Skyler Crossman

Especially since the collapse of FTX, I am quite interested in further diversifying the set of communities that are working on things I think are important to the future. AstralCodexTen and SlateStarCodex meetups seem among the best candidates for creating additional thriving communities with overlapping, but still substantially different norms.

I do feel currently quite confused about what a good relationship between adjacent communities like this and Effective Altruism-labeled funders like the Long Term Future Fund should be. Many of these meetups do not aim to do as much as good as possible, or have much of an ambitious aim to affect the long term future of humanity, and I think pressures in that direction would likely be more harmful than helpful, by introducing various incentives for deception and potentially preventing healthy local communities from forming by creating a misaligned relationship between the organizers (who are paid by EA institutions to produce as much talent for longtermist priorities) and the members (who are interested in learning cool things about rationality and the world and want to meet other people with similar interests).

Since this is a relatively small grant, I didn’t really resolve this confusion, and mostly decided to just go ahead with this. I also talked a bunch to Skyler about this, and currently think we can figure out a good relationship into the future on how it’s best to distribute funding like this, and I expect to think more about this in the coming weeks.