Comments
The FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Treasury announced that depositors will be fully protected, and have access to all of their money starting 2023-03-13, so any EA-destined funds at SVB should be fine.
Curated and popular this week
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TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
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Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
Recent opportunities to take action
[Update: As to depositors, see Jeff's comment.]
Probably very little? While there's a chance that depositors will take a haircut, that haircut is likely to be modest. The larger issue for depositors may be loss of access to funds for a while, although I expect next week's advance payment will be substantial. And if I had money, I'd lend it with very little hesitation with the uninsured deposits as collateral -- would probably want something like 1.10 in deposits backing 1 in loans to be safe.
Such a large percentage of SVB deposits were uninsured that there isn't going to be a concentration of losses in that class the way there might be at other banks.
If a major funder has significant exposure to SVB bonds or stock, that might be a different story.