CFAR listed several things which could cover it if the settlement was in 2024.

In December MIRI raised $1.6 million in donations plus a 100% matching donation from SFF. They wanted a total of $6 million. The donations grew from $1 million to $1.6 million in the last few days, suggesting that they talked a few of their upper-middle-class supporters into chipping in amounts in the high tens or low hundreds of thousand to capture the matching donation. Both fundraisers reached their minimum targets but not their goals.

I could one day but nitter and the Wayback Machine and public tools have gotten me this far!

Jax Romana accused Yud of using his polycule as servants and the Nonlinear Fund openly used an intern as a cheap maid-of-all-work so they could focus on their important{CitationNeeded} work

MIRI mentioned receiving "A two-year $7.7M grant from Open Philanthropy, in partnership with Ben Delo, co-founder of the BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform." in April 2020. Good luck to anyone who wants to track down that $15.6 million donation.

Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of épater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Husk's needs.

Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?

Does anyone have an explainer on the supposed DOGE/EA connection? All I can find is this dude with a blo wobbling back and forth with LessWrong flavoured language https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge (he quotes Venkatesh Rao and Dwarkesh Patel who are part of the LessWrong Expanded Universe).

The February 2024 Medium post by Moskovitz objects to cognitive decoupling as an excuse to explore eugenics and says that Eliezer Yudkowsky seems unreasonably confident in immanent AI doom. It also notes that Utilitarianism can lead ugly places such as longtermism and Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion. In the comments he mentions no longer being convinced that its as useful to spend on insect welfare as on "chicken, cow, or pig welfare." He quotes Julia Galef several times. A choice quote from his comments on forum.effectivealtruism.org:

If the (Effective Altruism?) brand wasn’t so toxic, maybe you wouldn’t have just one foundation like us to negotiate with, after 20 years?

Max Read argues that LessWrongers and longtermists are specifically trained to believe "I can't call BS, I must listen to the full recruiting pitch then compose a reasoned response of at least 5,000 words or submit."

A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of "rationality community building"

So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.

Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so don't get your hopes up)

In November 2024, Habryka also said " we purchased a $16.5M hotel property, renovated it for approximately $6M and opened it up ... under the name Lighthaven." So the disconnect between what Lightcone says to the taxman (we are small bois, CFAR owns the real estate) and what it says to believers (we own the real estate) was already there.

Over on Buttcoin, David Gerard found this substack post which quotes Lightcone staff in early 2025:

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of "rationality community building"

So I think Dustin told OpenPhil "when I read about an organization I funded, I don't want to read about phygs, sexual harassment, or pseudoscientific racism."

When Habryka says that "Open Philanthropy’s biggest donor asked them to exit our funding area" (email to LessWrongers) / "appears to continue to have some kind of blacklist for recommending grants to us" (public website) could that mean Moskovitz went all e/acc? Or just figured out that millions of dollars/yr is not the going rate to run a forum and host a conference for race pseudoscientists?

I am blissfully ignorant about social scenes in NYC like people in NYC are ignorant of scenes in the city and country where I live.

I want to steer this conversation away from psychology to say that this scene still seems to depend on ten or so wealthy patrons (Thiel, Moskovitz, Buterin, Tallinn, SBF, anonymous crypto donor, McClave). Owners of social media sites like Twitter and Substack find them amusing too. Without that money and media backing they would just be another bohemian social movement.

I can imagine Peter Singer's short-termist EA splitting off from the longtermists, but I have a hard time imagining any part of the EA movement aligning itself against global capitalism and American hegemony. If you are in to that there are movements which have better parties and more of a gender balance than Effective Altruism.