Molly

Karma: 1,056

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
39 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.

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; 219 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

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?

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
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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
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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
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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.

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
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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.

Molly 18 Mar 2022 5:09 UTC
27 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Legal support for EA orgs—useful?
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 31 Dec 2021 2:44 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Holden Karnofsky’s comment on: Comments for shorter Cold Takes pieces
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.

Molly 4 Oct 2021 1:28 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Starting a Small Charity to Give Grants
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.

Molly 13 Jul 2021 15:10 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Research Topics in Nonprofit Operations
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

Molly 15 May 2021 18:46 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Tim Ferriss, Michael Pollan, and Dr. Matthew W. Johnson on psychedelics research and philanthropy
I can think of a few different inter-related lines of effort in advancing the psychedelic movement, that may be most easily divided into:
1. policy work
2. scientific research
3. 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?