Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report.
- Lightcone Infrastructure is here. They operate LessWrong and the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley but list no physical assets; someone on Reddit says that they let fellow travelers like Scott Alexander use their old rented office for free. “We are a registered 501(c)3 and are IMO the best bet you have for converting money into good futures for humanity.” They also published a book and website with common-sense, data-based advice for Democratic Party leaders which I am sure fills a gap in the literature. https://decidingtowin.org/
- CFAR is here. They seem to own the campus in Berkeley (“Land, buildings, and equipment … less depreciation; $22,026,042”). I don’t know what else they do since they stopped teaching rationality workshops in 2016 or so and pivoted to worrying about building Colossus.
- MIRI is here. They pay Yud ($599,970 in 2024!) and after failing to publish much research on how to build Friend Computer they pivoted to arguing that Friend Computer might not be our friend. Edit: they had about $16 million in mostly financial assets (cash, investments, etc.) at end of year but spent $6.5m against $1.5m of revenue in 2024. Since 2021 they have been consuming a $25 million donation they received that year.
- BEMC Foundation is here. This husband-and-wife organization gives about $2 million/year each to Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell out of tens of millions of dollars in capital.
- The Clear Fund (GiveWell) is here. They have the biggest wad of cash and the highest cashflow.
- Edit: Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) is here (they have two sister organizations). David Gerard says they are mainly a way for Dustin Moskevitz the co-founder of Facebook to organize donations, like the Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations. They used to fund Lightcone.
- Edit: Animal Charity Evaluators is here. They have funded Vox Future Perfect (in 2020-2021) and the longtermist kind of animal welfare (“if humans eating pigs is bad, isn’t whales eating krill worse?”)
- Edit: Survival and Flourishing Fund does not seem to be a charity. Whereas a Lightcone staffer says that SFF funds Lightcone, SFF say that they just connect applicants to donors and evaluate grant applications. So who exactly is providing the money? Sometimes its Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa.
- Centre for Effective Altruism is mostly British but has a US wing since March 2025 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/333737390
- Edit: Giving What We Can seems like a mainstream “bednets and deworming pills” type of charity
- Edit: Givedirectly Inc is an excellent idea in principle (give money to poor people overseas and let them figure out how best to use it) but their auditor flagged them for Material noncompliance and Material weakness in internal controls. The mistakes don’t seem sinister (they classified $39 million of donations as conditional rather than unconditional- ie. with more restrictions than they actually had). GiveDirectly, Give What We Can, and GiveWell are all much better funded than the core LessWrong organizations.
Since CFAR seem to own Lighthaven, its curious that Lightcone head Oliver Habryka threatens to sell it if Lightcone shut down. One might almost imagine that boundaries between all these organizations are not as clear as the org charts make it seem. SFGate says that it cost $16.5 million plus renovations:
Who are these owners? The property belongs to a limited liability company called Lightcone Rose Garden, which appears to be a stand-in for the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality and its project, Lightcone Infrastructure. Both of these organizations list the address, 2740 Telegraph Ave., as their home on public filings. They’ve renovated the inn, named it Lighthaven, and now use it to host events, often related to the organizations’ work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence safety and “longtermism.”
Habryka was boasting about the campus in 2024 and said that Lightcone budgeted $6.25 million on renovating the campus that year. It also seems odd for a nonprofit to spend money renovating a property that belongs to another nonprofit.
On LessWrong Habryka also mentions “a property we (Lightcone) own right next to Lighthaven, which is worth around $1M.” Lightcone’s 2024 paperwork listed the only assets as cash and accounts receivable. So either they are passing around assets like the last plastic cup at a frat party, or they bought this recently while the dispute with the trustees was ongoing, or Habryka does not know what his organization actually owns.
The California end seems to be burning money, as many movements with apocalyptic messages and inexperienced managers do. Revenue was significantly less than expenses and assets of CFAR are close to liabilities. CFAR/Lightcone do not have the $4.9 million liquid assets which the FTX trustees want back and claim their escrow company lost another $1 million of FTX’s money.
I knew that “Deciding To Win” sounded familiar.
https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3m4bu6tyoac2t
There is also this Rationality is Systematized Winning by Eliezer Y.
(Which has the glorious line: “Reason is just a way of doing things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t”, showing he never went to university).
These guys really are just another boring cult. They’re Christian Scientists. They’re aesthetic realists.
It is how professors talk to each other in … debate halls? What the fuck? Yud really doesn’t have any clue how universities work.
I am a PhD student right now so I have a far better idea of how professors talk to each other. The way most professors (in math/CS at least) communicate in a spoken setting is through giving talks at conferences. The cool professors use chalkboards, but most people these days use slides. As it turns out, debates are really fucking stupid for scientific research for so many reasons.
I think Yud’s fixation on debates and “winning” reflects what he thinks of intellectualism. For him, it is merely a means to an end. The real goal is to be superior and beat up other people.
He also states: “If a hoard (sic) of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness.”
Wrong. If a horde of barbarians descends on the lecture theatre, the professor will be delighted to see so many people taking in an interest in, say, recent developments in differential calculus.
Nah they tend to just tell them to get the fuck out of the class they are disrupting, it has happened a few times now in the usa where random fasc types start to shout things and get chased off.
Wonder if the recent ‘i got my trans teacher fired for failing my paper correctly’ shit is going to shift that.
It is in fact the barbarians who bring the ‘debate hall’ with them, with the ‘change my mind’ or ‘prove me wrong’ shit.
To say it another way: We call them lecture halls, not debate halls, Yud.
From all my years in physics, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that resembles a debate as Yud seems to envision it. You might occasionally get a panel, where N participants sit on a stage and provide O(N) opinions.
Our physics department had a coffee table in the lobby piled up with the most recent batch of unsolicited kook manuscripts, which might count
The only ‘debates’ are, when after a lecture somebody goes ‘this isn’t a question, more of a comment but …’ and then half the audience groans.
Thinking that debates are the ultimate decider of who is right or wrong is like, twelve year old shit. Hence the internet debate industrial complex
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.
Choice quote from Dave Karpf:
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.