I’m Open Phil’s in house counsel and would love to talk to you about this! I sent you a message with my contact info.
Molly
Karma: 1,251
Vipassana meditation aims to give meditators experiential knowledge (rather than theoretical/intellectual understanding) of this conception of self. I think that’s what a lot of people get out of psychedelics as well.
I thought this paper was really interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12590
The abstract:
“It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, 1984). This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations (Lay Tibetan, Lay Bhutanese, and monastic Tibetans). Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.”
One interesting note: “None of the participants we studied were long-term meditators (Tsongkhapa, 1991), and one important question for future research will be whether highly experienced practitioners of meditation would in fact show reduced fear of self-annihilation.” I don’t know if they ever did that future research.
Giving money to individuals through private foundations is pretty cumbersome, and requires getting pre-approval from the IRS to run a scholarship program; then you have to stick to the same method of selecting recipients as the one the IRS approved you for, and it generally has to be an open application process.
If you give money to individuals through a public charity it’s a lot easier, but to qualify as a public charity you have to meet certain financial requirements.
Another way of doing this is to just use a 501(c)4 social welfare organization. The downside is that donations to c4′s aren’t tax deductible, but the upside is that they are tax exempt (so you wouldn’t pay any capital gains on donated assets). Giving money to individuals through a c(4) is easy.
A last way of giving money to individuals is to give people no-strings-attached prizes in recognition of past accomplishments through a private foundation (a la MacArthur Genius Grant or Nobel Prize). The upside is you can use a private foundation and have maximal discretion over who gets the money with minimal reporting requirements. The downside is that you can’t actually require people to do something specific with the money.
A couple of quick ideas from a legal perspective:
How to differentiate policy advocacy (which c3′s are allowed to engage in without limitations) from lobbying (which c3′s have significant restrictions on) in non-US systems (e.g. in the US pushing for agencies to adopt regulatory schemes does not count as lobbying, but the distinction between executive agencies and legislative bodies may not translate well to other governmental systems)
Effect of China’s NGO law (which creates huge barriers to giving/operating in China) on high impact causes (you’d probably need to narrow this down for a 30 page thesis—so maybe choose one specific cause), and what US/non-Chinese orgs can do to work with/around them
How the US regulations could better facilitate international giving (e.g. equivalency determination certificates should be good for a duration and not need to be re-issued for every grant, and anti-terrorism legislation should have a negligence standard rather than being basically strict liability)
and I second Abraham’s suggestion on what US orgs can do to prepare themselves for proposed DAF changes
I can think of a few different inter-related lines of effort in advancing the psychedelic movement, that may be most easily divided into:
policy work
scientific research
grassroots work
Do you have a sense of whether the policy work and scientific research are money constrained, talent constrained or both? For someone looking to enter the field what would be
And as far as grassroots work goes, it seems important to keep the movement “respectable” but at the same time it seems important for more people to have personal experiences with psychedelics if they’re going to get on board.
Given that it’s hard to be respectable while advocating for people to run around breaking the law, would should an effective grassroots component to the psychedelic movement look like? And specifically, do you think informal/under-the-table trip sitting/guiding (assume it is well researched, and carefully conducted) a valuable thing to offer to the movement?
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.