Ezra Klein appears to be an SSC/ACX reader from way back, and posted one of Scott’s pieces about race and policing in Vox more than 10 years ago (or maybe he was still at the Post?).
Dylan Whosit who is still at Vox has been a Scott superfan for forever (interviewed him around the time the Metalculus gathering - hosted at Lightcone campus, of course- was profiled in the NYT), Kelsey Piper got hired at Vox as a 23-24 year old on the basis of her rationalist Tumblr blogging, Vox even hired Scott to write an article once. Another major LWer/fanfic partner of Eliezer’s also got hired at Vox for a few years, Miranda Dixon-Luidenberg.
Klein is quite open about being an EA, asked Julia Wise to cover his podcast when he went out on paternity leave a few years ago, interviewed Kelsey and a number of SAC/ACX faves on his NYT podcast, and spent his first few years sanewashing AI safety issues in between his deeply uncritical conversations with conservatives and analyses of policy. I’m pretty sure he knows a lot of the rationalist bigwigs socially.
Open Philanthropy has kept the lights on at MIRI and CFAR since the beginning (also now Lightcone), as well as funding lots of offshoot “AI safety” entities like Redwood Research, the MIRI/CFAR summer AI camps at Berkeley and in Europe (that one itself almost certainly split off in response to the behaving-inappropriately-with-teenagers issue), academic AI groups founded or led by MIRI alums (Berkeley Existential Risk, others), I could go on. Ajeya Cotra (not sure if she’s still there) was active on LW for a while, maybe founded a magazine with Kelsey Piper? She I think was a program manager at Open Phil and oversaw a lot of the AI-safety funding work.
RationalWiki says that Kelsey Piper helped Cotra launch her Substack blog https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kelsey_Piper There are not many Indian-American rationalists, Dwarkesh Patel and his GF come to mind and Venkatesh Rao is adjacent.
Either Collison or his brother or both have been funding an abundance-y think tank in Ireland which has been the subject of some public controversy (complaints about “red tape”, etc.) Their genius proposal for increasing housing supply and density was to let homeowners build sheds in their back gardens and rent them out to people, a proposal our unscrupulous right-wing coalition government took on despite, you know, all the drawbacks of creating a new source of poor quality housing with insecure tenancy. I don’t have it in me to go looking up facts about those two gobdaws at this hour but there has been reporting by the Dublin Inquirer on the think tank.
Which of these names are of interest to us?
Tallinn, Bezos, Musk, and Thiel are missing.
Ezra Klein appears to be an SSC/ACX reader from way back, and posted one of Scott’s pieces about race and policing in Vox more than 10 years ago (or maybe he was still at the Post?).
Dylan Whosit who is still at Vox has been a Scott superfan for forever (interviewed him around the time the Metalculus gathering - hosted at Lightcone campus, of course- was profiled in the NYT), Kelsey Piper got hired at Vox as a 23-24 year old on the basis of her rationalist Tumblr blogging, Vox even hired Scott to write an article once. Another major LWer/fanfic partner of Eliezer’s also got hired at Vox for a few years, Miranda Dixon-Luidenberg.
Klein is quite open about being an EA, asked Julia Wise to cover his podcast when he went out on paternity leave a few years ago, interviewed Kelsey and a number of SAC/ACX faves on his NYT podcast, and spent his first few years sanewashing AI safety issues in between his deeply uncritical conversations with conservatives and analyses of policy. I’m pretty sure he knows a lot of the rationalist bigwigs socially.
Open Philanthropy has kept the lights on at MIRI and CFAR since the beginning (also now Lightcone), as well as funding lots of offshoot “AI safety” entities like Redwood Research, the MIRI/CFAR summer AI camps at Berkeley and in Europe (that one itself almost certainly split off in response to the behaving-inappropriately-with-teenagers issue), academic AI groups founded or led by MIRI alums (Berkeley Existential Risk, others), I could go on. Ajeya Cotra (not sure if she’s still there) was active on LW for a while, maybe founded a magazine with Kelsey Piper? She I think was a program manager at Open Phil and oversaw a lot of the AI-safety funding work.
RationalWiki says that Kelsey Piper helped Cotra launch her Substack blog https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kelsey_Piper There are not many Indian-American rationalists, Dwarkesh Patel and his GF come to mind and Venkatesh Rao is adjacent.
some LWer suggested Moskovitz for president a while back
Either Collison or his brother or both have been funding an abundance-y think tank in Ireland which has been the subject of some public controversy (complaints about “red tape”, etc.) Their genius proposal for increasing housing supply and density was to let homeowners build sheds in their back gardens and rent them out to people, a proposal our unscrupulous right-wing coalition government took on despite, you know, all the drawbacks of creating a new source of poor quality housing with insecure tenancy. I don’t have it in me to go looking up facts about those two gobdaws at this hour but there has been reporting by the Dublin Inquirer on the think tank.
Edit:
With think tank Progress Ireland the yimby movement here is powering up
(I can’t go in and pick out quotes cause I’m over my free article limit but trust me there is some stuff in there to make your monocle pop out)
“Government plans to allow homeowners to let modular ‘garden homes’ on the private rental market have been described as “scraping the bottom of the barrel” in terms of finding a solution to the housing crisis.”
Moskovitz is the biggest name in Abundance