All of Molly's Comments + Replies

I'd like to read this book! 

FWIW, I've undergone both getting a tattoo in a relatively painful place (my ribcage) and natural/unmedicated childbirth, and your assessment of the pain doesn't really line up with my experience. My tattoo is pretty small, and I suspect the wrist would be more painful, so maybe that explains the delta. But my unmedicated childbirth was also significantly faster than average, (like a total of about 70 minutes), so that should also close some of the delta. 

The pain of the most painful parts of childbirth was excruciating in a way that just wasn't in th... (read more)

There seems to be some confusion around the following sentence: “Essentially, if you received money from an FTX entity in the debtor group anytime on or after approximately August 11, 2022, the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back.” 

Some clarifications: 

FTX Foundation, Inc. (the nonprofit corporation) is not currently in the debtor group. At least some FTXFF grantees received their funding from this nonprofit corporation, so this sentence doesn’t apply to them (yet – it could be added late... (read more)

Post is now up here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o8B9kCkwteSqZg9zc/thoughts-on-legal-concerns-surrounding-the-ftx-situation 

(links to more resources including the explainer in the post)

Hi! I'm Open Phil's managing counsel, and put out a post on this subject (with links to resources) here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o8B9kCkwteSqZg9zc/thoughts-on-legal-concerns-surrounding-the-ftx-situation 

It'll be an explainer about how US clawbacks work, yes. 

(and mandatory disclaimer: it'll be an explanation of legal context but not legal advice) 

Update that I don't think I'm going to be able to meet the timeline I set myself and have a product I think is worth sharing. Given that this is a holiday weekend it might be hard to find good advisors who are willing to work on this before Monday, but I'm going to try. 

Thanks! Updated. 

Quick response to comments about potential clawbacks: OP expects to put out an explainer about clawbacks tomorrow. It'll be written by our outside counsel and probably won't contain much in the way of specifics, but I think generally FTX grantees should avoid spending additional $$ on legal advice about this just yet.

Also, please don't take this as evidence that we expect clawbacks to happen, just that we know it's an issue of community concern. 

Thanks! 

Yea, I probably could've done a better job differentiating what I think people would get out of guard/reserve service vs. active duty. I absolutely would not expect the cultural absorption to happen in the guard/reserve; probably not even if you took a year-long mob. It really was a years-long process. 

I agree that the national security knowledge is overrated, and tried to convey that - I think your Peace Corps analogy is spot on.

It'd be awesome if you wrote a post on warrant officer careers - nobody seems to know WTF warrants do, myself included! 

I didn't join right out of college - I joined after law school. I took a few years off between college and law school, so I was 27 when I joined. It wasn't weird for me but that might be in large part because I joined the JAG Corps, which required a law degree, so most people I was in training with were around my age. 

I've known other people who joined later than the standard age, and they mostly did really well. It probably helped that respect for your elders is one of those more traditional values that is somewhat a part of military culture. 

I ... (read more)

I asked someone else who has more experience in the national guard than I do to jump in and answer this. I will say that I'm not sure that joining the guard will be much added protection against going out-of-state. My husband was guard, and got mobilized to Iraq in 2004-2005, and ended up resigning his commission when it looked like that was going to happen again in 2007-ish. Also guard often helps other states when they need disaster relief. 

Do you have any specific questions about the differences? 

It's worth noting that there's active duty, and then there are two part-time options: national guard (where you belong to the state but can be mobilized for federal work), or the reserves (where you belong to the federal military). The army reserves doesn't have line jobs - infantry, special forces, etc. are only options for active duty or national guard. 
 

You can only earn a G.I. Bill if you spend some time on active duty. You can do that either by joining the guard or reserves and t... (read more)

Oh, I definitely agree there are good reasons to read unedited opinions - if nothing else, they're great reads a lot of the time! But I think you'll get a good number of false negatives if you use that as a test for whether you'll enjoy the reading in law school. Anyone who enjoys reading unedited opinions will probably enjoy the reading in law school. But not everyone who doesn't enjoy them won't. 

Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree with the point that people should only go to law school if they have a pretty good idea of what they want to get out of it, and should not go to avoid making decisions about career paths (though people often don't realize they're doing this). 

Also strongly agree with differentiating between the very top law schools and the schools just below them. I might go even farther than that. I went to NYU Law, which at the time was tied with Columbia for 4th in the U.S. News rankings. I didn't apply to Harvard or Stanfo... (read more)

I'm Open Phil's in house counsel and would love to talk to you about this! I sent you a message with my contact info.

Vipassana meditation aims to give meditators experiential knowledge (rather than theoretical/intellectual understanding) of this conception of self. I think that's what a lot of people get out of psychedelics as well. 

I thought this paper was really interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12590 

The abstract: 

"It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, 1984). This paper examines the rela... (read more)

A couple of quick ideas from a legal perspective:

• How to differentiate policy advocacy (which c3's are allowed to engage in without limitations) from lobbying (which c3's have significant restrictions on) in non-US systems (e.g. in the US pushing for agencies to adopt regulatory schemes does not count as lobbying, but the distinction between executive agencies and legislative bodies may not translate well to other governmental systems)
• Effect of China's NGO law (which creates huge barriers to giving/operating in China) on high impact causes (you'd probably n

I can think of a few different inter-related lines of effort in advancing the psychedelic movement, that may be most easily divided into:

1. policy work
2. scientific research
3. grassroots work

Do you have a sense of whether the policy work and scientific research are money constrained, talent constrained or both? For someone looking to enter the field what would be

And as far as grassroots work goes, it seems important to keep the movement "respectable" but at the same time it seems important for more people to have personal experiences with psychedelics if they're go... (read more)