The short version is probably “MetaMed and FTX were a typical rationalist businesses” but there have to be more anecdotes. These are not people who spend less than they earn, own Booglehead portfolios, and take night classes on business to get ready to launch their side hustle next year.

This blog post talks about who funds one EA organization. https://rufuspollock.substack.com/p/what-lightcone-infrastructures-financial. Note that all the foundations like OpenPhil (Moskovitz) and SFF (Tallinn) which are mostly a way to distribute one patron’s funds have well-paid senior staff. They are not squeamish about letting a former CFAR board member join the grants committee that votes money for CFAR either.

I cover all the overlapping organizations at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/gb/the_2014_survey_of_effective_altruists_results/

I think it mostly comes through very wealthy patrons, less from Effective Altruists like Zhang who they persuaded to “earn to give” at the start of their careers (although they hope all their friends at AI startups will donate their shares to the cause). Most of those billionaires were in the software industry before 2008.

• Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa
• Peter Thiel
• Dustin Moskovitz (turned off the taps a few years ago)
• Elon Musk
• Sam Bankman-Fried (oops)
• some crypto speculator
• Mark Zuckerberg (on the edge)
• Jeff Bezos (on the edge)
• Eric Schmidt (the thing with Zhang is the first I can recall)
• James McClave and his BEMC foundation who funded a whole EA propaganda outlet at Vox

Small donors to EA orgs don’t always know the money will pay Yud $600,000 a year to think great thoughts, or Nonlinear Fund to be digital nomads with a live-in servant, or the European EAs to buy a Czech castle to hold retreats. I have not looked into who funds Effective Altruism after FTX went bankrupt but the pledge drives always have matching donations from a foundation with a billionaire patron.

And then the people who receive the benefits and earn hundreds of thousands a year pass on $50-100k at a time to their friends.

It sounds like a dubious investment because its run by a hedge fund bro:

JueYan is a philanthropic advisor and a grantmaker. He runs the AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund (AISTOF), a pooled multi-donor charitable fund which seeks to reduce the probability and severity of catastrophic risks from advanced AI. Since inception in September 2023, the fund has raised more than $10mm and disbursed more than $7mm. JueYan serves on the boards of Family Empowerment Media and Suvita. He also advises Ambitious Impact and is a speculation grantor for the Survival and Flourishing Fund (“Our primary client is philanthropist Jaan Tallinn”). Previously, JueYan spent a decade earning-to-give as a hedge fund manager.

Mr. Zhang is a rare Asian-American in Effective Altruism. FEM helps women access contraception rather than encouraging some women to breed. Suvita helps poor Indians vaccinate their children.

Edit / Schmidt Sciences means “Eric Schmidt of Google.” He clearly has not lost faith in EA!

In the 2008 post about sparky elites, Yud also admits to feeling intimidated and not sure his achievements were so remarkable. So young Yud had a different position on some issues than wealthy, famous Yud. He is not a very clear writer and has trouble spotting weak spots and inconsistencies in his arguments because he never had a scientific education or an editor who was not his fan/employee.

1. People who are awful online and especially on corporate social media generally turn that off in person because ruining the community you actually live in is costly and requires courage. So best practice is to use the Internet as a research library and e Yellow Pages not as a substitute for your local coffeehouse or makerspace.

2. SlateScott was feeling down that he had trouble connecting with women the way many people can. There are a lot of hints that the first year he spent in San Francisco, in 2012-2013, was the first time he had a face-to-face social life, and mysteriously his love live improved thereafter and he stopped posting so many angry things about feminists and women who put out for the wrong guy. “Find some face-to-face activity with the sex you are interested in, especially a virtuous or physical activity,” is really common advice for the loveless. A SlateScott who did some kind of medical volunteering in Cork, say educating partygoers about substance use, might have found a girlfriend and spent less time reading wordy racists.

AFAIK Yud denies he is autistic which is why the community keeps reinventing names like akrasia for things that the neurodivergence movement already named. At one point he told Twitter he had superior Ashkenazi genes not Autistic genes like some Untermensch.

AFAIK, exercise is competitive with SSRIs as a treatment for depression too. I don’t know how to square Dr. Siskind the specialist in people whose depression won’t clear up with exercise, pills, and therapy, and SlateScott encouraging his friends to self-experiment.

He seems to have spent a lot of time on early tumblr, but young lefty activist women horrified him. I don’t think anyone explained that people are nicer in person and volunteering in person is a great way to fall in love.

He loves San Francisco, but not exploring the city’s many different kind of weird energetic people.

One of the odd things about the Scott Alexander posts is that he cites academic papers, and trade books, and people he knows in person, but does not mention that there are communities in the Bay Area which will talk your ear off about substances and harm reduction.

He also seems more comfortable with taking drugs to be more productive than with taking them for fun or taking them for transcendence.

Also, Bostrom is an academic writing for serious publications. The standards are higher than when Yudkowsky was rewriting pop-science books without sufficient attribution on his private blog, because Yudkowsky is a self-published autodidact.

I did not know that Bostrom boasts of being an undergraduate prodigy like Yudkowsky and Geoff Anders boast of being child prodigies. Doing impressive things is not enough, they have to rank themselves against the vulgar masses.

The idea that industrial civilizations tend to destroy themselves was a commonplace during the Cold War. The Paperclip Maximizer is a lot like the magic broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and bureaucracies in the literature of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Lining up by IQ and number of sex partners is another example of our friends obsessing about ranking each other numerically. Remember Caroline Ellison’s Chinese harem fantasy? Its all very adolescent.

Can imagine the computer heaven, can’t imagine things to do with someone eager and delicious that are hard to describe as “sex” or “not sex.” Berkeley should glitter-and-lube them and ride them out of town on a very phallic rail.

Edit / One of the men at Aella’s gangbang realized that he had more fun making out with a beautiful naked woman than in two minutes tussling with the birthday girl. That guy has a lesson that many inexperienced male rationalists should heed.

Good for him mentioning Caroline Ellison, the proscription amphetamines, and the ketamine. The icebreaker exercise is from one of Aella’s blog posts “This practice made men arouse me.”

Everything from the eugenics to the Social Darwinism to the ritual magick to the Jung to the goldbug economics is reviving ideas from the 1880s-1920s. If academics gave them up 50 or 100 years ago, that just proves that mainstream wisdom can’t be trusted!

I love this bit on “did they use goat’s blood in a silver chalice? Rookie mistake, my teacher used a brazen chalice and he was only carried off by demons once.”

Because Leveragers believed in the great potential of psychological change, naturally it became important to access seemingly cordoned-off areas of the psyche, to explore or to reprogram them. A student of other psychological and spiritual models might call mental space Leveragers now sought to understand “the unconscious,” or “the Abyss.” If more Leveragers had been following certain spiritual teachers or methods, they might have learned ideas about containment, such as “perimeters” — or “protection” practices, ranging from prayers to ritual cleansings. But, as many a serious practitioner could tell you, it’s hard to say whether any of that would have been truly protective, in the end.

Also, the Leverage Staffer who appeared on LessWrong to defend Geoff Anders’ practice of taking his disciples to bed was at one time CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism in the UK. https://old.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1tyr0y0/request_can_someone_please_write_a_deep_dive_on/

Leverage published The “Post-Experiences” Inquiry Report: Factors and Mistakes that Contributed to a Range of Negative Experiences on Our 2011-2019 Research Collaboration. It does not mention demons, Buddhists, neoreactionaries, or bodywork.

The emphasis on how Geoff Anders is very sorry (but not how he claimed he had solved philosophy and was about to solve psychology and by the way he could help his disciples better if they stripped and assumed the position) reminds me of Anna Salamon not-talking talking about what went wrong at CFAR 1.0.