Dustin Moskovitz is by far the single largest funder of the EA ecosystem. So let's meet him: Moskovitz made his fortune as a cofounder of Facebook, though he has since said he is "embarrassed to have helped it begin," citing Trump's victory, COVID misinformation, and "hate." He also co-founded Asana, a B2B SaaS company. He is married to Cari Tuna (pictured), a former journalist. It is unknown whether they have children. Together, they launched their nonprofit efforts in the form of Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy. The latter has since been rebranded as Coefficient Giving. Through these and other vehicles, Moskovitz has donated billions to causes including EA community building (Centre for Effective Altruism, Effective Ventures, 80,000 hours, and various smaller programs), criminal justice reform (leniency advocacy) including grants to BLM-related organizations, and AI safety. Coefficient says it's on track for more than a billion dollars in AI-related grantmaking in 2026. Moskovitz has also been a very generous political donor since 2016. He spent about $20 million in 2016 opposing Trump, $24 million in 2020 plus much more through Asana, and ~$50 million in 2024. His organizations have funded Congressional aide roles. He has also funded the salaries of journalists who have written anti-AI stories structured as interviews of "experts" also paid by Moskovitz orgs, as documented by @brianchau57 / Effort. If you want to hear from him directly, you can find him on BlueSky.

I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse. By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this. A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.

What do we know about Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic “whistleblower”? He became concerned about AGI doom in high school (in the town of Oxford btw - see my previous posts) after reading Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence. Attended Cambridge, during which time he went to an alignment conference at age 19. He then became a fellow at Newspeak (yes, really) House, which received EA funding and hosted Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto launch. In 2022 he received a scholarship from a Moskovitz-funded org. Moskovitz is one of the leading EA donors, and an early Anthropic investor. The 80,000 Hours project (also funded indirectly by Moskovitz) explicitly encourages EAs to infiltrate frontier labs to influence them from the inside. None of this, in itself, proves that he is wrong about AI safety. What it does indicate is that he was already sold on the idea as a teenager, before he worked in the labs, before GPT-1 came out. I think good epistemic practice means we should therefore take him no more seriously than any other doomer. His experience in the labs didn’t convince him AI is dangerous. He already believed that even before the current AI paradigm became dominant, and probably chose his career based on this belief. If you’re convinced by Bostrom’s arguments yourself, that’s fine. But Coxon adds precisely zero additional weight to them.

“The ultimate purpose of freedom of speech is to overturn lies, fraud, and false ideologies. This is precisely what Cofnas was doing” The US State Department is defending Cofnas. Elections really do have consequences. Very heartening.

A guy followed a mother around with his camera while she tried to get away from him and told her to say “nigger” over and over, and when she finally does it that’s apparently a crime. Completely absurd and unacceptable. She must appeal and we must fund it. No magic word crimes.

I fell for a lot of progressive nonsense, and hard. I was literally trans. But two things I can honestly say I never fell for were 1. alternative ways of knowing. Science obviously works, and it’s hard to even coherently describe an alternative. What, you aren’t taking in data or trying to parse it without contradiction? What are you even talking about? I was a new atheist technocratic progressive, and thought the extent to which other groups failed at scientific thinking was a result of disadvantage, but never that scientific thinking itself was bad. Same with everything on that smithsonian chart (being on time etc) 2. Strong anti-hereditarianism. I believed racial average differences were due to discrimination (to the extent I thought about the issue at all, which was infrequently) but the belief that *all* human cognitive differences, even within groups, are due to upbringing was always just facially absurd. There exists such a thing as a smart person, and there are aspects of it that clearly aren’t about education. They talk faster. They’re funnier. They learn *new* concepts faster. Their questions are sharper. It’s textural. It’s visceral. I didn’t know anything about psychometrics or the hereditarian debate at this point. It’s just obvious if you’ve met three humans and are honest.

Total pre-IPO investment in Tesla (debt and equity) was something like $700 million. With an m, not a b. For SpaceX, it was ~$12 billion. Look at what those investments did to the world. You can see the results all around you, in every city in America, and in space. Over 9 million electric cars on the road. Breakthroughs in battery design. Internet access in every remote corner of the planet. Cost of launch dropped by more than an order of magnitude. What has her $26 billion done?

The industrial titans of America, the people who build and make and do things, need to take politics seriously. There is no automatic corrective mechanism. The cops won’t disobey orders en masse when ordered to confiscate property. You need to do something serious and drastic NOW

The Nowak case clearly highlights that we need to stop treating racism as an ~infinite evil, not because Nowak was racist (no evidence of this) but because any time you create a social superweapon like accusations of racism are now, it’ll be misused horribly. What is racism? Ask 10 people and you’ll get 12 opinions. Historically, it meant someone who treats people badly in interpersonal interactions because of their race. Which is just, like, kinda annoying and slightly boorish. It’s not the apocalypse. There are many personal traits that are equally or more annoying. Now the definition has been ludicrously expanded to include a bunch of things even less objectionable than that, including belief in very plausible scientific claims and policy preferences that were near-universal for almost all of human history. Racism just isn’t a big deal. We have to take it off its pedestal. If Nowak had said something racist, it would morally change exactly nothing about the horror of what happened to him. He didn’t, but I feel over-focusing on that distracts from the fact that it wouldn’t matter if he had. Murder is worse than racism. Hell, shoplifting is worse than racism. Enough. Who cares.