The Nonlinear Fund is an EA organization that whose stated goal is to incubate other EA organizations, but whose most significant observable effects on the world seem to consist of enabling its founders, Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz, to go on vacation forever while having their lives and jobs managed for them by personal assistants.
Part 1 gave a basic overview of the organization. In this part we’re going talk more about what the actual outputs of their work have been, how they received funding, and where they’re at now.
Nonlinear lists their projects on their webpage (“A few projects we’ve incubated so far”). Most of them are not worth mentioning, but one stands out as being distinctly charity-like: Superlinear.
The Superlinear project offers awards to people who do good works. The total amount of money awarded so far is ,265. None of the awards have been greater than 00, and almost all of them are for various forms of blogging.
One still-outstanding award that I’d like to draw your attention to is “The ALTER AI Alignment Prize”, which will pay out 0,000. To win this prize you must write a fancy mathematical proof related to AI and then post it to LessWrong. Given the degree of rigour that Rationalists usually bring to proofs, this might be low-hanging fruit. You could probably bang it out in an afternoon. Due date is October 2023.
In case you had any doubts, hiring personal assistants for themselves is not a misallocation of Nonlinear’s funds by its founders. In fact, it has always been one of their explicitly-stated goals. The theory seems to be that an EA’s potential for greatness is encumbered by the drudgery of managing their own lives, and so the most impactful way to avert the apocalypse would be to free EAs from having to perform any kind of domestic or business labor.
Not only do Nonlinear’s founders hire personal assistants for themselves, they want to create a system to hire personal assistants for other EA’s too! Naturally they decided to hire someone else to do this for them; doing it themselves would have been hypocritical, really.
The largest chunk of publicly-acknowledged funding that Nonlinear has received comes from Jaan Tallinn, who was involved in creating Skype.
How did Jaan Tallinn decide to give funding to Nonlinear? As is apparently typical for people who have too much money, he was “recommended” to make this donation by the “Survival and Flourishing Fund” (SFF), which he founded and is the largest funder of, and the money itself was then disbursed by a third organization, “Rethink Charity USA”.
And how did SFF come to recommend this donation for Nonlinear? By being extremely rational, of course. You see, SFF doesn’t just make grant recommendations arbitrarily like less serious nonprofits do. They use a proprietary system called the “S-Process”, which involves
allowing the Recommenders and funders to simulate a large number of counterfactual delegation scenarios using a table of marginal utility functions
Jaan Tallinn himself was apparently one of the three people who developed it. The process is facilitated by a dedicated phone app, and you can read about the experience of someone who actually participated in it in this LessWrong post. The author of that post notes that the end result of this process is that
[you] are funded based on who most is excited to fund you, not based on a consensus on what to fund
and also that
funders [i.e. Jaan Tallinn] decide which recommenders to give how much money to.
I assume that forming a consensus to make decisions is undesirable because it is time consuming, it requires significant interpersonal skills, and (most importantly) it does not directly contribute to the goal of fabricating external validation for Jaan Tallinn’s decisions about how to hand out his money.
In a previous era this inefficiency would have been eliminated by instead asking an oracle to examine the spilt entrails of an animal for signs of favor from the gods. In the 21st century we can instead use marginal utility functions and phone apps, which are significantly faster and do not require having goats on hand.
Nonlinear received 50,000 from SBF to support a project that automatically creates audio content from LessWrong posts, so that you can consume Rationalist content even when otherwise occupied. We probably shouldn’t count that money though, somebody probably wants it back now.
Nonlinear also received 5,000 from Dustin Moskovitz specifically to hire someone to hire personal assistants for themselves and other EAs. Lest you think that only Emerson and Kat have recognized the value of avoiding any kind of real labor, this is some evidence that the broader EA community shares their insights on that front.
Finally, Nonlinear’s Head of Incubation Program has claimed that there are some additional private donors, and particularly that founder Emerson Spartz himself donates “six figures annually” to Nonlinear. I have not yet found any evidence to support those claims, partly because Nonlinear apparently forgot to ever file taxes.
This, for me, is the cherry on top of the sundae.
For people who aren’t familiar with American nonprofits, IRS Form 990 is a document that all nonprofits file with the government each year. A nonprofit’s submitted Form 990 can be viewed by anyone on the IRS website; if you want to know basic facts about a nonprofits finances then this is the first thing you look up. This disclosure requirement is one of the tradeoffs for operating taxation-free.
So that’s obviously the first thing I looked up about Nonlinear. And, as it turns out, their 501(c)(3) nonprofit status was automatically revoked by the IRS because they never filed Form 990. Not even once. As a result they no longer appear on the IRS list of tax exempt organizations.
If you’d like to look this up for yourself then you’ll need the real name of their organization, which used to be stated on their job ads:
The Nonlinear Fund operates as a project of Spartz Philanthropies, a 501(c)(3) registered non-profit in the US.
This text stopped appearing on their job ads some time in 2022. Notably, however, it stopped appearing on their site long after their nonprofit status was revoked, which happened on August 9 2021 according to the IRS website. That revocation date is also long before they received any of the public funding described above. Did the SFF and OpenPhilanthropy think that donations to Nonlinear would be tax-free when they recommended them? Would it have mattered to them? I have no idea.
How could this happen? Maybe they just fucked up and forgot to do it? There are two reasons that would be surprising:
1. Filing Form 990 is super easy. It’s really not complicated. You can buy software to do it for you. You can hire an accountant to do it for you. If your organization is small and makes no money - which Spartz Philanthropies did until at least 2019 - then Form 990 is literally a postcard, it takes like 10 minutes to fill it out.
2. Emerson Spartz’s mother has been the president of a successful 501(c)(3) nonprofit for over 25 years. It’s her full-time job, and the nonprofit she works at appears to be transparent and well-run. The mind boggles at the thought that Emerson Spartz’s own mother is an expert at running nonprofits, and yet he didn’t know to do the most basic and essential task that is required for running a nonprofit.
Even so, there’s at least some evidence in favor of the theory that they simply forgot to ever file taxes. Consider the following facts:
If indeed they just forgot then maybe we shouldn’t judge them too harshly. As lofty 100x EA charity entrepreneurs, their minds were probably too distracted by pondering the fate of humanity for them to remember such pedestrian concerns as filing taxes. And/or they couldn’t focus properly because Kat had a cold and Emerson’s joints were achy.
Nonlinear’s Head of Incubation recently wrote an EA Forum post titled “What are examples of EA orgs pivoting after receiving funding?”. It seems that Nonlinear’s plans may not be panning out the way that they had hoped.
Unimpressive projects and tax issues aside, they’ve also contended with some scandalous drama. I haven’t said anything about it already because I have no idea how much of it is true, but it wouldn’t be surprising to me if their organization has experienced chronic dysfunction in some form or another.
Dysfunction that goes beyond just the general mission and structure of their organization, that is.
Regarding this,
I’d like to congratulate /u/garnet420, who presciently suggested that this should be their strategy.
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I just read the comments on the “some scandalous drama” EA post, and it fits the pattern of every other EA self-policing effort: a bunch of people citing personal friendships with these people as evidence the allegations are wrong, attacking the poster for spreading “gossip” etc. There are some pretty detailed posts in there providing evidence, and then loads of downvoting and brigading. The idea that you can maintain the integrity of any organization through comments on a public message-board (let alone one that has massively unequal voting clout) was always pretty dubious. But watching it fail in real-time is something you’d think the community might learn from.
I really have no problem with EA as far as its purpose is to deprive stupid billionaires of their wealth (although the IRS should really look closer at the tax aspects of this.) It is, however, really disturbing to me that this community might metastasize and try its hands at extracting funds from the general public. I think you are all doing a service here.
Taken from SFF’s website: “survivalandflourishing.fund (SFF) is a website for organizing the collection and evaluation of applications for donations to organizations concerned with the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life.”
Okay then . . .
Great find and posts OP
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I actually used to work with Jaan Tallinn’s sister. The tech community in northern Europe is relatively small, wondering how widespread Ideas like EA and Longtermism are here
What you fail to understand about SFF’s S-Process is that it an attempt to fix a problem; in many funding org’s if one person objects to a grant application they deny it…this ends up being non-optimal and less efficient…it’s like ancient political org’s that required 100% yes votes to go ahead, and so nothing got done…the S-Process reverses this and if one person is enthusiastic, they say yes…probably many applications are viewed as Ok but no one is really enthusiastic, so that’s a no. So it’s just a way to try something different. There is a lot of money given by small and large donors and we need continual innovation in how we disperse it into charitable work.