Molly

FTX Ex­am­iner Report

• Molly 22 Mar 2023 18:24 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Write a Book?

  I’d like to read this book!

• Molly 17 Mar 2023 19:31 UTC

  41 points

  3 ∶ 1

  on: Re­mind­ing my­self just how awful pain can get (plus, an ex­per­i­ment on my­self)

  FWIW, I’ve undergone both getting a tattoo in a relatively painful place (my ribcage) and natural/​unmedicated childbirth, and your assessment of the pain doesn’t really line up with my experience. My tattoo is pretty small, and I suspect the wrist would be more painful, so maybe that explains the delta. But my unmedicated childbirth was also significantly faster than average, (like a total of about 70 minutes), so that should also close some of the delta.

  The pain of the most painful parts of childbirth was excruciating in a way that just wasn’t in the same ballpark as the tattoo. The tattoo was more like the early parts of childbirth—hard to talk, had to focus to control my breathing, took extra mental energy to answer a question, sweating from discomfort. Transition labor was a whole other beast, though—it was like my body couldn’t contain that amount of pain and was being split open, but that the environment that it was being split open into contained pain instead of air.

  Maybe the key difference is “I went through these experiences voluntarily and with the knowledge that I have the freedom to stop whenever I want.” I did not intend on having an unmedicated birth (I was open to it, but wanted the choice to be mine). Labor progressed so quickly that the medical team was unable to get analgesics to me in time. I felt completely out of control and none of the nurses in the labor and delivery room was taking control—I think no one had realized how quickly my labor was progressing. Once the midwife arrived, she took control and within ~30 seconds of her arriving, I no longer felt in terrible pain. In fact, I don’t recall feeling any pain after that. Though my guess is that transition labor was over by that point, so it’s hard to say why my pain was so greatly diminished.

  It’s kind of horrifying to me that there are multiple things rated above this on the pain scale.

  Anyway, it seems like there are probably a ton of people in the world who have tattoos and who have undergone unmedicated childbirth, and I’d be interested to see how their experiences compare. I’d be happy to ask some women I know if you think it’d be informative.

Pro­cess for Re­turn­ing FTX Funds An­nounced

Thoughts on le­gal con­cerns sur­round­ing the FTX situ­a­tion: doc­u­ment preser­va­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions

• Molly 22 Nov 2022 4:15 UTC

  35 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Thoughts on le­gal con­cerns sur­round­ing the FTX situation

  There seems to be some confusion around the following sentence: “Essentially, if you received money from an FTX entity in the debtor group anytime on or after approximately August 11, 2022, the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back.”

  Some clarifications:

  FTX Foundation, Inc. (the nonprofit corporation) is not currently in the debtor group. At least some FTXFF grantees received their funding from this nonprofit corporation, so this sentence doesn’t apply to them (yet – it could be added later).

  It’s worth checking what entity you received your funding from. We believe that some grantees received funding from Alameda Research, North Dimension or other entities that are in the debtor group.

  When I say “the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back” I mean, you are at least likely to receive a demand letter from the lawyers representing the debtor group. It costs next to nothing for the lawyers to send out demand letters, so a small grant amount isn’t necessarily protective against receiving a letter like that.

  If you do receive a demand letter, at that point you will have options about whether and how to engage in a negotiation process with the debtors’ lawyers. If you don’t come to a resolution, the claim could go to formal litigation. The likelihood of this depends on a number of factors, including the amount of money at play. Keep in mind, this is probably years in the future; a lot can happen in the bankruptcy case (and in the world) between now and then.

  What links here?

  • Thoughts on le­gal con­cerns sur­round­ing the FTX situation by Molly (13 Nov 2022 17:01 UTC; 367 points)
  • I’m less ap­prov­ing of the EA com­mu­nity now than be­fore the FTX collapse by throwaway790 (16 Dec 2022 19:40 UTC; 225 points)

• Molly 13 Nov 2022 17:07 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Molly’s comment on: Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation

  Post is now up here: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​o8B9kCkwteSqZg9zc/​​thoughts-on-legal-concerns-surrounding-the-ftx-situation

  (links to more resources including the explainer in the post)

• Molly 13 Nov 2022 17:03 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Claw­backs: Prob­a­bly don’t spend FTX grantee money for the next few days(?)

  Hi! I’m Open Phil’s managing counsel, and put out a post on this subject (with links to resources) here: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​o8B9kCkwteSqZg9zc/​​thoughts-on-legal-concerns-surrounding-the-ftx-situation

Thoughts on le­gal con­cerns sur­round­ing the FTX situation

• Molly 12 Nov 2022 14:21 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David M’s comment on: Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation

  It’ll be an explainer about how US clawbacks work, yes.

  (and mandatory disclaimer: it’ll be an explanation of legal context but not legal advice)

• Molly 12 Nov 2022 1:35 UTC

  22 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Molly’s comment on: Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation

  Update that I don’t think I’m going to be able to meet the timeline I set myself and have a product I think is worth sharing. Given that this is a holiday weekend it might be hard to find good advisors who are willing to work on this before Monday, but I’m going to try.

• Molly 10 Nov 2022 22:42 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation

  Thanks! Updated.

• Molly 10 Nov 2022 22:15 UTC

  120 points

  12 ∶ 0

  on: Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation

  Quick response to comments about potential clawbacks: OP expects to put out an explainer about clawbacks tomorrow. It’ll be written by our outside counsel and probably won’t contain much in the way of specifics, but I think generally FTX grantees should avoid spending additional $$ on legal advice about this just yet.

  Also, please don’t take this as evidence that we expect clawbacks to happen, just that we know it’s an issue of community concern.

  What links here?

  • Lorenzo Buonanno🔸's comment on The FTX Fu­ture Fund team has resigned by Nick_Beckstead (11 Nov 2022 10:02 UTC; 31 points)
  • Tyrone-Jay Barugh's comment on Com­mu­nity sup­port given FTX situation by Julia_Wise🔸 (10 Nov 2022 20:10 UTC; 20 points)
  • illative's comment on IMPCO, don’t in­jure your­self by re­turn­ing FTXFF money for ser­vices you already provided by EliezerYudkowsky (12 Nov 2022 11:41 UTC; 18 points)

• Molly 15 Aug 2022 19:09 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital

  Thanks!

  Yea, I probably could’ve done a better job differentiating what I think people would get out of guard/​reserve service vs. active duty. I absolutely would not expect the cultural absorption to happen in the guard/​reserve; probably not even if you took a year-long mob. It really was a years-long process.

  I agree that the national security knowledge is overrated, and tried to convey that—I think your Peace Corps analogy is spot on.

  It’d be awesome if you wrote a post on warrant officer careers—nobody seems to know WTF warrants do, myself included!

• Molly 15 Aug 2022 19:04 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jacob1212442’s comment on: Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital

  I didn’t join right out of college—I joined after law school. I took a few years off between college and law school, so I was 27 when I joined. It wasn’t weird for me but that might be in large part because I joined the JAG Corps, which required a law degree, so most people I was in training with were around my age.

  I’ve known other people who joined later than the standard age, and they mostly did really well. It probably helped that respect for your elders is one of those more traditional values that is somewhat a part of military culture.

  I did do airborne school when I was 33. I was one of the oldest, if not the oldest person in my class. No issues at all—though maybe hitting my body that hard at 33 was more ache-inducing than it would have been in my 20s.

• Molly 10 Aug 2022 19:21 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff A’s comment on: Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital

  I asked someone else who has more experience in the national guard than I do to jump in and answer this. I will say that I’m not sure that joining the guard will be much added protection against going out-of-state. My husband was guard, and got mobilized to Iraq in 2004-2005, and ended up resigning his commission when it looked like that was going to happen again in 2007-ish. Also guard often helps other states when they need disaster relief.

• Molly 10 Aug 2022 1:34 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff A’s comment on: Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital

  Do you have any specific questions about the differences?

  It’s worth noting that there’s active duty, and then there are two part-time options: national guard (where you belong to the state but can be mobilized for federal work), or the reserves (where you belong to the federal military). The army reserves doesn’t have line jobs—infantry, special forces, etc. are only options for active duty or national guard.
  

  You can only earn a G.I. Bill if you spend some time on active duty. You can do that either by joining the guard or reserves and then taking mobilizations, or by going active duty. There are also various tuition assistance programs for guard, reserve, and active duty, but using them tends to incur additional service obligations.
  

Mili­tary Ser­vice as an Op­tion to Build Ca­reer Capital

• Molly 19 Jul 2022 5:24 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Adler’s comment on: Law School: Why and When? – Con­sid­er­a­tions for Mem­bers of the EA Community

  Oh, I definitely agree there are good reasons to read unedited opinions—if nothing else, they’re great reads a lot of the time! But I think you’ll get a good number of false negatives if you use that as a test for whether you’ll enjoy the reading in law school. Anyone who enjoys reading unedited opinions will probably enjoy the reading in law school. But not everyone who doesn’t enjoy them won’t.

• Molly 18 Jul 2022 16:37 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Law School: Why and When? – Con­sid­er­a­tions for Mem­bers of the EA Community

  Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree with the point that people should only go to law school if they have a pretty good idea of what they want to get out of it, and should not go to avoid making decisions about career paths (though people often don’t realize they’re doing this).

  Also strongly agree with differentiating between the very top law schools and the schools just below them. I might go even farther than that. I went to NYU Law, which at the time was tied with Columbia for 4th in the U.S. News rankings. I didn’t apply to Harvard or Stanford because for personal reasons I wanted to be in NYC (I probably should have been more flexible on this). I didn’t get into Yale, which I could have commuted to. I did get into Columbia, but for a variety of reasons (I went to Barnard undergrad, so it seemed likely that NYU would broaden my network more; the Columbia admissions process was incredibly bureaucratic and that had been my experience with dealing with Columbia’s administration as an undergrad as well) I decided to go to NYU.

  I regret this a little bit because while NYU is well respected in the legal world, it does not have the same name-recognition as Columbia to non-lawyers, and the vast majority of people I interact with professionally are non-lawyers. When people have little else to go off of (and sometimes even when they have plenty else to go off of), name recognition can do a lot of heavy lifting. Silly though it may be, it can really affect how seriously your legal advice gets taken.

  One point of dissent: Even with the caveats you included, I am not sure that reading an unedited legal opinion would be particularly informative—my impression is that most textbooks heavily edit the opinions so that they’re focused on the issue relevant to the subject matter of the textbook. Most opinions are going to have multiple issues to get through (and will generally start with the boring stuff, like whether and why the court has jurisdiction to hear the case and whether/​why the plaintiff has standing), and might be way more of a slog than the reading in law school would be. I think a more useful test would be to read a few sections of a law school textbook from a subject that is mostly taught through case law (so not something heavily regulatory). Torts, contracts, criminal law, constitutional law all fit the bill.