What's your opinion on starting to run with barefoot shoes? I've recently started using barefoot shoes due to overpronation and ankle instability (worked very well), so I've been a bit hesitant to use narrow cushioned shoes again for running. Any resources you recommend on this topic?
Thank you, River, for being the actual lawyer here.
I guess much of my confusion stemmed from thinking a 501c3 was a specific corporate structure from the way the podcast described it, whereas you seem to say that it's a tax status that you put on top of any existing corporate structure. In France, the tax advantages are just part of the Association structure.
Governance structure: I got the wrong impression from the podcast, where Andrew said that making a board and having board meetings was part of the steps to start a church. Probably, that was specific to the Californian corporate structure he was using, which I thought was a characteristic of 501c3.
Liability: Same for this. It makes sense that 501c3 being only a tax status has no bearing on liability.
Constitutional protection: Here I was thinking about the part of the podcast where Andrew said that one advantage of incorporating as a church was that you had to do far less reporting of your activities to the government than other 501c3.
Lobbying: Yeah, makes sense that one would just separate the two organizations. I agree that the main advantage in French law is that you keep the tax-deductible donations when lobbying, as long as the lobbying supports the general interest mission.
Board members: In France, it's common for the president of the board and organization leader role to be the same person (the Président-directeur général). In most small Associations I've been part of, the president of the board was in fact the leader of the organization, so the restriction on getting paid was in fact restricting. If the default approach in the US is to separate them, then it makes sense that it's not a "workaround".
Interestingly, that means that Sam Altman being OpenAI's CEO and on the OpenAI board is actually a surprising point of power concentration if American organizations are not like that by default.
Note that the documentation says they'll aim to recruit 1-3 nationals from each EU country (plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). As far as I understood, it does not require them to be living in their home country at the time of applying. Therefore, people from small European countries have especially good odds.
Note also that the gender balance goal would also increase the chance for any women applying.
1Thanks for sharing! I've been sharing it with people working in AI Safety across Europe.
Do you know if anyone is doing a coordinated project to reach out to promising candidates from all EU countries and encourage them to apply? I'm worried that great candidates may not hear about it in time.
Most associations I know never got a rescrit fiscal and never got audited. Also, you would only get penalties if you were not actually eligible for tax deductible donations, which is usually obvious whether it's the case or not, so no need for government confirmation.
Do you know some associations who did? How's the process?
Thank you for the post! I've regularly pointed out the spurious negative correlations from stratification in conversations, but never had a link to point to for an explanation.
Case in point, my smartest close friend is also the least hard-working. Sometime I worry he'll find his way towards reliable executive function and leave me behind :')
IMO it makes sens for an event venue to not list the events it's hosting, especially when they're run by orgs unaffiliated with Lightcone Infrastructure. I expect Vitalist Bay organizers to not want to be straightforwardly associated with all the other events running at Lighthaven.
AFAIK most events running at Lighthaven related to the rationalist community are advertised on LessWrong. See the Lighthaven tag for some examples.
I'm looking for websites tracking the safety of the various frontier labs. For now, I found those:
- Seoul Commitment Tracker → Whether frontier AI companies have published their "red line" risk evaluation policy, in accordance with their commitments at the Seoul AI Action Summit
- AI Lab Watch → Tracker of actions frontier AI companies have taken to improve safety
- Safer AI Risk Management Ratings → Ratings of frontier AI companies' risk management practices
Do you know of any other?
I'm currently writing a grant application to build websites specifically tracking how frontier AI Labs are fulfilling the EU Code of practice, how close are frontier models from each lab from various red lines, and how robust are the evaluation methodologies of each lab (probably as separate websites). I'd be interested to any pointer to existing work on this.
IMO Janus mentoring during MATS 3.0 was quite impactful, as it led @Quentin FEUILLADE--MONTIXI to start his LLM ethology agenda and to cofound PRISM Eval.
I expect that there's still a lot of potential value in Janus work that can only be realized through making it more legible to the rest of the AI safety community, be it mentoring, posting on LW.
I wish someone in the cyborgism community would pick up the ball of explaining the insights to outsiders. I'd gladly pay for a subscription to their Substack, and help them find money for this work.
Yeah, I've ramped up slowly and did not get injured :) Although, I did not do any long runs in those yet.
Do you think the proper running technique would be different for barefoot shoes? I've heard that, with barefoot running, it's better to go forefoot first to use the arch muscles to absorb the shock, or something like that.