Thanks! :) I’m glad you enjoyed the episodes, and yes, we’d like to do more episodes where we bring on people that disagree (and find out why they disagree).
spencerg
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Curated conversations with brilliant effective altruists
A podcast episode exploring critiques of effective altruism (with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra)
A quote on centralization in EA (in which Ajeya was steelmanning an argument Michael had made):
My understanding of your position is that it’s difficult to figure out what the most important causes are — to simplify a little bit and say there’s one most important cause as opposed to the most important or optimal portfolio. EA has a pretty small set of intellectual leaders that are trying to think about this and then disseminating their conclusions. And because this is a really difficult project, they’re going to get it wrong a lot. But they’re also going to influence a pretty large number of people to work on whatever they say is the current best thing that they believe. Even if that’s completely in good faith, you’re like, “Well, people should just have a policy of listening less to such intellectual leaders and doing their own thing more.” And that could have led to a faster convergence on the optimal cause or optimal portfolio or whatever it is.
Michael on expected value calculations and legibility:
I think if you’ve been an effective altruist in the 1660s trying to decide whether or not to fund Isaac Newton — the theologian, astrologer, and alchemist — he had no legible project at all. That would have looked just very strange. You would have had no way of making any sense of what he was doing in terms of an EV point of view. He was laying the foundations for a worldview that would enable the Industrial Revolution and a complete transformation in what humanity was about. That’s true for a lot of the things that have been the most impactful.
Find out how utilitarian you are—a mega thread of philosophy polls
$13,000 of prizes for changing our minds about who to fund (Clearer Thinking Regrants Forecasting Tournament)
Opportunities that surprised us during our Clearer Thinking Regrants program
Thanks so much, Molly, I really appreciate you taking the time to write this, as I’m sure many others here do as well!
There is one thing that really confuses me about what you’ve written (that I think could be relevant to quite a number of folks here) that I’m hoping you can clarify. It’s related to what “FTX entities” we are talking about precisely here.
Some - perhaps many—of the grants seem to have been paid through an entity that it’s not clear to me is legally/formally related to the other entities you’re referring to here. And I’m wondering if that could change the situation.
My basic question is: is your post still relevant for grants that came from entities that are not part of the group of companies filing for bankruptcy?
And is your post still relevant for funds given by an FTX company to a 501(c)(3), and then the grants were later made from that 501(c)(3) to other grant recipients?
Below are more details about what I’m referring to.
You said that post is about the question:
“if I received FTX-related grant money, what am I supposed to do?” (with the footnote: I say FTX-related and not FTXF because my impression is that grant money came from many different entities, and not just FTX Foundation.)
and
“FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday (November 11th, 2022). More specifically, Alameda Research Ltd. filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, by filing a standard form in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The filing includes 134 “debtor entities” (listed as Annex I); it looks like this covers the full FTX corporate group.”
and also:
“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.”
What confuses me about this is the definition of FTX entities. While payments for different grants came from different entities, there was one entity, in particular, that seems to have made quite a number of grants I think:
FTX Foundation, Inc.
I see no mention of this entity in the Alameda bankruptcy documents: (https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/alameda-filing-11112022.pdf)
What’s more, this diagram that has been floating around of their corporate structure (https://i.imgur.com/sUb2efI.png) shows FTX Foundation Inc. (at the bottom of the chart) as being unconnected to the other entities.
The FTX Foundation Inc. seems to have Delaware file number 6586501, which, when I search for it in the Delaware corporate database (https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/eCorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch.aspx) with a different name - FTX PHILANTHROPY, INC. - but this entity is also not in the bankruptcy filing from what I can tell, and I think not on the corporate structure chart mentioned above either.
So, what is FTX Foundation Inc.? Here (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2mx6xrDrwiEKzfgks/announcing-the-future-fund-1?commentId=qtJ7KviYxWiZPubtY), one of the people running the Future Fund says:
“We have a number of entities we can use to provide funding, and which we use depends on the exact circumstances. It could be our non-profit entity FTX Foundation Inc, or it could be a DAF [Donor Advised Fund] of one of our board members, or it could be something else if it’s a for-profit investment. ”
This article (https://puck.news/the-s-b-f-pandemic/) also referred to this org as a 501(c)(3):
“That financial question also hovers over the future of the FTX Future Fund, the flagship foundation created by S.B.F. and other top executives at the company that promised to give away hundreds of millions of dollars annually and has already distributed $160 million this past year. But it’s not clear that all of the assets there are segregated for charity—this particular philanthropy is actually a collection of vehicles: a 501(c)3 foundation called FTX Foundation Inc. and several donor-advised funds of its board members, along with other, undisclosed vehicles if the Future Fund wants to back a for-profit company.”
Thanks again for all your help!
I created a manifold market forecasting page for whether or not grant money given by the Future Fund via FTX Foundation, Inc. will be “clawed back”. Please forecast there if you have an opinion to help others stay informed on the probabilities (and I added one I just learned about from Eliezer as well):
Estimating the probability that FTX Future Fund grant money gets clawed back
Take part in our giant study of cognitive abilities and get a customized report of your strengths and weaknesses!
Hi! The scores are relative to a sample from the U.S. population (not people on LessWrong or the EA Forum). I suspect that the population we used may have a slightly higher-than-average IQ but I’d be surprised if it was a lot higher than average.
We haven’t yet released the 40 claims we’re seeing if we can replicate, but they include many of the major claims in the intelligence literature.
Each participant gets a random subset of the 61 intelligence tasks our study includes. So yes, there are visual-spatial tests in there, but not everyone is going to get them.
Each participant gets a random subset of the 61 intelligence tasks from the study. Sorry the ones you got we’re that interesting to you!
Sense-making around the FTX catastrophe: a deep dive podcast episode we just released
There isn’t a transcript available for this episode (we sometimes have them for our episodes).
I was pretty surprised by these Twitter poll results (of course, who is responding may have various selection biases involved) where I ask how people feel about organizations putting out statements along the lines of “we oppose racism and sexism and believe diversity is important” (note: the setting of my poll—I give the example of a software accounting firm or animal rights org - is quite different from the setting of the above post):
https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1624044864584273920
@garrymm, here is my talk where I discuss this study further. https://youtu.be/tOSpj19eows?t=876 At the end of the talk (22m 37s) I also point to where to find more info.