In my model, one should be deeply skeptical whenever the answer to ‘what would do the most good?’ is ‘get people like me more money and/or access to power.’ One should be only somewhat less skeptical when the answer is ‘make there be more people like me’ or ‘build and fund a community of people like me.’
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Lightcone Infrastructure
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if you gave that person [...] a credit card and told me ‘seriously, use this for whatever you want as long as it’s putting you in a better position to do the stuff worth doing, it doesn’t matter, stop caring about money unless it’s huge amounts.’
Seems like these are pretty centrally “build and fund a community of people like me”. Do you agree with this, and think that you have enough evidence to overcome the default skepticism? Or do you think Lightcone doesn’t actually fall into that reference class?
My guess is that it’s the first one, and that you’d say that unlike the vast majority of other orgs, Lightcone is clearly composed of people who are Doing Thing and will lead to other people Doing Thing better, and this isn’t true of most other things where you have default skepticism?
Seems like these are pretty centrally “build and fund a community of people like me”. Do you agree with this, and think that you have enough evidence to overcome the default skepticism? Or do you think Lightcone doesn’t actually fall into that reference class?
My guess is that it’s the first one, and that you’d say that unlike the vast majority of other orgs, Lightcone is clearly composed of people who are Doing Thing and will lead to other people Doing Thing better, and this isn’t true of most other things where you have default skepticism?