Building Nonlinear.
Drew Spartz
Karma: 734
Thanks for doing this!
I also have x-risks.com and may or may not use it, so feel free to DM me if you have a creative use case for it.
The “bureaucrat’s curse” reminds me of Vitalik’s bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html
Vetocracy can be beneficial if a system’s strength depends on it not changing. e.g. People invest in Bitcoin because it’s incredibly difficult to change its monetary policy. Bitcoin doesn’t need to innovate.
But if Ethereum is too vetocratic and fails to innovate—it could get outcompeted by other more nimble startups like Solana or Avalanche.
The current mood in the AI Safety community appears to be pessimistic. For example, Eliezer bet Bryan Caplan (2-1 odds) that humans will be extinct by Jan 1, 2030.
If you believe that inaction will lead to extinction, reducing vetoes and increasing the variance of outcomes could increase the probability we’ll survive.
As Scott Alexander says,
Healthy people are fragile (increased variance can mostly make them worse), very sick people are antifragile (increased variance can mostly make them better). So it is reasonable to give a terminal cancer patient an experimental drug—the worst that happens is they die (which would happen anyway) and the best that happens is they recover—it’s all upside and no downside.
I think you’re missing a few billionaires in your 5-6 number.
Jed McCaleb (founder of Ripple) is a funder of SFF.
There are many wealthy crypto people that have either donated to EA causes or are heavily involved that have an illiquid or highly fluctuating net worth due to the crypto markets. I would guess there are 5-10 that were billionaires at some point but likely have high 9 figure net worths now.
Also do you count people that sympathize with EA ideas as EAs? Fred Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong have both wrote positively about EA in the past. I have seen on Twitter a handful of 9-10 figure net worth crypto hedge fund managers talk about Less Wrong and a few talk about EA.
You can’t really use the S&P 500 as a way to predict these guys’ net worths either.
If there is another crypto bull market and Bitcoin hits $200k, I remember seeing a BOTEC that half of all the new billionaires in the world will be due to crypto.