I have found a particularly rich vein of material. It’s long, so I’m going to break it up into two parts.
The Nonlinear Fund intends to serve as a kind of meta-EA organization. They believe that the bottleneck in EA progress is the limited number of people working in EA, and their stated goal is
to 10x the number of talented people working on x-risk by launching dozens of high impact charities. Rather than working on specific EA-related causes themselves, they instead aim to disburse EA funding to new “charity entrepreneurs” and provide guidance on how best to use it.
Wealthy benefactors appear to have given them at least 00,000 to pursue these ends.
The defining principle of Effective Altruism is that charitable work should be judged by its measurable impact on the world. In that respect, the most substantive observable impact of the Nonlinear Fund appears to be that it has enabled its founders, Emerson Spartz and Kat Woods, to hire personal assistants and interns to manage their lives for them while they go on vacation forever.
Emerson Spartz is the most prominent of the two. The New Yorker did a profile on him that I definitely recommend reading. As is tradition in Rationalism, his career started with running a Harry Potter fan fiction website. Before pivoting to EA he founded and ran an internet content mill; this Glassdoor review written near the end of his tenure there describes Spartz’s company as follows:
No direction. No vision. No management. No product. […] The culture is toxic with a lot of cliques, internal conflict, and finger pointing.
Kat Woods founded some previous EA orgs and writes somewhat prolifically on the effective altruism forum and on her website. For your pleasure I present a (only somewhat curated) sampling of posts from her blog, in which she:
You might assume that I am mischaracterizing her blog posts for humorous effect. I am not.
The most enduring employee is Emerson Spartz’s younger brother, Drew. He carries the title of “Head of Incubation Program”.
There has been frequent turnover in the other positions. I will give you a sampling of their historical job listings.
Title: Writing intern Pay: none (link)
The founders need a personal scribe. If this works out well then they might consider paying the scribe later on, and encouraging their friends to get scribes too. Among the listed benefits is writing mentorship from Emerson Spartz, who is the NYTimes best-selling author of MuggleNet.com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7.
Title: Research analyst intern Pay: none (link)
Extremely generic, bog standard EA stuff. Note the compensation and the demand for machine learning expertise. A more typical going rate in the USA for that kind of expertise is about 20k/year equivalent, even for an internship.
Why would someone with such qualifications take this internship? To quote one person who had this very job title (proof),
I think it’s unlikely that [it was] good for my career or impact in ways other than gaining EA credibility. I think one non-trivial reason EA credibility was important to me was that I wanted to keep being admitted to things like EAG (maybe more than I admitted to myself in my explicit reasoning at the time).
And what did this rather well-educated person actually do in this internship? Well, for one thing, they were the point of contact for people to apply for the “Writing internship” described above.
Title: Medical mysteries investigator Pay: 0-0/hr (link)
Kat regularly gets cold-like symptoms, and Emerson has achy joints. These problems have defied explanation by conventional medical science and are interfering with the important work of EA; a creative investigator is needed to sort this out. Medical expertise is not required.
Later versions of this job ad omit explicit references to the founders’ medical problems.
Title: Operations manager/executive assistant Pay 0k-00k (link)
Do all of the founders’ chores for them while going on vacation forever with them.
You might have thought that I was exaggerating about the “vacation forever” thing earlier, but it’s prominently featured as a perk of this job. Kat also discusses vacationing forever on her blog, but strangely “have personal assistants manage your life for you” is not included among her advice for how to do it successfully.
COMING UP IN PART 2: personal assistants for everyone, extremely rational grantmaking heuristics, and the mysteries of IRS Form 990.
This sounds very inefficient. Perhaps each new intern should be in charge of hiring another two interns – that’s how you get exponential growth.
Problem: AI safety is held back by two bottlenecks:
Solution: There is no solution. We’ve decided to become part of the problem instead.
Of course the 100xers are themselves
Ah yes, all funding should go towards deciding how to spend the funding, and so on in an infinitely recursive series of organizations until something something AI takes over and figures it all out.
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Who are these wealthy benefactors? The usual sort? Moskovitz?
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Here’s your whole thesis: Don’t be a digital nomad and if you are a digital nomad don’t hire an assistant even if it would make your super productive life more productive and intern/mentor someone.
The reason you are so missing reality is that you don’t actually know how productive these people have been. Kat has started four major charities in ten years, that’s massively huge, she’s a legend in EA.
Tim Ferris popularized the 4 hour work week + digital nomad path back when the internet finally made it doable. He’s a national hero, no one criticizes how cool it is to work less while traveling…as long as you do it for your own self profit. But here are people doing it for the benefit of others - altruism. What you call “vacation forever” is just being a digital nomad which people salivate over the possibility of doing. So this hit piece for no reason is just brazenly mean - so what if someone is an altruist and a digital nomad? So what if they have enough of a track record to get a personal assistant to ramp up their effectiveness? If they were in for profit work no one would blink.
There’s another thing I doubt you could know unless you were more connected to EA communities. it’s well know young EA people get so hyped up on trying to give as much of their income and career to altruism that they can get pulled into a guilt situation…should I have an ice cream cone or will that be one less child saved?…it’s a problem that comes from living a good life but also being too young to have a balance…it’s an issue in EA…Kat is providing leadership by example to teach younger EA’s that you can enjoy life and still live a life of impact in making the world better. EA needs this kind of example and I deeply applaud how she lives and inspires others. I hope you’ll think all this through and consider retracting this piece.