Glad to see the superrich don’t object to paying large sums to build society. So we can just start wealth taxing them instead, that’ll be fine right? That way they don’t have to spend their valuable time cherrypicking initiatives and charities.
It is just a case of efficiency, they are good at making money, not spending it, so we should tax them.
If they were so good at investing money in the public good then how come they still have so much money and so much time to bitch about unhoused people?
“It’s the only way to be sure,” as Ellen Ripley said.
From the billionaire’s perspective, confiscatory taxation should be preferable to guillotines.
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
I wish they would come out and say democracy was a mistake instead of using 100 words to say the same thing.
Rationalists are incapable of being concise and clear
i very much enjoy that that quote is literally the first thing that you find when you search “zack rosen politics” to differentiate from the basketball guy, and also ain’t it a thing how goddamn these conceited assholes always sound so fucking lame / identical to one another / literally never change
“Slot machine” is a good comparison for chatbot text extruders, but as an insult against ActBlue it misfires horribly.
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The goal now is “operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives public outcomes at scale.”
I’m pretty sure I read this exact justification in a document from management explaining why they were simultaneously laying off 20% of total headcount and doing a massive stock buyback.
Can’t stop laughing at “drives public outcomes AT SCALE”, when you can’t decide if you’re a political org or a software consultancy.
Operationalizing into a synergistic workflow-driven organization with the energy of a startup that drives impactful public platforms at web scale for the AI revolution
Which of these names are of interest to us?
- Dustin Moskovitz and Coefficient Giving / Open Philanthropy
- Mark Zuckerberg (less enthusiastic about EA)
- Chris Larsen of Ripple cryptocurrency
- Patrick Collinson (less enthusiastic about EA)
- Emmet Shear formerly of Twitter and OpenAI (sides with the cultists against the grifters)
- Ezra Klein the Vox and NYT pundit
Tallinn, Bezos, Musk, and Thiel are missing.
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)
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.
Ajeya Cotra
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.
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.
Moskovitz is the biggest name in Abundance
Eh, still better than NIMBYs.
One day I am gonna write my essay “NIMBYism does not exist” outlining the way that self-professed YIMBYs have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics
ah, i see the other person already made the some point
I am a simple man. I just want more trains, more public transit and more housing next to said public transit.
And for better and worse YIMBYs are one of the few people I’ve seen to take that seriously.
The essay will include a short section at the beginning acknowledging that lots of self-identified YIMBYs are good people with some sensible ideas about getting hold of the right things, followed by a long explanation of why the essay will not allow this fact to be used to once again derail its point, already stated in the title (“NIMBYism does not exist”), that they have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics
If anything I would expect the nonexistence of NIMBYs to be a good sign for the good-faith YIMBYs because it suggests that the opposition to their preferred policies are both more reasonable and less unified than the existence of a coherent NIMBY ideology would suggest. Of course if your YIMBYism is just a subset of technocratic authoritarianism then the fact that NIMBYs aren’t an actual thing is both convenient but hard to acknowledge. Crushing a mirage under your boot in the name of Progress and Civilization is easier than crushing actual people, but if that reality becomes too obvious you start looking like Star Wars kid.
Don’t tell him that in Canada the maximum legal donation is $1,750 per year per federal party and $1,750 per year to candidates for each federal party. Alberta once banned corporate and union donations in provincial politics entirely. Its almost like the problem is not small money but yet another smartphone app (or SMS service) designed like a slot machine?
Two shit tastes that taste shit together
