I've done AI safety grantmaking for the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Lightcone Commons. It's hard. There's an endless amount to know, from which hardware verification mechanisms will survive a dedicated adversary, all the way to which founders have skeletons in their closets that will blow up into destructive scandals....
The AI Futures Project[1] distinguishes several different plans for navigating the AI transition, which I'll lump into two broader categories: Plan A (my combination of their Plan A/S/Other) involves working for a global pause on AI development, hopefully lasting decades. During this pause, we either research preparatory technologies like alignment...
Wei Dai, one of the first people Satoshi Nakamoto contacted about Bitcoin, was a frequent Less Wrong contributor. So was Hal Finney, the first person besides Satoshi to make a Bitcoin transaction. The first mention of Bitcoin on Less Wrong, a post called Making Money With Bitcoin, was in early...