I can’t click your link, but I disagree. MIRI got most of its money from Vitalik, who I think was into crypto first and then found rationality/LW. We don’t get any credit for that.
Also, MIRI got a 500,000 dollar (why can’t I make the dollar sign on this site?) worth of Ripple donation in 2014. If they had kept it as Ripple, it would be worth 50 million now. Instead they sold it for 500,000 dollars (I’m not blaming them, this made sense at the time).
So although MIRI and CFAR lucked out into getting some money from crypto, I don’t think it was primarily because of their (or our) great decisions. And if people had made great decisions they could have gotten much more.
Taking my place in history—one of my first tasks as an intern at MIRI was to write some ruby scripts that dealt with some aspects of that donation.
Not only did that experience land me my first programming job, but just realizing now that it was also the impetus that led me to grab more bitcoin (I had sold mine at the first peak in 2013) AND look into Stellar. Probably the most lucrative internship ever.
(Shoutout to Malo/Alex if you guys are still lurking LW)
While not technically part of the winter fundraiser, don’t forget that MIRI also got a million dollar ETH donation in the spring. For the year, it’s more than half crypto, even after accounting for the 1.25M from Open Phil.
Maybe this is nitpicking, but per their post MIRI got a plurality of cryptocurrency from Vitalik but not a majority. If the website is accurate, then out of 66% of the funds raised ($1.656m) Vitalik contributed $763k, the other $893k of cryptocurrency being from other donors.
Are the numbers MIRI cites for crypto donation amounts in USD based on how much they worth at the time of the donation? Or how much that donation is worth in USD based on price right now?
You can’t write a dollar sign because it’s interpreted as “start writing mathematics”. But if you type a backslash first it gets escaped and you get the dollar sign you hoped for: $.
I think it says something good about our community that whoever implemented this feature assumed people would be more likely to want to write mathematics than to discuss amounts of money.
However, I did consider whether to change the behavior of pressing ‘$’ and decided that people would probably use LaTeX more often than trying to use the dollar sign, and so was reasonably happy with that default behavior.
FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you’re writing a post about money, it’s super inconvinient.
I actually had in mind the original author of the plugin, when I said whoever it was just didn’t consider it; but it’s interesting that you did think about it in this way!
It might be cool to survey current users of the site, to see what in fact are the relative prevalences of these two use cases. (Also there are lots of other similar questions I’d love to have the answers to.)
(Re-writing this comment from the original to make my point a little more clear).
I think it is probably quite difficult to map the decisions of someone on a continuum from really bad to really good if you can’t simulate the outcomes of many different possible actions. There’s reason to suspect that the “optimal” outcome in any situation looks vastly better than even very good but slightly sub-optimal decisions, and vise-versa for the least optimal outcome.
In this case we observed a few people who took massive risks (by devoting their time and energy into understanding or developing a particular technology which very well may have turned out to be a boondoggle) receive massive rewards from the success of it, although it could have very well turned out differently, based on what everyone knew at the time. I think the arguments for cryptocurrency becoming sucessful that existed in the past were very compelling but they weren’t exactly airtight logical proofs (and still aren’t even now). Not winning hugely because a legitimately large risk wasn’t taken isn’t exactly “losing” (and while buying bitcoins when they were cheap wasn’t a large risk, investing time and energy into becoming knowledgable enough about crypto to know it was worth taking the chance may have been. A lot of the biggest winners were people who were close to the development of cryptocurrencies).
But even so, a few of these winners are close to the LW community and have invested in its development or some of its projects. Doesn’t that count for something? Can they be considered part of the community too? I see no reason to keep the definition so strict.
I can’t click your link, but I disagree. MIRI got most of its money from Vitalik, who I think was into crypto first and then found rationality/LW. We don’t get any credit for that.
Also, MIRI got a 500,000 dollar (why can’t I make the dollar sign on this site?) worth of Ripple donation in 2014. If they had kept it as Ripple, it would be worth 50 million now. Instead they sold it for 500,000 dollars (I’m not blaming them, this made sense at the time).
So although MIRI and CFAR lucked out into getting some money from crypto, I don’t think it was primarily because of their (or our) great decisions. And if people had made great decisions they could have gotten much more.
Taking my place in history—one of my first tasks as an intern at MIRI was to write some ruby scripts that dealt with some aspects of that donation.
Not only did that experience land me my first programming job, but just realizing now that it was also the impetus that led me to grab more bitcoin (I had sold mine at the first peak in 2013) AND look into Stellar. Probably the most lucrative internship ever.
(Shoutout to Malo/Alex if you guys are still lurking LW)
While not technically part of the winter fundraiser, don’t forget that MIRI also got a million dollar ETH donation in the spring. For the year, it’s more than half crypto, even after accounting for the 1.25M from Open Phil.
Maybe this is nitpicking, but per their post MIRI got a plurality of cryptocurrency from Vitalik but not a majority. If the website is accurate, then out of 66% of the funds raised ($1.656m) Vitalik contributed $763k, the other $893k of cryptocurrency being from other donors.
Are the numbers MIRI cites for crypto donation amounts in USD based on how much they worth at the time of the donation? Or how much that donation is worth in USD based on price right now?
Based on price at the time of donation. My understanding is that they usually sell right away.
You can’t write a dollar sign because it’s interpreted as “start writing mathematics”. But if you type a backslash first it gets escaped and you get the dollar sign you hoped for: $.
I think it says something good about our community that whoever implemented this feature assumed people would be more likely to want to write mathematics than to discuss amounts of money.
That is a nice thought, but it seems more likely that they just didn’t think of it…
(also, I don’t think that particular bit was custom-written for LW, though the dev team can correct me on that if I’m mistaken)
Nope, not custom-written. We are using this plugin: https://github.com/efloti/draft-js-mathjax-plugin
However, I did consider whether to change the behavior of pressing ‘$’ and decided that people would probably use LaTeX more often than trying to use the dollar sign, and so was reasonably happy with that default behavior.
FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you’re writing a post about money, it’s super inconvinient.
Interesting!
I actually had in mind the original author of the plugin, when I said whoever it was just didn’t consider it; but it’s interesting that you did think about it in this way!
It might be cool to survey current users of the site, to see what in fact are the relative prevalences of these two use cases. (Also there are lots of other similar questions I’d love to have the answers to.)
Err… this seems like the kind of thing that *really* wouldn’t stand up to user testing.
(Re-writing this comment from the original to make my point a little more clear).
I think it is probably quite difficult to map the decisions of someone on a continuum from really bad to really good if you can’t simulate the outcomes of many different possible actions. There’s reason to suspect that the “optimal” outcome in any situation looks vastly better than even very good but slightly sub-optimal decisions, and vise-versa for the least optimal outcome.
In this case we observed a few people who took massive risks (by devoting their time and energy into understanding or developing a particular technology which very well may have turned out to be a boondoggle) receive massive rewards from the success of it, although it could have very well turned out differently, based on what everyone knew at the time. I think the arguments for cryptocurrency becoming sucessful that existed in the past were very compelling but they weren’t exactly airtight logical proofs (and still aren’t even now). Not winning hugely because a legitimately large risk wasn’t taken isn’t exactly “losing” (and while buying bitcoins when they were cheap wasn’t a large risk, investing time and energy into becoming knowledgable enough about crypto to know it was worth taking the chance may have been. A lot of the biggest winners were people who were close to the development of cryptocurrencies).
But even so, a few of these winners are close to the LW community and have invested in its development or some of its projects. Doesn’t that count for something? Can they be considered part of the community too? I see no reason to keep the definition so strict.