The fact that some people in EA (a huge broad community) are probably wrong about some things didn’t seem to be an argument that Lightcone Offices would be ineffective as (AFAIK) you could filter people at your discretion.
I mean, no, we were specifically trying to support theEA community, we do not get to unilaterally decide who is part of the community. People I don’t personally have much respect for but are members of the EA community who are putting in the work to be considered members in good standing definitely get to pass through. I’m not going as far as to say this was the only thing going on, I made choices about which parts of the movement seemed like they were producing good work and acting ethically and which parts seemed pretty horrendous and to be avoided, but I would (for instance) regularly make an attempt to welcome people from an area that seemed to have poor connections in the social graph (e.g. the first EA from country X, from org Y, from area-of-work Z etc), even if I wasn’t excited about that person or place or area, because it was part of the EA community and it seems very valuable for the community as a whole to have better interconnectedness between the disparate parts. Overall I think the question I asked was closer to “what would a good custodian of the EA community want to use these resources for” rather than “what would Ben or Lightcone want to use these resources for”.
As to your confusion about the office, an analogy that might help here is to consider the marketing or recruitment part of a large company, or perhaps a branch of the company that makes a different product from the rest — yes, our part of the organization functioned nicely, and I liked the choices we made, but if some other part of the company is screwing over its customers/staff, or the CEO is stealing money, or the company’s product seems unethical to me, it doesn’t matter if I like my part of the company, I am contributing to the company’s life and output and should act accordingly. I did not work at FTX, I have not worked for OpenAI, but I am heavily supporting an ecosystem that supported these companies, and I anticipate that the resources I contribute will continue to get captured by these sorts of players via some circuitous route.
I mean, no, we were specifically trying to support the EA community, we do not get to unilaterally decide who is part of the community. People I don’t personally have much respect for but are members of the EA community who are putting in the work to be considered members in good standing definitely get to pass through. I’m not going as far as to say this was the only thing going on, I made choices about which parts of the movement seemed like they were producing good work and acting ethically and which parts seemed pretty horrendous and to be avoided, but I would (for instance) regularly make an attempt to welcome people from an area that seemed to have poor connections in the social graph (e.g. the first EA from country X, from org Y, from area-of-work Z etc), even if I wasn’t excited about that person or place or area, because it was part of the EA community and it seems very valuable for the community as a whole to have better interconnectedness between the disparate parts. Overall I think the question I asked was closer to “what would a good custodian of the EA community want to use these resources for” rather than “what would Ben or Lightcone want to use these resources for”.
As to your confusion about the office, an analogy that might help here is to consider the marketing or recruitment part of a large company, or perhaps a branch of the company that makes a different product from the rest — yes, our part of the organization functioned nicely, and I liked the choices we made, but if some other part of the company is screwing over its customers/staff, or the CEO is stealing money, or the company’s product seems unethical to me, it doesn’t matter if I like my part of the company, I am contributing to the company’s life and output and should act accordingly. I did not work at FTX, I have not worked for OpenAI, but I am heavily supporting an ecosystem that supported these companies, and I anticipate that the resources I contribute will continue to get captured by these sorts of players via some circuitous route.