Nonlinear spoke to dozens of earn-to-givers and a common sentiment was, "I want to fund good AI safety-related projects, but I don't know where to find them." At the same time, applicants don’t know how to find them either. And would-be applicants are often aware of just one or two...
5 years ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote an important but little-known blog post that deserves more visibility, so I'm posting it here. This way, it'll also cross-post to The Nonlinear Library, where it'll be available in podcast form. Inspired by Vitalik, I just set up an X-risk + Crypto...
"Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days."
Seems like other people besides Ruby are confused about this too, maybe also because Ben sometimes says "the Nonlinear cofounders" and Emerson/Kat/Drew
Just FYI Drew is not a cofounder of Nonlinear. That is another inaccurate claim from the article. He did not join full time until April 2022.
I'd like to kindly remind you that you are making a lot of judgments about my character based on a 10,000 word post written by someone who explicitly told you he was looking for negative information and only intended to share the worst information.
That is his one paragraph paraphrase of a very complex situation and I think it's fine as far as it goes but it goes nowhere near far enough. We have a mega post coming ASAP.
Ben has also been quietly fixing errors in the post, which I appreciate, but people are going around right now attacking us for things that Ben got wrong, because how would they know he quietly changed the post?
This is why every time newspapers get caught making a mistake they issue a public retraction the next day to let everyone know. I believe Ben should make these retractions more visible.
This is more false info. The approximate/expected total compensation was $70k which included far more than room and board and $1k a month.
Chloe has also been falsely claiming we only had a verbal agreement but we have multiple written records.
We'll share specifics and evidence in our upcoming post.
Just FYI, the original claim is a wild distortion of the truth. We'll be providing evidence in our upcoming post.
Rob Bensinger replied with:
I think that there's a big difference between telling everyone "I didn't get the food I wanted, but they did get/offer to cook me vegan food, and I told them it was ok!" and "they refused to get me vegan food and I barely ate for 2 days".
Agreed.
... (read more)And this:
This also updates me about Kat's take (as summarized by Ben Pace in the OP):> Kat doesn’t trust Alice to tell the truth, and that Alice has a history of “catastrophic misunderstandings”.
When I read the post, I didn't see any particular reason for Kat to think this, and I worried it might be just be an attempt to dismiss a critic,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
1) I disagree with that interpretation.
2) She was not an employee of Nonlinear at the time, just a friend. Ben's post said she was, but that was a factual inaccuracy, one of many we are working hard to correct in our forthcoming post.
Just to clear up a view things:
Yes, that is what I intended to communicate here, and I was worried people might think I was trying to suppress the article so I bolded this request to ensure people didn't misunderstand:
Nonlinear spoke to dozens of earn-to-givers and a common sentiment was, "I want to fund good AI safety-related projects, but I don't know where to find them." At the same time, applicants don’t know how to find them either. And would-be applicants are often aware of just one or two funders - some think it’s “LTFF or bust” - causing many to give up before they’ve started, demoralized, because fundraising seems too hard.
As a result, we’re trying an experiment to help folks get in front of donors and vice versa. In brief:
Why apply to just one funder when you can apply to dozens?
If you've already applied for EA funding, simply paste your... (read 486 more words →)
5 years ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote an important but little-known blog post that deserves more visibility, so I'm posting it here. This way, it'll also cross-post to The Nonlinear Library, where it'll be available in podcast form.
Inspired by Vitalik, I just set up an X-risk + Crypto Discord - let's cross-pollinate together!
Also inspired by Vitalik, I'm putting out a $100 bounty for any post on the EA Forum/Alignment Forum/LW that cross-applies ideas from crypto/web3 to x-risk that gets at least 25 upvotes, subject to my discretion. Alternatively, you can email me at emersonspartz@nonlinear.org and if your ideas are interesting enough I'll still pay out the bounty.
Semi-unrelated, but if you're interested... (read 1349 more words →)
@Ben Pace Can you please add at the top of the post "Nonlinear disputes at least 85 of the claims in this post and intends to publish a detailed point-by-point response.
They also published this short update giving an example of the kind of evidence they plan to demonstrate."
We keep hearing from people who don't know this. Our comments get buried, so they think your summary at the bottom contains the entirety of our response, though it is just the tip of the iceberg. As a result, they think your post marks the end of the story, and not the opening chapter.