A report about LessWrong karma volatility from a different universe
In a far away universe, a news report is written about LessWrong. The following passages have been lifted over and written into this post...
Early one morning all voting on LessWrong was halted
It was said that there was nothing to worry about
But then GreaterWrong announced their intent to acquire and then un-acquire LessWrong
All LessWrong users lost all of their karma, but a poorly labeled ‘fiat@’ account on the EA Forum was discovered with no posts and a similarly large amount of karma
Habryka states that LessWrong and the EA Forum “work at arms length”
Later, Zvi Mowshowitz publishes a leaked internal accounting sheet from the LessWrong team
It includes entries for “weirdness points” “utils” “Kaj_Sotala” “countersignals” and “Anthropic”. We recommend all readers open up the sheet to read in full.
Later, LessWrong filed for internet-points-bankruptcy and Holden Karnofsky was put in charge.
Karnofsky reportedly said:
I have over 15 years of nonprofit governance experience. I have been the Chief Executive Officer of GiveWell, the Chief Executive Officer of Open Philanthropy, and as of recently an intern at an AI safety organization. Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of nonprofit board controls and such a complete absence of basic decision theoretical cooperation as occurred here. From compromised epistemic integrity and faulty community oversight, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of biased, low-decoupling, and potentially akratic rationalists, this situation is unprecedented.
Sadly the authors did not have time to conclude the reporting, though they list other things that happened in a comment below.
Other things that happened that we did not have the time to report on:
Kelsey Piper publishes some LessWrong PMs with Oliver Habryka where he reveals himself to have secretly been a negative utilitarian this entire time.
The authorship of all posts and comments in the last 90 days are given to Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Scott Alexander opens up about being the personal psychiatrist of all the rationalists involved and writes an op-ed in the NYT about giving them all amphetamines.
My thanks to Chana Messinger for coming up with the whole idea of reporting on this with me, and to Ricki Heicklen and Avital Morris for help fleshing it out.
Also, Oliver Habryka was accused of spending ill-gotten karma on a lavish lifestyle. In response, Habryka says he was not spending other people’s internet points on his extravagant lifestyle and in fact he sleeps on a coffee table in the office because he’s always working, and shared a picture to prove it.
Looks like Connor LeahyI keep thinking “negative utilitarian” means “suffering-maximizer” 🤔🤔🤔
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year. Will this post make the top fifty?
OK yeah this one wins today.
Thanks. I wish I’d had the time to flesh it out into a full-site event, but I got more crunched than usual this week (and we also had the debate/dialogue feature launching which is cool).