all of it goes to them or their "associates"

What else should it go to? (Under the assumption that SI's goals are positive.)

As Larks said above, they are doing thought work: they are not trying to ship vast quantities of food or medical supplies. The product of SI is the output from their researchers, the only way to get more output is to employ more people (modulo improving the output of the current researchers, but that is limited).

Why was this downvoted instead of responded to? Downvoting people who are simply stating negative impressions of the group doesn't improve impressions of the group.

But they're not buying malaria nets, they're doing thought-work. Do you expect to see an invoice for TDT?

Quite appart from the standard complaint about how awful a metric that is.

If a person disagrees with Rand about a number of key beliefs, do they still count as a Randian?

Could you elaborate on this?

Would it be productive to be skeptical about whether your login really starts with the letter "M"? Taking an issue off the table and saying, we're done with that, is not in itself a bad sign. The only question is whether they really do know what they think they know.

I personally endorse the very beginning of Objectivist epistemology - I mean this: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." It's the subsequent development which is a mix of further gemlike insights, paths not taken, and errors or uncertainties that are papered over.

In the case of Buddhism, one has the usual problem of knowing, at this historical distance, exactly what psychological and logical content defined "enlightenment". One of its paradoxes is that it sounds like the experience of a phenomenological truth, and yet the key realization is often presented as the discovery that there is no true self or substantial self. I would have thought that achieving reflective consciousness implied the existence of a reflector, just as in the Objectivist account. Then again, reflection can also produce awareness that traits with which you have identified yourself are conditioned and contingent, so it can dissolve a naive concept of self, and that sounds more like the Buddhism we hear about today. The coexistence of a persistent observing consciousness, and a stream of transient identifications, in certain respects is like Hinduism; though the Buddhists can strike back by saying that the observing consciousness is not eternal and free of causality, it too exists only if it has been caused to exist.

So claims to knowledge, and the existence of a stage where you no longer doubt that this really is knowledge, and get on with developing the implications, do not in themselves imply falsity. In a systematic philosophy based on reason, a description which covers Objectivism, Buddhism, and Less-Wrong-ism, there really ought to be some notion of a development that occurs as you as learn.

The alternative is Zen Rationalism: if you meet a belief on the road (of life), doubt it! It's a good heuristic if you are beset by nonsense, and it even has a higher form in phenomenological or experiential rationalism, where you test the truth of a proposition about consciousness by seeing whether you can plausibly deny it, even as the experience is happening. But if you do this, even while you keep returning to beginner's mind, you should still be dialectically growing your genuine knowledge about the nature of reality.