Month: April 2025

Bandwidth Rules Everything Around Me: Oliver Habryka on OpenPhil and GoodVentures

In this episode of our podcast, Timothy Telleen-Lawton and I talk to Oliver Habryka of Lightcone Infrastructure about his thoughts on the Open Philanthropy Project, which he believes has become stifled by the PR demands of its primary funder, Good Ventures.

Oliver’s main claim is that around mid 2023 or early 2024, Good Ventures founder Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation, and this put a straight jacket over what Open Phil could fund. Moreover it was not enough for a project to be good and pose low reputational risk; it had to be obviously low reputational risk, because OP employees didn’t have enough communication with Good Ventures to pitch exceptions.  According to Habryka.

That’s a big caveat. This podcast is pretty one sided, which none of us are happy about (Habryka included). We of course invited OpenPhil to send a representative to record their own episode, but they declined (they did send a written response to this episode, which is linked below and read at end of the episode). If anyone out there wants to asynchronously argue with Habryka on a separate episode, we’d love to hear from you. 

Transcript available here.

Links from the episode:

An Update From Good Ventures (note: Dustin has deleted his account and his comments are listed as anonymous, but are not the only anonymous)

CEA announcing the sale of Wytham Abbey

OpenPhli career page

Job reporting to Amy WL

Zach’s “this is false”

Luke Muelhauser on GV not funding right of center work

Will MacAskill on decentralization and EA

Alexander Berger regrets the Wytham Abbey grant

Single Chan-Zuckerberg employee demanding resignation over failure to moderate Trump posts on Facebook

Letter from 70+ CZ employees asking for more DEI within Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

OpenPhil’s response

Journal of Null Results: EZMelt sublingual vitamins

4 months ago I described my success curing my hypothyroidism by gargling liquid iodine, when iodine pills had failed. The good news is that the cure has held– my thyroid numbers continue to be in the desirable range. 

The bad news is I’ve failed to replicate this success with a multivitamin. Shortly after the thyroid post I was handed a perfect opportunity to put sublingual vitamins to the test when my doctor took me off all my oral vitamins to give my gut a rest. I had already started on EZMelt Multivitamin + Iron (2x standard dosing every other day, because I absorb iron better that way), but now we’d removed all potential assistance (“except food, right?” no. My gut has never been good at extracting vitamins from food except right after I discovered Boswelia. Mold Winter rolled back those gains).

I recently got my nutrition test results back and they suck. I can’t prove I wouldn’t have been even worse off without these vitamins, but there’s a profound absence of positive evidence. However the issue could just be these particular vitamins; after a break I’m now trying Feroglobin, which is a thick liquid iron supplement with a smattering of other vitamins. It’s not intended to be taken sublingually but I don’t live by their rules, man.

Between getting the results and publishing this post I made a market on Manifold, asking whether the EZMelts would work. The market was trading just under 50% “no, not helpful” for most of the week, but in the final hours fluctuated between 30-40% “no”. Seems like a very mild victory for prediction markets. 

I’ve created a similar market for Feroglobin here. This run is not going to be quite as clean- my doctor put me back on oral vitamins, plus I finally found a place that does IV nutrition. So this will be more of a best guess, probably resolved as a probability rather than flat Yes/No. 

Predict the impact of sublingual vitamins

4 months ago I shared that I was taking sublingual vitamins and would test their effect on my nutrition in 2025. This ended up being an unusually good time to test because my stomach was struggling and my doctor took me off almost all vitamins, so the sublinguals were my major non-food source (and I’ve been never good at extracting vitamins from food). I now have the “after” test results. I will announce results in 8 days- but before then, you can bet on Manifold. Will I judge my nutrition results to have been noticeably improved over the previous results?

Austin Chen on Winning, Risk-Taking, and FTX

Timothy and I have recorded a new episode of our podcast with Austin Chen of Manifund (formerly of Manifold, behind the scenes at Manifest).

The start of the conversation was contrasting each of our North Stars- Winning (Austin), Truthseeking (me), and Flow (Timothy), but I think the actual theme might be “what is an acceptable amount of risk taking?” We eventually got into a discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried, where Austin very bravely shared his position that SBF has been unwisely demonized and should be “freed and put back to work”. He by no means convinced me or Timothy of this, but I deeply appreciate the chance for a public debate.

Episode:

Transcript (this time with filler words removed by AI)

Editing policy: we allow guests (and hosts) to redact things they said, on the theory that this is no worse than not saying them in the first place. We aspire but don’t guarantee to note serious redactions in the recording. I also edit for interest and time.