Which group office, if I can ask?
Yea, I guess this is one of those things where American being composed of states maybe makes things weird. A corporation (or LLC or whatever) is a creation of state law. When you form a corporation, you file paperwork with the secretary of state of one of the states, not even necessarily one you are particularly closely connected to, and then your corporation is controlled by the corporate law of that particular state. Many businesses famously incorporate in the state of Delaware because its corporate law is very friendly to businesses. Whereas 501c3 is a tax status that the federal government confers on an organization that has the right kind of purpose.
I think what Andrew may have been referring to is a 990. A 990 is a form that non-church 501c3s have to file with the federal government every year. Churches don't have to, but that exemption is statutory law, not constitutional law. I've never thought of the form 990 as "snooping". It's just reporting what the major programs are, what money is coming in and flowing around at a high level, who the directors and officers are, etc. The idea is that in exchange for these tax advantages, the public ought to have access to this information. But I guess if you have a stronger notion of privacy or something you might regard it as snooping.
I don't want to give too strong an impression about CEOs being board chairs. There definitely are organizations that do that, and no real legal constraints on it. And I'm sure there are Americans who think it is just fine. There has been a bit written on the EA forum about how different people seem to have rather different conceptions of what a board is for. But on the boards where I served, we understood the board's most important role as being the CEO's boss, and we saw that as incompatible with having the CEO on the board, or even present for the portions of board meetings where we discussed the CEO's performance. And yes, when I look at OpenAI and see Sam Altman on the board, that does not look great to me, though it would not be my first point of concern about OpenAI.
There is a concept in American nonprofit law that board members and staff members shouldn't be paid too much, but there is no clearly defined threshold of what constitutes too much, and little enforcement in practice. It's more a matter of looking at what similar nonprofits are doing, and not being too out of line with that. And in the case where the top staff person was on the board, that board status wouldn't prevent paying them like a top staff person.
1I'm an American ex-lawyer and have served on nonprofit boards in the past, though it is not the area of law I practiced. I think there are some mistakes here, so I'll go through point by point.
Governance structure - there are churches with all kinds of governance structures in America. Some have a hierarchy in which the bishops or whomever effectively own everything (Catholics and Mormons for example). Some have much more collective governance by local congregations. Not only does law not dictate a governance structure, there is a principle in American constitutional law called the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine that says that the government cannot interfere in the governance of a church.
Liability - I'm not sure what is meant here. In America, the question of liability is actually kindof orthogonal to the question of churchness. To get limited liability (meaning you can't go after one leader's personal assets when another leader screws up) you file paperwork with your state to become a corporation or LLC or something. 501c3 status is a matter of federal law. An organization can have either or both or neither. I'm also not sure what is meant by "full liabilty" for the French case.
Purpose - 501c3 describes a pretty broad class of nonprofits. A religious purpose is one kind of purpose that qualifies an organization for 501c3 status. And churches always have a religious purpose. So basically churches are a subset of religious organization, which are in turn a subset of 501c3s. Once you are a church, there's no additional purpose requirement. All 501c3s are tax exempt and donations to them are tax deductible. So this sounds similar to the French case.
Constitutional protection - There's no actual need to incorporate to get constitutional protection. The US constitution protects the free exercise of religion, which can be done as part of a religious organization, incorporated or not, or can be done individually. An individual can even get constitutional protection for something their church does not endorse (see Thomas v. Review Board, 450 US 707 (1981)). That said, I can't think of any cases or principles that deal with "snooping" in particular. There are constitutional limits on searches and seizures that derive from the Fourth Amendment, but those wouldn't be any different for a church versus any other organization. There are also some limits that derive from the Freedom of Association, which is part of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and which again would not be any different for a church versus a secular organization. Here I'm thinking of NAACP v. Alabama, note that the NAACP is not a religious organization.
Lobbying - technically a church could give up its 501c3 status, still be a church in other respects (like constitutional protections), and lobby as much as it wants. I don't know of any actually doing this. What would be the point? Just form a lobbying organization with a different tax status. So this isn't really a restriction on what a group of people who might also be a church can do, it is just a requirement that they form a separate corporate entity with a different status to do the lobbying, which in turn has tax implications. Lobbying groups, 501c4 is the status I am most familiar with, are also tax exempt, but donations to them are not tax deductable. It sounds like this deductability of donations is the real difference betweeen Amercan and French lobbying.
I'm also not sure why you would frame making the leader an employee rather than a board member as a workaround. It's true this is not required in American nonprofits, but it is definitely the best practice. The core purpose of a nonprofit board is to supervise the top level of staff, and a board cannot do that effectively if the leader of the organization is a member of the board. You shouldn't want your leader on your board even if it were legally permissible.
I was with you right up until the last paragraph where you try to apply this to an office. Even at an ideologically driven nonprofit organization, why would you want an office to be a community? The primary output of an office is basically never the relationships among the people in the office. There is a reason people keep work and personal life separate. Trying to get the personal social benefits of a community from ones coworkers creates an enormous single point of failure in your life. This is bad! And this is just as true at an ideologically driven organization as any other.
I don't spend enough time in the LW comments to have any idea who Said is or to be very invested in the decision here. I think I agree with the broad picture here, and certainly with the idea that an author is under no obligation to respond to comments, whether because the author finds the comments unhelpful or overly time consuming or for whatever other reason. That said, I am mostly commenting here to register my disagreement with the idea of giving post authors any kind of moderating privileges on their posts. That just seems like an obviously terrible idea from an epistemic perspective. Just because a post author doesn't find a comment productive doesn't mean someone else won't get something out of it, and allowing an author to censor comments therefor destroys value. LW is the last site I would have expected to allow such a thing.
2My disagreements are these. Point 4 - if you choose not to have children, you are harming the children you might have had by not giving them the opportunity to exist. There is nothing incoherent about this. A person has an interest in existing, and this interest can't depend on them existing at a particular arbitrary point in time. Otherwise murder wouldn't be wrong. The intuition can maybe be driven better from the other side. Imagine a particular child - your child, or a friend's child, or whatever. Would they be harmed if history were changed such that their parents never chose to have them? Of course they would be harmed by that. When deciding to have or not have a kid, you are viewing the same question from an earlier point in time, and that shouldn't change the moral calculus. (Note that I am not making any argument about how this interest should be analyzed or weighed against other interests, I am just rejecting your position that this interest is incoherent.)
I also don't think an inclination to have or not have children is similar to an inclination to have or not have romantic relationships. Many people go from not wanting children in early adulthood, to wanting children later. This can definitely sometimes be a product of environmental influences. People whose peers have kids are much more likely to end up wanting kids! And this can definitely sometimes be influenced by ethical arguments. We have seen many people in recent decades not have kids, or have fewer kids, out of concern for how those kids would impact global warming. That's an ethical argument. If it is right, then I think it is honorable that people chose to act on it. If it is wrong (as I think it is), then it is important that it be countered by other arguments. If demographic collapse is a catastrophic risk, then that is an ethical argument for having kids which should cause some people to act. So I think making ethical arguments is good.
All that said, I agree that having kids will not be right for everyone, and that whatever your model of the world, there are other ways to improve the world at which some people will be more effective.
I don't know much about LARPing. I do regularly attend a Blood in the Clocktower game at a rationalist house. Do you think that is more similar to Werewolf or LARPing?
I actually think that distinction is not very hairsplitty here. One of the most striking things from this whole discussion is that the Cremieux who writes the blog actually does seem very different from the Cremieux who appears on Twitter/X and Reddit and Discord. My exposure to him is primarily through the blog, which I do like, which does not seem to say offensive things about race, which doesn't even seem to have race as a dominant theme. Whereas there do seem to be some more questionable statements and interactions from him on these other platforms.
His much more recent blog post on national IQs makes the point that a sub-70 IQ is not equivalent to mental retardation, so it seems his views have at least somewhat changed since he wrote this particular comment. https://substack.com/@cremieux/p-153828779
A salesperson who doesn't endorse their own product is in the wrong job. The weird thing to me is that a doctor is the only kind of salesperson who expects to get paid when they don't make a sale. You go to a car dealership and don't buy a car, the salesperson doesn't get paid for that. You walk into a Best Buy, play with some of the computers on display, and ask the salesperson some questions, but leave without buying anything, Best Buy doesn't get paid for that. Yet if you go to a doctor, and the doctor fails to diagnose your condition, or to prescribe a treatment you will consent to, somehow the doctor still expects you to pay. That seems wrong to me.