Fonts should probably not do this. This would be better served as the font being what's in negative, and then the backdrop behind it being an unrelated graphical element, perhaps accomplished with css.
Now, where's the sympathy for the effective altruists who bought a castle for the same financial reasons? They were widely mocked for their apparent exuberance.
It's been a while since I read his writing, but I skimmed and didn't see anything that sounded unlike him. He writes with a very neutral tone.
It did make me wonder though how effectively you could lean on AI to flesh out a list of questions, but I think in this case he has the expertise to write each response quickly and he'd be conscious that this is overall a piece of content doing properly.
That castle was found to be more cost-effective than any other space the group could have purchased, for the simple reason that almost nobody wants castles anymore. It was chosen because it was the best calculation; the optics of it were not considered.
It would be less disingenuous if you were to say EA is the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a conference space in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd -- the fact that it was a castle shouldn't be relevant.
Nobody wants castles anymore because they’re impractical and difficult to maintain. It’s not some sort of taboo or psychological block, it’s entirely practical.
Actually, the fact that people think castles are cool suggests that the going price for them is higher than their concrete utility would make it, since demand would be boosted by people who want a castle because it’s cool.
Did these guys have some special use case where it made sense, or did they think they were the only ones smart enough to see that it’s actually worth buying?
> That castle was found to be more cost-effective than any other space the group could have purchased
In other words, they investigated themselves and cleared themselves of any wrongdoing.
It was obvious at the time that they didn't need a 20 million dollar castle for a meeting space, let alone any other meeting space that large.
They also put the castle up for sale 2 years later to "use the proceeds from the sale to support high-impact charities" which was what they were supposed to be doing all along.
The depressing part is that the "optics" of buying a castle are pretty good if you care about attracting interest from elite "respectable" donors, who might just look down on you if you give off the impression of being a bunch of socially inept geeks who are just obsessed with doing the most good they can for the world at large.
Both are factual, the longer statement has more nuance, which is unsurprising. If the emphasis on the castle and SBF - out of all the things and people you could highlight about EA - concisely gives away that I have a negative opinion of it then that was intended. I view SBF as an unsurprising, if extreme, consequence of that kind of thinking. I have a harder time making any sense of the OP story in this context, that's why I was seeking clarification here.
Why buy a conference space. Most pubs will give you a seperate room if you promise to spend some money at the bar. There are probably free spaces had they researched.
If I am donating money and you are buying a conference space on day 1 I'd want it to be filled with experienced ex-UN field type of people and Nobel peace prize winners.
Somewhere between “once a year” conferences hosted at hotels and the continual conferences of a university lies the point where buying a building makes sense.
The biggest downside, of course, is all your conferences are now in the same location
Accelerating consistently at 1G (and then -1G for the second half), should take 6 years of proper time (from the perspective of the traveller) to get there.
Yea, actually the problem is not at all that we’d need too much acceleration for the human body. Accelerating at 1g for a couple years gets you to preposterous speeds (and we don’t even need any artificial gravity nonsense!). The problem is that accelerating at 1g for years would require a ridiculous amount of energy.
In his 1958 juvenile novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (I read it years later as a tween), Robert A. Heinlein described this as a "skew-flip maneuver" that would get someone from Earth to Pluto in five days at 8G (!). And apparently E.E. "Doc" Smith described it even earlier.
I believe the person you're responding to was observing that the planets will appear to be in a line to an observer on the surface of one of those planets.
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