Chakravarthy Chunduri

Karma: 26

I’m an Indian guy with a JD-equivalent honors degree and also a masters degree in corporate law. I worked as an outsourced in-house counsel (contract review and drafting) at Ernst & Young/EY for (two American and one British) Fortune 500 companies. After that I burnt out and quit.

I saw the rather heart-wrenching effects of the pandemic first-hand in New Delhi and did my first “philanthropy” by financially supporting and encouraging neighbors to support domestic helps whose income had evaporated overnight due to the lockdowns.

I was inspired by Bill Gates’ work during the pandemic. I don’t come from money so I thought of joining the Indian Administrative Service, India’s high-impact federal bureaucracy which controls the administration of India’s $756 billion annual federal budget. But I wasn’t successful and now I’m an independent lawyer, looking to go back to a job.

I got to know about EA from Scott Alexander’s blog and read WWOTF and started lurking on the forum. I’m interested in animal welfare, AI safety, geopolitics, government policy, improving mental health resources and progress studies.

Chakravarthy Chunduri May 15, 2025, 10:26 AM
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: [urgent] Americans: call your Senators and tell them you oppose AI preemption
It doesn’t seem like the current administration cares about legality or anything, but I’m guessing that the Commerce Clause broadly empowers the US Congress (i.e; the US “Parliament”) to regulate at the federal level anything that ‘impacts’ inter-state commerce in any way. But apparently this AI provision runs afoul of the “Byrd rule” in this specific instance, because regulating AI is not part of the budget reconciliation process and therefore cannot be a part of a budget bill.
I’m guessing that the legalese doesn’t really matter, this is just a banally routine way to provoke political theater so that Republicans can claim that Democrats are holding up the budget bill and paralyzing the country and/or distract from the controversy on Medicaid healthcare budget cuts.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Apr 18, 2025, 1:30 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform
You make good points. Obviously, every country is either definitionally or practically a nation-state. But IMHO the only conditions under which individual freedoms and economic freedoms for individuals survive in a country, are when Statism is not embraced but is instead held at arm’s length and treated with caution and hesitation.
My argument for voting against Trump and Trumpists in the 2026 midterms, for a republican-leaning American citizen is this:
The current situation is directly a result of both Republican and Democrat politicians explicitly trying to increase and abuse state power for their definition of “the greater good”, which the other side disagrees with.
Up to an arbitrary point, this can be considered the ordinary functioning of democratic nation-states. Beyond the arbitrary point, the presence or absence of democracy is irrelevant, and the very nature of the social contract changes.
The fact that the arbitrary point is unknown or unpredictable is precisely the reason that Statism should not embraced but instead be held at arm’s length and treated with caution and hesitation!
Every dollar the government takes out of you pocket or restricts you from earning, every sector or part of the economy or society the government feels the need to “direct” or “reshape” for the greater good, the less freedom there is for the individual, and private citizens as a whole.
If the Republican voters abdicate too much sovereignty to support Trumpist pet projects, even if the Dems ultimately defeat Trumpists, or even if Vance turns out to be a much better president, the social contract may or may not revert back to what it used to be. Which could really suck.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Apr 18, 2025, 5:49 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: Aaron Bergman’s comment on: aaronb50′s Shortform
tl;dr: Getting Trump removed from office is not high-leverage and can be actively dangerous, since that only means JD Vance becomes President, and he and the Republicans will be politically obligated to dig in their heels and implement a Trump agenda.
Instead, I think somehow getting millions of Americans to recognize Trump’s gameplan (which I’ve summarized below), and getting them to panic-vote Democrats in the 2026 midterms is the highest leverage thing you can do.
Here’s my $0.02, even though I don’t know how to achieve a Dem victory.
I think Trump is doing all of this with an eye on the 2026 midterms. I’ll try to publish a more detailed write-up later if I’m able to, but all these arguably inane policy decisions that even well connected Trump supporters were blindsided by- are all things that the Trump administration is hoping will play well with the voters in the mid-term elections. Then more Trumpists get elected into the House, then that empowers Trump even more, considering he’s already installed his vassal Mike Johnson as the leader of the House of Representatives.
I think that’s the overall game plan. That’s why he’s had no compunction in walking decisions back as soon as they’ve generated news headlines.
As plans go, it certainly is a cogent plan. It looks and feels like the Southern Strategy 2.0. Frankly I was expecting this sort of populist grandstanding from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic Socialists; and not this generation of Republicans.
It looks like Trump saw Bernie Sanders attempting Ralph Nader’s political strategy and thought, “Huh. I could do that!” and so here we are today. That’s why I personally dislike politicians who are not centrists. But I think there’s a flaw in Trump’s plan.
I’m not an American, but I’m guessing the reason previous presidents haven’t done this kind of populism is because American voters (a) aren’t that stupid, like, most American citizens have at least a high-school level education; and (b) more than education, most Americans, even rural, redneck bible-thumping MAGA voters are intimately connected to the global economy. That’s the whole reason the US is the richest country in the world, to begin with.
So, yeah- IMHO the highest leverage option in this situation is just plain-old fashioned vote-out-the-policy-you-think-sucks way of doing things. Hopefully that will, in turn, bring centrists back on both sides of the aisle and that will in turn open up opportunities for higher leverage (i.e; lobbying) options.
Will that actually work, though? I have no idea. Trump won and lost the presidential elections on a wafer-thin margin, like less than 100,000 voters. That’s what makes Trump’s actions risky electorally for the Republicans.
Quite frankly, Trump’s actual policy decisions are not nearly as damaging as the Trumpist goal of turning America into a Russia-style statist country.
If Trump’s winning margin improves considerably in the mid-terms, then America will become a heavily statist country. Statism sucks donkey bollocks in all kinds of ways -for ordinary citizens, that is. For politicians and political insiders on both sides of the aisle, Statism probably feels awesome. (source: am an Indian citizen). So, politically speaking, the mid-terms are kind of an existential moment for citizens (to put it very mildly).
Because once a country embraces Statism, it usually begins an irreversible process of turning into a “shithole country”, as Trump himself eloquently put it. Somehow getting this into the hearts and minds of voters and getting them to vote blue in 2026, is existentially important for Americans.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Apr 9, 2025, 11:07 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
Dank EA Memes. I think it was a facebook group.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Apr 8, 2025, 12:19 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes
Edit: I see your point. Still, I’ll leave the below comment as-is, because from my (3rd world, generational financial instability, no health insurance, filial obligations etc.) point of view I think the perspective of a broke person ought to be represented.
But what counts as “numerous”, though? How many EAs are actually working in AI—fifty people? A hundred people? Who’s collecting data on this subgroup versus the larger EA group?
I agree that the question itself is appropriate and there’s nothing wrong with it. I was saying this question doesn’t benefit from public speculation, because, for one thing, there isn’t any reliable data for objective analysis, and for another, the logistics of an individual’s personal finance are a bigger factor in how or how much a person donates, at the non-millionaire level (in this subclass and the broader population).

Chakravarthy Chunduri Apr 7, 2025, 1:06 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 4
in reply to: Alfredo Parra 🔸’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes
I’d consider this a question that doesn’t benefit from public speculation because every individual might have a different financial situation.
Truth be told “earning really well” is a very ambiguous category. Obviously, if someone were financially stable, eg. consistently earning high 5 figure or six figure dollars/euros/pounds/francs or more annually(and having non-trivial savings) and having a loan-free house, their spending would almost always reflect discretionary interests and personal opinions (like ’do I donate to charity or not”).
For everyone not financially stable, ‘donating to charity’ may not:
(a) be a discretionary decision and
(b) be a simple decision—that is, increasing charitable donations too soon comes at the expense of not investing in one’s personal ability to weather volatility, which has knock-on qualitative effects on career progression (especially to senior management roles), future earnings potential and lifetime charitable contributions. Additionally, not getting one’s personal finances in order early on contributes directly to great personal and family stress, which then has knock on effects on everything else.
tl;dr: when you’re broke, money allocation is a high-risk, high-stress headache. The long term solution is to prioritize becoming the opposite of broke, i.e; financially stable, first.
also see: Julia Wise’s post on the logistics of giving.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Jan 18, 2025, 2:50 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David T’s comment on: EA’s Biggest Missed Opportunity: Mark Zuckerberg
I think you’re asking the right question. I’ve tried to answer that in my reply to Trappist here.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Jan 18, 2025, 2:42 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Trappist’s comment on: EA’s Biggest Missed Opportunity: Mark Zuckerberg
I see where you’re coming from and you’re right. My point was, the actions of billionaire tech CEOs (and CEOs in general) tend to be put under a microscope by the public and news media merely because they are CEOs of influential companies. So most CEOs try not to do anything that invites more criticism or controversy. It’s true that EA tries to be ‘boringly effective’ and ‘verifiably high impact’. However, as of now EA is still a very niche social movement and it is emphatically not a ‘plain and boring philanthropic choice’ in the same way as donating to your local place of worship or the local YMCA is.

Zuckerberg has been mocked mercilessly for stupid things like ‘looking like an alien’ and ‘sweating during congressional testimony’. He gave a $75 million donation to a bay area hospital and got a building named after his Harvard-educated doctor wife -and he still got criticized. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative tried their best to toe the line and donate to ‘woke’ left wing causes and activists, and those activists once asked him to resign from his own charitable foundation. So now Zuckerberg is just doing zany-but-popular billionaire stuff like building a 7 foot tall statue of his wife or re-recording his favorite pop song. Of course I’m not saying that sort of thing is right or ‘moral’, but you can see Zuckerberg’s point of view from his actions.

For that matter even Moskovitz sometimes gets the Zuckerberg treatment on this forum itself, and can’t just be a donor giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Instead the guy has to politely tiptoe around people’s sentiments while worrying about risks to both EA and his day job as CEO of another multi-billion dollar company. So I wonder if EA is really appealing as a philanthropic choice to other billionaires.

Basically I think EA should become a boring thing like the YMCA, to be more impactful. Philanthropic interest and funding tends to be a feast-or-famine thing (hah) for some reason. So I think EA needs to be popular first, and then the billionaire funding may very well follow afterwards.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Jan 16, 2025, 1:51 PM
2 points
2 ∶ 4
on: EA’s Biggest Missed Opportunity: Mark Zuckerberg
I disagree. I think the entire reason Dustin Moskovitz was able to begin liquidating and diversifying his Facebook/Meta stock is because Zuckerberg is holding down the fort as CEO and controlling shareholder with 58% voting rights. Zuckerberg assumed the fiduciary duty of actually running Meta to maximize shareholder return and even strategically got married the day after the Facebook IPO-just to make it super clear who was going to be in charge of the company. Dustin Moskovitz is also in a similar position at Asana.

Contrast that to FTX where Bankman-Fried was giving away company and shareholder money before FTX ever made any profit or even went public, and consequently EA suffered reputational damage and FTX fund recipients faced lawsuits and clawbacks from FTX shareholders and deposit holders.

Basically I think it can be a ….slippery slope-fiduciary duty wise, at least- asking billionaires that have an active role in running their companies to aggressively divest their shares for the sake of philanthropy.

Chakravarthy Chunduri Jun 5, 2024, 11:38 AM
11 points
1 ∶ 6
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Review of Past Grants: The $100,000 Grant for a Video Game?
(edited for lucidity)
Maybe you could rename the LTFF as the Speculative Long Term Future Fund (SLTFF) or the Moonshot Fund. That is, make it clear that the LTFF is EA Funds’ “Moonshot-focused” grantmaking arm. Here’s a draft writeup you can use to replace the LTFF description:

From an EA point of view, the entire reason the LTFF exists is that some opportunities to impact the future, or impact a large portion of humanity, or both; are much more cost effective than traditional ‘bednets’ type opportunities. But the tradeoff is uncertainty. LTFF funds opportunities whose impact is much more uncertain. That is, LTFF tries to fund effective ‘moonshots’. The problems with funding moonshots, however, are:
(a) the likelihood of any particular grantee actually succeeding—that is, succeeding at a scale so as to influence events on a humanity-wide scale, is pretty low.
(b) Even if such funding opportunities exist, they are likely to need millions of dollars of funding, just because of the sheer logistics of making an impact at that scale.
However, that’s not to say that such funding opportunities don’t exist. Furthermore, even if humanity-scale impact costs millions of dollars, the LTFF can fund pilot projects that get picked up by bigger funders, and also fund individuals to contribute towards an ecosystem that can create humanity-scale impact.