Ending Open Philanthropy Project

Effective immediately, my wife and I will no longer plan funding for EA or EAs. There’s enough money with OpenPhil to wind down operations gracefully, paying out all current grants, all grants under consideration that we normally would have made, and any new grants that come in within the next three months that we normally would have said yes to (existing charities receiving Open Philanthropy money are particularly encouraged to apply), and providing six months for everyone currently at the non-profit before we shut down.

I want to emphasize that this is not because of anything that Alexander Berger or the rest of the wonderful team at OpenPhil have done. They’re great, and I think that they’ve tried as hard as anyone could to do the best possible work with our money.

It’s the rest of you. I present three primary motivations. They're all somewhat interrelated, but hopefully by presenting three arguments in succession you will update on each of them sequentially. Certainly I've lost all hope in y'all retaining any of the virtues of the rationalist community, rather than just their vices. I hope that this helps you as a community clean up your act while you try to convince someone else to fund this mess. Maybe Bernauld Arnault. That was a joke. Haha, fat chance.

1. In the words of philosopher Liam Kofi Bright, “Why can’t you just be normal?”

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DaRvpDHHdaoad9Tfu/critiques-of-prominent-ai-safety-labs-redwood-research

Two of Redwood's leadership team have or have had relationships to an [Open Philanthropy] grant maker. A Redwood board member is married to a different OP grantmaker. A co-CEO of OP is one of the other three board members of Redwood. Additionally, many OP staff work out of Constellation, the office that Redwood runs. OP pays Redwood for use of the space.

Just be normal. Stop having a social community where people live and work and study and sing together, and do social atomization like everybody else. This won’t cause any problems. Everyone else is doing it. There is another way! You don't, actually, need to have more partners than the average American adult has friends.^[1]

Also, just don’t have sex. That’s not that much to ask for, is it? I’ve been married for a decade now: I can tell you, it’s perfectly possible.

2. I’m tired of all the criticism. I’m tired of it hitting Asana, which I still love and care about. Moving my donations to instead buying superyachts, artwork, and expanding on an actually fun hobby (giant bonsai) is going to substantially reduce how often my family, friends, and employees sees me getting attacked in one news outlet or another.

3. Pick a cause and stick with it. Have the courage of your convictions. I don't need to spend my time hearing about sea-rats and prisoners and suffering matrices and matrices that are suffering and discount rates and so many different ways human bodies can go wrong in other countries and immigration and housing for techies and so many more. Y'all were supposed to be optimizers, so this donating splitting between different cause areas should end. Like I said, most of my wealth is going into the new super-yacht my wife and I will be commissioning. Maybe then you could stop arguing quite so much. Get it all out of your systems, figure out what the best charity is, and stick with it.

[Addendum: multiple people have mistaken this for having been written by Dustin Moskovitz, for which I apologize. It was written by Keller Scholl, with no input from Dustin.]
 

1. ^{^}

   Average American adult has three or fewer friends.