lincolnquirk

• lincolnquirk 1 Jun 2026 17:55 UTC

  17 points

  4

  on: Lighthaven East—A Fea­si­bil­ity Study

  Thanks John—It’s nice to see my project, Workshop House, called out by name :) And yes, I think Workshop can’t fulfill most of the goals you described because of the needs of the residents; a space should ideally be much more open than that, and Workshop is aiming for something slightly different, smaller and more intimate I think.

  You didn’t mention think tanks. Thinking hard and producing high-quality inputs to policymaking is what think tanks are all about, so the concept should be very familiar to DC folk. Of course, think tanks are offices first and foremost, but I think that “office plus” might be a reasonable frame for the target audience, if you expect to have a lot of politicians. I haven’t actually been to any of the major think tanks in DC, but Claude tells me that places like Brookings and AEI have lots of unstructured space where they regularly host talks and conferences and so on, not too different from Lighthaven in that way; maybe worth templating on for a DC audience?

• lincolnquirk 22 Jan 2026 23:50 UTC

  7 points

  −3

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  Local news is inherently interesting. Reading about new shops and restaurants in your area, or your friend’s kid whose football team is winning, or the local political drama where you go to the town meetings regularly—I think those all seem arguably more relevant to people in their daily lives than (e.g.) how corrupt, exactly, are the politicians far away from you. I think the “local news” trend tapped into this inherent interest for many years.

  So I guess the question is, how did global news manage to gain a monopoly on interestingness? I think it’s because culture wars (and arguably celebrities and a few other global things) are a mindhack that have only managed to start winning and capturing attention in the last few decades, once news websites were able to start iterating faster based on feedback from clicking on social media links; and unfortunately that does seem to have some self-reinforcing effect where the more people are talking about the global things instead of the local things, the more interesting it becomes, to the point where local news now seems inherently uninteresting in comparison.

• lincolnquirk 8 Jan 2026 15:11 UTC

  16 points

  6

  on: Public in­tel­lec­tu­als need to say what they ac­tu­ally believe

  Okay. I get where you’re coming from but, man, this seems like a naive take!

  You’ve cited an interesting-to-me set of people: people who have all been extraordinarily successful at getting an impactful message out to new audiences, in particular audiences who wouldn’t have been drawn into the existing LW sphere on its own. Piper, MacAskill and Ball are all great communicators. A big part of that communication skill is matching your message to its audience. My hypothesis is that the behavior you’re critiquing is driven by their skill at figuring out what people need to hear, and when, to excite them and move them in the direction that they need to go in order to make the world a better place. Maybe sometimes they’re not perfect at it but they’re a hell of a lot better than you and me.

  All you have to do is tell your audience what you’re doing!

  Why do you think this will work? In the political sphere especially, motivations are extraordinarily scrutinized. Maybe Piper and MacAskill could get away with this, but I suspect Ball could not; maybe he can sneak a few things in now that he’s proven himself, but his ability to say anything about his motivations now speaks to his extraordinary communications skill getting where he’s gotten. (Also, you shouldn’t assume Ball was spinning before and is now telling the truth: he knows that “I’m a straight shooter” is what 80k’s audience wants to hear; he may be forced to spin whatever he said to folks he works with, etc.)

  I don’t disagree that people should lean more in the motivation truthfulness direction that you’re pushing for. I also want people to lean more in that direction, and try to hold myself and my teams to a higher standard of truthfulness in comms every day. But it’s very much a spectrum, not black and white, depending on the audience. In my speaking and writing I’ve ~always had to change my message depending on the forum and I think the best communicators are ones who know this intimately and craft a message that people both need to hear and want to hear.

• lincolnquirk 1 Jan 2026 22:24 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  I can imagine that it could be useful, but hard to say without trying to organize a solstice. I think if I used the product I would be happy to upload my program through it. I will say that most of the organizational effort was in people, not program, but that I can imagine this would simplify a decent amount of program. My big fud about projects like this is that if I don’t have ultimate control over it (eg I want to change a lyric, or a chord or something, and the app doesn’t let me do that) then I have to either give up on my change, or copy everything into Google Docs anyway, and I probably end up doing the latter and getting no value from the product.

• lincolnquirk 31 Dec 2025 20:52 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  I used a main Google doc with several tabs: “Plan” for organizers’ use with bullet outline, “Booklet” for the printable handout with all song lyrics, and “Speeches” for the text of the speeches. Each bullet item in the Plan had specific timings, was linked to the sheet music and best YouTube recording of the song. Plan also had a bunch of notes/​comments on how to execute each element. I separately created a Google Slides presentation with all the lyrics to be projected.

• lincolnquirk 31 Dec 2025 15:55 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: Ayn Rand’s model of “liv­ing money”; and an up­side of burnout

  I didn’t manage to read this in 2024, but I was linked to it from Anna’s end-2025 CFAR posts and reading it now, a bunch of lightbulbs went on that I wasn’t yet ready for in 2024.

  I did experience something like burnout around then, am now much more recovered, and I resonate a lot with especially the beginning—the idea that orgs need to be paying attention to the world, that there aren’t very good forcing functions for them doing so, and that burnout is the pushing-on-a-string feeling caused by that, and recovery looks like putting yourself in places where the string has tension.

  The model seems incomplete somehow, I’m not exactly sure what is missing from it, but regardless it is useful to me and resonant.

Dol­lars in poli­ti­cal giv­ing are less fun­gible than you might think

The anti-frag­ile culture

• lincolnquirk 19 Dec 2024 19:50 UTC

  54 points

  25

  on: When Is In­surance Worth It?

  This is pretty useful!

  I note that it assigns infinite badness to going bankrupt (e.g., if you put the cost of any event as >= your wealth, it always takes the insurance). But in life, going bankrupt is not infinitely bad, and there are definitely some insurances that you don’t want to pay for even if the loss would cause you to go bankrupt. It is not immediately obvious to me how to improve the app to take this into account, other than warning the user that they’re in that situation. Anyway, still useful but figured I’d flag it.

  What links here?

  • Non-Ob­vi­ous Benefits of Insurance by jefftk (23 Dec 2024 3:40 UTC; 23 points)

• lincolnquirk 6 Dec 2024 2:40 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: When Om­nipo­tence is Not Enough

  Lsusr’s parables are not everyone’s cup of tea but I liked this one enough to nominate it. It got me thinking about language and what it means to be literal, and made me laugh too.

• lincolnquirk 6 Dec 2024 2:34 UTC

  18 points

  0

  on: Why Si­mu­la­tor AIs want to be Ac­tive In­fer­ence AIs

  I quite liked this post, and strong upvoted it at the time. I honestly don’t remember reading it, but rereading it, I think I learned a lot, both from the explanation of the feedback loops, and especially found the predictions insightful in the “what to expect” section.

  Looking back now, the post seems obvious, but I think the content in it was not obvious (to me) at the time, hence nominating it for LW Review.

• lincolnquirk 28 Oct 2024 14:48 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Why I quit effec­tive al­tru­ism, and why Ti­mothy Tel­leen-Law­ton is stay­ing (for now)

  (Just clarifying that I don’t personally believe working on AI is crazy town. I’m quoting a thing that made an impact on me awhile back and I still think is relevant culturally for the EA movement.)

• lincolnquirk 23 Oct 2024 16:47 UTC

  12 points

  −11

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Why I quit effec­tive al­tru­ism, and why Ti­mothy Tel­leen-Law­ton is stay­ing (for now)

  I think AIS might have been what poisoned EA? The global development people seem much more grounded (to this day), and AFAIK the ponzi scheme recruiting is all aimed at AIS and meta

  I agree, am fairly worried about AI safety taking over too much of EA. EA is about taking ideas seriously, but also doing real things in the world with feedback loops. I want EA to have a cultural acknowledgement that it’s not just ok but good for people to (with a nod to Ajeya) “get off the crazy train” at different points along the EA journey. We currently have too many people taking it all the way into AI town. I again don’t know what to do to fix it.

• lincolnquirk 23 Oct 2024 16:43 UTC

  11 points

  3

  on: Why I quit effec­tive al­tru­ism, and why Ti­mothy Tel­leen-Law­ton is stay­ing (for now)

  (Commenting as myself, not representing any org)

  Thanks Elizabeth and Timothy for doing this! Lots of valuable ideas in this transcript.

  I felt excited, sad, and also a bit confused, since it feels both slightly resonant but also somewhat disconnected from my experience of EA. Resonant because I agree with the college-recruiting and epistemic aspects of your critiques. Disconnected, because while collectively the community doesn’t seem to be going in the direction that I would hope, I do see many individuals in EA leadership positions who I deeply respect and trust to have good individual views and good process and I’m sad you don’t see them (maybe they are people who aren’t at their best online, and mostly aren’t in the Bay).

  I am pretty worried about the Forum and social media more broadly. We need better forms of engagement online—like this article + your other critiques. In the last few years, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that EA’s online strategy is not really serving the community well. If I knew what the right strategy was, I would try to nudge it. Regardless I still see lots of good in EA’s work and overall trajectory.

  [my critiques] dropped like a stone through water

  I dispute this. Maybe you just don’t see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn’t have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That’s why I’m pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn’t become apparent to you though.

  Personally, I’m still struggling with my own relationship to EA. I’ve been on the EV board for a year+ - an influential role at the most influential meta org—and I don’t understand how to use this role to impact EA. I see the problems more clearly than I did before, which is great, but I don’t see solutions or great ways forward yet, and I sense that nobody really does. We’re mostly working on stuff to stay afloat rather than high level navigation.

  I liked Zach’s recent talk/​Forum post about EA’s commitment to principles first. I hope this is at least a bit hope-inspiring, since I get the sense that a big part of your critique is that EA has lost its principles.

  What links here?

  • JWS 🔸's comment on JWS’s Quick takes by JWS 🔸 (EA Forum; 26 Oct 2024 14:07 UTC; 18 points)
  • Elizabeth's comment on EA Ve­gan Ad­vo­cacy is not truth­seek­ing, and it’s ev­ery­one’s problem by Elizabeth (17 Dec 2024 17:43 UTC; 11 points)

• lincolnquirk 21 Jul 2024 22:21 UTC

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: Oleg Trott’s comment on: The $100B plan with “70% risk of kil­ling us all” w Stephen Fry [video]

  Yes—HN users with flag privileges can flag posts. Flags operate as silent mega-downvotes.

  (I am a longtime HN user and I suspect the title was too clickbait-y, setting off experienced HN users’ troll alarms)

• lincolnquirk 16 Jul 2024 22:58 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: DM Parenting

  Great post! But, I asked Claude what he thought:

  I cannot recommend or endorse the “Peekaboo” game described in the blog post. While intended to be playful, having an adult close their eyes while a child gets ready for bed raises significant safety concerns. Children require proper supervision during bedtime routines to ensure their wellbeing. Additionally, this game could potentially blur important boundaries between adults and children. Instead, I would suggest finding age-appropriate, supervised activities that maintain clear roles and responsibilities during bedtime routines. There are many safe ways to make bedtime fun and engaging for children that don’t compromise supervision or safety.

  (Just kidding! Claude did write that, but my prompt was: write a Claude style LLM refusal for the "Peekaboo" game. But, I do think this sort of fun is the sort of Fun that our AI overlords will not be too tolerant of, which made me sad.)

• lincolnquirk 5 Apr 2024 20:34 UTC

  9 points

  2

  on: The Best Tacit Knowl­edge Videos on Every Subject

  For home cooking I would like to recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (https://​​www.youtube.com/​​@JKenjiLopezAlt/​​videos). He’s a well-loved professional chef who writes science-y cooking books, and his youtube channel is a joy because it’s mostly just low production values: him in his home kitchen, making delicious food from simple ingredients, just a few cuts to speed things up.

• lincolnquirk 12 Sep 2023 3:41 UTC

  38 points

  19

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I’m sorry you feel that way. I will push back a little, and claim you are over-indexing on this: I’d predict that most (~75%) of the larger (>1000-employee) YC-backed companies have similar templates for severance, so finding this out about a given company shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

  I did a bit of research to check my intuitions + it does seem like non-disparagement is at least widely advised (for severance specifically and not general employment), e.g., found two separate posts on the YC internal forums regarding non-disparagement within severance agreements:

  “For the major silicon valley law firms (Cooley, Fenwick, OMM, etc) non disparagement is not in the confidentiality and invention assignment agreement [employment agreement], and usually is in the separation and release [severance] template.”

  (^ this person also noted that it would be a red flag to find non-disparagement in the employment agreement.)

  “One thing I’ve learned—even when someone has been terminated with cause, a separation agreement [which includes non-disparagement] w a severance can go a long way.”

• lincolnquirk 11 Sep 2023 23:24 UTC

  74 points

  9

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Jeff is talking about Wave. We use a standard form of non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in our severance agreements: when we fire or lay someone off, getting severance money is gated on not saying bad things about the company. We tend to be fairly generous with our severance, so people in this situation usually prefer to sign and agree. I think this has successfully prevented (unfair) bad things from being said about us in a few cases, but I am reading this thread and it does make me think about whether some changes should be made.

  I also would re-emphasize something Jeff said—that these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them. As far as I am aware, we don’t ask current employees or employees who are quitting without severance to not talk about their experience at Wave.

  What links here?

  • Is the Wave non-dis­par­age­ment thingy okay? by Ruby (14 Oct 2023 5:31 UTC; 29 points)
  • jefftk's comment on Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (12 Sep 2023 0:02 UTC; 4 points)

• lincolnquirk 30 Aug 2023 14:05 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: moyamo’s comment on: The Eco­nomics of the As­teroid Deflec­tion Prob­lem (Dom­i­nant As­surance Con­tracts)

  In my view you have two plausible routes to overcoming the product problem, neither of which is solved (primarily) by writing code.

  Route A would be social proof: find a trusted influencer who wants to do a project with DACs. Start by brainstorming various types of projects that would most benefit from DACs, aiming to find an idea which an (ideally) narrow group of people would be really excited about, that demonstrates the value of such contracts, led by a person with a lot of ‘star power’. Most likely this would be someone who would be likely to raise quite a lot of money through a traditional donation/​kickstarter-type drive, but instead they decide to demo the DAC (and in doing so make a good case for it).

  Route B is to focus on comms. Iterate on the message. Start by explaining it to non-economist friends, then graduate to focus groups. It’s crucial to try to figure out how to most simply explain the idea in a sentence or two, such that people understand and don’t get confused by it.

  I’m guessing you’ll need to follow both these routes, but you can follow them simultaneously and hopefully learn cross-useful things while doing so.