VieEnCode

Is it wrong of me to think that at the root of all of this is the VC funding model?

Pump & hype > IPO > eventually dump all the negative externalities on others.

It's the startup dream.

We should aim to do better somehow.

You can't really just choose a life of enjoyment unless you have the financial means to support yourself in some realistic way. Most fun and enjoyable work is poorly paid because there is an army of people out there who will do it for free/as a hobby/for the clout.

Can you please elaborate? What do you mean by the war to liberate ideas?

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.

Richly deserved.

Can you give some examples of category (C)? I'm not quite sure of the type of organisation you're referring to there.

Midjourney is insane: simultaneously really inspiring and terrifying in the quality of "imaginative" images it's effortlessly spitting out.

> This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.

Large investors don't tend to be drawn to projects offering affordable housing to local residents because they are not as profitable as the alternatives. Many large European cities are currently suffering a housing affordability crisis driven in part by properties increasingly catering to tourists (esp. Air B&Bs) and luxury properties for investment for international high-net worth individuals.

> I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.

It usually wouldn't be as clear cut and easy to spot a case as that. But for example, until the war in Ukraine, European law firms were happy to act for any number of Russian businesses or oligarchs, provided they don't figure on any anti-money laundering lists (themselves, often relatively simple to circumvent). Or say, an African business person who has acquired their huge wealth in domestic assets and infrastructure through nepotism and is salting away the wealth offshore or into Europe via various direct or opaque investments, all legally facilitated by big law firms.

>The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is

3. Doesn’t cause harm

Not causing harm is much harder to tease out than one might think. The first order effects might appear harmless, but what about the second and third order effects? Is one often even in a position to know given the levels of abstraction in global financial markets? Are you lifting up developing countries by investment, or unwittingly enabling more to be extracted from them than is being put in?

Impact in corporate law is not necessarily close to neutral at all. You may, for example be promoting income inequality and housing affordability issues by facilitating international investment funds buying up huge swathes of real estate in a city.

You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.

You may be promoting the inequality of arms in access to justice, given that regulators and citizens cannot pay for the best legal advice, therefore enabling corporate regulatory capture over the long term.

Given the ubiquity of offshore vehicles in many international legal transactions, you may enable companies to evade contributing fairly to the countries in which they operate, thereby fuelling a decline in funding available for public services, and increasing the tax burden on wage-earning citizens.

And you may even have little awareness you are even doing these things because of the relative opacity and abstraction of the ownership of the corporate vehicles that make up your client base.

"authentic selves"

I'm not sure there actually is such a thing.

I highly recommend this beautifully filmed BBC documentary about the lives of a few ageing truffle hunters and their trusty dogs in northern Italy:

Storyville: The truffle hunters

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016489/storyville-th...

Apart from the already financially secure, who can possibly afford to be an effective altruist in the current climate (in the sense of donating a significant proportion of one's income). Similarly, who can afford to work for these EA foundations and charities on lowish salaries based in major cities but trustafarians?

The heads of the remaining employees must be spinning by now.

This should be the top comment, but this place is full of Thiel Stans, hence their bemusement.

This is exactly what people like Jeff Koons do.

I strongly suspect that many awards in the legal industry work in this way also.

Orwell wasn’t a communist. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Not true for London, there's now quite a lot of Indian fine dining:

https://www.thehandbook.com/london-guidebook/posh-indians-lo...

This is not just a Dorries thing, she is merely working from the script. I believe that focusing on culture war issues as a front for Tory vote-winning was becoming a key focus under Munira Mirza, and I only expect it to intensify in spite of her departure.

Luck is chance taken personally.

Not sure why you're being downvoted: your comment is spot on.

Bret and Eric Weinstein are ... to put it politely, utter narcissistic charlatans themselves.

Yeah, it’s two academics who primarily talk critically about content from the so-called “intellectual dark web”. They’re quite entertainingly scathing about some of these figures, especially the Weinstein brothers.

The Decoding the Gurus podcast did an episode on Rogan’s recent discussions pushing Covid disinfo:

https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/robert-malon...

The Decoding the Gurus podcast did an episode talking about Rogan’s recent discussions pushing Covid disinfo:

https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/robert-malon...

John Lewis & Partners, an employee-owned cooperative and the largest and most successful high end chain of department stores in the UK, springs to mind as a larger scale success story for alternative models.

I totally agree. I think that business and self help books are the worst offenders for this: lots of potentially embellished, or plain made up “stories” to wade through, when just getting to the point would work better for me.

Is Bach well-regarded in the AI community? I found this podcast a very interesting listen and checked out many of his others. He is a compelling speaker, but I am in not any way qualified to verify his claims. He also seems somewhat categorical in his statements about things that perhaps don't warrant such confidence: e.g. his view of the nature of mind, consciousness, the self, dreams, etc.