This could have been buttcoin, sneerclub or techtakes, but y’know pick one.
Lightcone is the rationalist org that runs LessWrong these days and runs totally not race science conferences.
SBF donated $6m to Lightcone. Then FTX in ch 11 wrote demanding a clawback (cos it was stolen customer funds). Lightcone ignored it. This went badly for Lightcone. They had to sell a building and their funding has dried right up.
this is Oliver Habryka, CEO of Lightcone:
“Oh man, we are being sued by FTX. I should hire a bankruptcy lawyer to prepare our defense.” WRONG. I mean yes, of course go ahead and hire a bankruptcy lawyer to prepare the defense. But in-parallel use language models to prepare a defense yourself, then run the defense by the lawyer you hired until you think you understand reasonably well what the core constraints are. Then work together with the bankruptcy lawyer on the defense.
Habryka wrote this a few years after Lightcone completely fucked this one. Well done, Oliver.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/cegJvyiP2dBkhDh2K/p/rSCxviHtiWrG5pudv
The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly.
LO fuckin’ L
NOTE: on looking again, I’m not sure if he asked a chatbot at the time (presumably the GPT 3.5-based ChatGPT) or if he’s saying it would have gone better if he had asked a chatbot. Not that the second is one dot better, and may be worse.
Tangent: I looked through that sequence. The premise is that once a month, Habryka writes a mini-essay that repackages some bland corporate insight (e.g. Pareto principle, “fail fast”, etc.) as an internal document of Lightcone’s core principles. Lightcone is a company of 7 people.
rationalism as cult incubator
it keeps turning out that groups who call themselves The Smart Guys Who Are Very Cool And Also Smart are full of numbnuts! HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING
It’s really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won’t be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman’s standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
now if you know habryka wrote this, you can picture exactly what this kitchen looks like and will know to look out for doors falling on your head
hmm, was groverhaus actually just an instance of convergent evolution among posters
did Grover do his own three-phase wiring, no it takes Bayes for that
