MIRI mentioned receiving “A two-year $7.7M grant from Open Philanthropy, in partnership with Ben Delo, co-founder of the BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform.” in April 2020. Good luck to anyone who wants to track down that $15.6 million donation.
Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of épater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Husk’s needs.
Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?
Does anyone have an explainer on the supposed DOGE/EA connection? All I can find is this dude with a blo wobbling back and forth with LessWrong flavoured language https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge (he quotes Venkatesh Rao and Dwarkesh Patel who are part of the LessWrong Expanded Universe).
The February 2024 Medium post by Moskovitz objects to cognitive decoupling as an excuse to explore eugenics and says that Eliezer Yudkowsky seems unreasonably confident in immanent AI doom. It also notes that Utilitarianism can lead ugly places such as longtermism and Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. In the comments he mentions no longer being convinced that its as useful to spend on insect welfare as on “chicken, cow, or pig welfare.” He quotes Julia Galef several times. A choice quote from his comments on forum.effectivealtruism.org:
If the (Effective Altruism?) brand wasn’t so toxic, maybe you wouldn’t have just one foundation like us to negotiate with, after 20 years?
Max Read argues that LessWrongers and longtermists are specifically trained to believe “I can’t call BS, I must listen to the full recruiting pitch then compose a reasoned response of at least 5,000 words or submit.”
A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:
Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of “rationality community building”
So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.
Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so don’t get your hopes up)
In November 2024, Habryka also said " we purchased a $16.5M hotel property, renovated it for approximately $6M and opened it up … under the name Lighthaven." So the disconnect between what Lightcone says to the taxman (we are small bois, CFAR owns the real estate) and what it says to believers (we own the real estate) was already there.
Over on Buttcoin, David Gerard found this substack post which quotes Lightcone staff in early 2025:
Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of “rationality community building”
So I think Dustin told OpenPhil “when I read about an organization I funded, I don’t want to read about phygs, sexual harassment, or pseudoscientific racism.”
When Habryka says that “Open Philanthropy’s biggest donor asked them to exit our funding area” (email to LessWrongers) / “appears to continue to have some kind of blacklist for recommending grants to us” (public website) could that mean Moskovitz went all e/acc? Or just figured out that millions of dollars/yr is not the going rate to run a forum and host a conference for race pseudoscientists?
I am blissfully ignorant about social scenes in NYC like people in NYC are ignorant of scenes in the city and country where I live.
I want to steer this conversation away from psychology to say that this scene still seems to depend on ten or so wealthy patrons (Thiel, Moskovitz, Buterin, Tallinn, SBF, anonymous crypto donor, McClave). Owners of social media sites like Twitter and Substack find them amusing too. Without that money and media backing they would just be another bohemian social movement.
I can imagine Peter Singer’s short-termist EA splitting off from the longtermists, but I have a hard time imagining any part of the EA movement aligning itself against global capitalism and American hegemony. If you are in to that there are movements which have better parties and more of a gender balance than Effective Altruism.
It appears that MIRI had an inflection point in 2019 when they grew from a $3.6m / yr organization to a $6 million / yr. In 2021 they received $25 million in donations and they have been burning that ever since. They received $15.6m in crypto from one anonymous donor and $4.4m in crypto from Vitalik Buterin of Etherium in 2021. Since then they report $1.6m to $1.9m / year of donations, and their December 2025 fundraiser aimed at $6 million and has reached $1.2 million (half of that a match from Survival and Flourishing Fund ie. probably another tech exec or crypto gambler). So MIRI depends on a few rich donors and could not survive in its present form from ordinary rationalists chipping in.
MIRI and Lightcone have unusual calls for donations at the same time. That seems like poor coordination but operations are not our friends’ strength.
Their executive compensation exploded from $1.3m to $3.1m in 2024. Their other activities were giving out $280k in grants and spending $34k on a conference. What are they doing with all that money? You don’t need $3.1m to write a trade book and get on some podcasts. And they plan to spend faster next year:
Going into 2026, our budget projections have a median of $8M, assuming some growth and large projects, with large error bars from uncertainty about the amount of growth and projects. On the upper end of our projections, our expenses would hit upwards of $10M/yr.
I don’t think Yud had any martial-arts training when he wrote the Musashi similes either. He would have made a good novelist or science writer if he could have made himself do the work, because he can write up other people’s ideas in his own words.
The Nonlinear Fund from Old!SneerClub seems to have lost their 501(c)3 status because they forgot to file. A donor might be able to sue Lightcone for deceptive advertising but if you donated enough to get anything back after you pay off the lawyers, its probably better just to stop giving like Dustin Moskovitz.
Plus $12,018 in “other reportable compensation.” You could support a team of ten graduate students with that money and they would actually make things other than fanfic and publish research!
I liked Dave Karpf’s essay on the time Melon Husk showed he was a great poker player by making a big bet, losing everything to the card-counters, and buying back in again and again until he won once.
For Americans reading this, there is probably an essay in analyzing Deciding to Win and relating it to Kelsey Piper’s flavour of neoliberal LessWronger and all the tech executives whose campaign contributions in 2024 were mostly to Democrats. Not my country so I am not reading the whole book or writing the essay.
I agree that “publicly owned, publicly funded” would be a fine option (but which public? Is twitter global or for the USA or for California?) Good luck making the case for $5 billion/year new tax revenues to fund that new expense. Until then, there are small janky services on the Fediverse which rely on donations and volunteer work.
Jax Romana accused Yud of using his polycule as servants and the Nonlinear Fund openly used an intern as a cheap maid-of-all-work so they could focus on their important{CitationNeeded} work