I probably would be OK with that from an ethics standpoint. After all, I was not a party to the contracts in question. We celebrate (in appropriate circumstances) journalists who serve as conduits for actual classified information. Needless to say, I find the idea of being an enabler for the breach of contractual NDAs much less morally weighty than being an enabler for the breach of someone's oath to safeguard classified information.

Legally, such an organization would have to be careful to mitigate the risk of claims for tortious interference with contract and other theories that the AI company could come up with. Promising financial support prior to the leak might open the door for such claims; merely providing it (through a well-written trust) after the fact would probably be OK.

low thousands? Obviously haven't seen the documents, but a few hours times few hundred dollars per billable hours should be in the ballpark. Obviously someone might want a more in-depth study before taking actions that could expose them to massive liability, though...

Legal fees may not be these individuals' big exposure (assuming they have non-disclosure / non-disparagement agreements). That would be damages for breaking the NDA, which could be massive depending on the effects on OpenAI's reputation. 

I might quantify the value of the talent pool around another $10bn, so again, you only need a ~10% increase here to be worth a billion, and over centralisation seems like one of the bigger problems.

I find it plausible that a strong fix to the funder-diversity problem could increase the value of the talent pool by 10% or even more. However, having a new independent funder with $1B in assets (spending much less than that per year) feels more like an incremental improvement.

$1bn is only 5% of the capital that OP has, so you'd only need to find a 1 grant for every 20 that OP makes that they've missed with only 2x the effectiveness of marginal OP grants in order to get 2x the value.

You'd need to do that consistently (no misses, unless counteracted by >2x grants) and efficiently (as incurring similar overhead as OP with $1B of assets would consume much of the available cash flow). That seems like a tall order. 

Moreover, I'm not sure if a model in which the new major funder always gets to act "last" would track reality very well. It's likely that OP would change its decisions, at least to some extent, based on what it expected the other funder to do. In this case, the new funder would end up funding a significant amount of stuff that OP would have counterfactually funded.

This is a tricky situation, because “Fuentes” is not an openly anonymous account, but a fake name account started with a fake bio.

Depending on the claimed identity of "Fuentes," the strength of the evidence for that proposition, and whether Torres can show any portion of the Fuentes post was made in objective bad faith, the mods should consider allowing "Fuentes" to be named. Pseudonymity is a shield to protect the writer from blowback, not a sword to allow people to make up details of a fake identity to bolster their attacks on others. If "Fuentes" flatly lied about being an outsider, but clearly is not, then I think their true identity is likely fair game in assessing the validity of the "Fuentes" post. 

I'm biased now, but I think people miss how most of our team's efforts go to scalable support, which doesn't necessarily target top universities (and includes universities like mine). 

Is the portion of efforts that currently do not go to top universities quantifiable, or at least subject to reasonable estimation? I would guess that people who were adversely affected by changes would be more vocal, which could lead to others overestimating the magnitude of those changes on non-top university support.

Partially depends on the nature of the claim, methinks. Generally, I do not think you have any obligation to delve into collateral matters -- just enough to put the reader on notice of the possible bias.

There are, I believe, fifteen people with +9 strongvotes (the fifteen with 10K+ karma). You can search the People directory by karma to see the list. 

As of one those people, I wish there was a smallish chance our strongvotes would count as +8 and a small chance the +8 people's votes would count as +9 to make attempted identification of a voter more difficult.

Perhaps that it doesn't seem to clearly relate to the context of Jessica's comment, which I understand to be about prioritizing support for EA student groups at "top" universities. That decision seemingly has to be made on a university level, and -- unless the university is particularly strong in a priority area -- overall rating is probably the best measure.

Whether field-specific rating is a better measure in other contexts, and whether it is reasonably practical to use it in those contexts, is likely a case-by-case determination. I'd also note that in US undergraduate programs, admission is generally to the university as a whole allowing the student to select any major. I suspect your position is stronger where admission is to a specific program/department and thus the specific program's reputation is relevant to the applicant characteristics needed to get in.

On the one hand, I am generally sympathetic to the broader concern. 

On the other hand, a suggestion that EA should attempt to change certain deep-rooted truths about the way the world works to "create a more equal world" in addition to its object-level workloads wouldn't score well with me. As a general matter, the development of non-elite American college students is not neglected or cost-effective, so it is not a viable object-level initiative. It's only viable as a meta project to the extent that it indirectly contributes to object-level success.

I don't think focusing CEA resources on elite universities is inherently inconsistent with your second point. Maybe I'm showing my age, but back when I was an undergraduate, most student organizations had access to funding through student government, but little in the way of external subsidy or support. Except for modest sums given to newspaper editors and such, students didn't get paid for leadership. When trips/retreats were subsidized, the subsidies were partial and the trips were generally within a few hours' driving distance and on a modest budget. In most cases, there were no external organizations helping student leadership out. (I recognize that this setup makes it more difficult for student of modest means. That was my experience as well -- my family was low-income enough that even the school concluded my parents could contribute almost nothing to educational expenses.) 

Although there was a shift toward concentrating resources on top universities, it seems from a glance at the UGAP program that the resources that are out there for non-top university EA groups still exceed what student groups generally get in the broader world. To be clear, I'm sure the pulling back of support for non-top university groups was difficult for their organizers who had previously received more support, and that the existence of more supported groups at top universities is discouraging for organizers elsewhere. But the existence of more recruiting-focused programs at top universities does not somehow makes EA inaccessible everywhere else. Thus, it is not inconsistent in my view with working toward "a diverse community that could think more robustly about how to change the world for better."