Sorry if I wrote unclearly. For most of the time (even in the last 6 months) I thought it was worth continuing to support the ecosystem, and certainly to support the people in the office, even if I was planning later to move on. I wanted to move on primarily because of the opportunity cost — I thought we could do something greater. But I believe Habryka wanted to separate from the whole ecosystem and question whether the resources we were providing were actually improving the world at all, and at that point it’s not simply a question of opportunity cost but of whether you’re helping or hurting. If you’re worried that you’re not even helping but just making the problem worse, then it’s a much stronger reason to stop.
You seem to think it wasn’t worth it because of opportunity costs alone? I have been used to the world for a while now where there are two multi-billion dollar funders who are interested in funding x-risk work who don’t have enough things to spend their money on, so I didn’t feel like this was really competing with much else. Just because Lightcone was spending that money didn’t mean another project didn’t get money, none of the major funders were (or are) spending close to their maximum burn rate.
Sorry if I wrote unclearly. For most of the time (even in the last 6 months) I thought it was worth continuing to support the ecosystem, and certainly to support the people in the office, even if I was planning later to move on. I wanted to move on primarily because of the opportunity cost — I thought we could do something greater. But I believe Habryka wanted to separate from the whole ecosystem and question whether the resources we were providing were actually improving the world at all, and at that point it’s not simply a question of opportunity cost but of whether you’re helping or hurting. If you’re worried that you’re not even helping but just making the problem worse, then it’s a much stronger reason to stop.
You seem to think it wasn’t worth it because of opportunity costs alone? I have been used to the world for a while now where there are two multi-billion dollar funders who are interested in funding x-risk work who don’t have enough things to spend their money on, so I didn’t feel like this was really competing with much else. Just because Lightcone was spending that money didn’t mean another project didn’t get money, none of the major funders were (or are) spending close to their maximum burn rate.