I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
In practice I don’t think there was any pump against linguistic drift to abbreviate ‘cofounder level responsibility’ to ‘cofounder’.
e.g.