Thanks for writing this, I broadly agree!

I also initially misread your title as "don't burn the bridges for slower worlds", which would be a completely different article (but perhaps one I endorse): about not recklessly pursuing policies which cut off alliances that could be good in the future, such as with tech, dems or republicans, China, middle powers etc.

FWIW, here's what we applied with to Lightcone Commons 3 months ago: link

And our public fundraiser earlier this year: https://manifund.org/projects/mox-2026-fundraiser

(Some details have changed, and I hope to push out an update soon, esp in light of the $813k of funding we are very grateful for)

hey! thanks for clarifying. once again, I'd recommend making the sources of these things clear, because otherwise it might seem plausible to a reader that this is completely just a joke site. (i think there's still some strength in being a joke/satire site, but your purpose is more evident if it conveys that these are real people, imo.)

you could just start by linking to the original EA Forum comment for the ones that came from there!

re: "parody", I'm not sure I used this term correctly -- you're probably right that "satire" is a better fit for what I had in mind, apologies for my imprecision). to be clear, even before your message I was expecting that these were originating from real examples, as I stated in my original comment.

I was trying to point out that your site's design makes this unclear, eg because of the slop-iness of the specific language used in the website copy, as well as the "quotes" which to my eye, also seem like summarized LLM-ese. 

finally re: Manifund, I'm curious if you can say more about autoreply-rejection? Manifund, unlike traditional funds like CG/LTFF/etc, is just a platform where people list their proposals; we make no guarantees about reviewing or replying to any listed proposal. (in this way, it's similar to the EA Forum, and also similar to aisafety.fail itself). so I'm not sure what you meant by an autoreply-rejection.

(we do flag LLM-written proposals and hide them from the feed until they receive a certain amount of funding. is this perhaps what you meant?)

I guess, a second basic question is how you validate the postings (if at all), if they're supposed to be anonymous

(to be clear, i think the site is kind of funny & designed catchily, and i appreciate y'all trying to help support various job applicants within EA)

hi! I had a basic question about your site: are the listed rejections coming from real people, or is this solely parody?

my guess is that they were supposed to be real, but I think making this clear on your site would be helpful.

mm, I suspect that Longview and Macroscopic might also be grantmaker constrained, but it's kind of hard to say without knowing how much they have under management and the size of grants they have been giving

I agree that more money going through Lightcone Commons seems great (vs say CG)!

I agree with the existence of a problem, but mostly don't think the proposed solutions will lead to major wins. My guess is that, roughly, "Constellation/Anthropic Slack killed EA Forum" - in that there's been a lot of evaporative cooling of the most high context people towards private chats and docs, and also specifically towards AI safety (as Fran notes).

I am quite interested in pushing against this gradient - see https://manifund.substack.com/p/total-safety-transparency about the importance of posting in public. 

For now, I'm trying other initiatives to increase the amount of great writing and discussion - https://justwrite.club/ is one example, and I think an "EA Inkhaven" might also be pretty great if anyone wanted to facilitate that. 

With a lot of love in my heart: I'm also uncertain that CEA is the right org to steward the EA Forum. From the outside it seems like the CEA online team has been losing great people, both technical and community/cultural talent. (Also I would guess the right format of a new "forum" looks completely different from the classic internet forums, given new AI capabilities - eg maybe more moltbook, or something even more wild.)

hi! as I've posted on X:

perhaps I really botched the writeup but I meant to say that feeling a debt to the future fund is why I'd consider the idea of hiring an unpopular, convicted individual, while many other people would just reject that idea prima facie

while the decision to actually hire Caroline comes from having interviewed her, work trialed her, and assessed her competence and skillset, and having considered Manifund's talent shortages

and as a quick point of clarification, I've returned to working after approximately a week of parental leave.

Okay, unfortunately the EA Forum DM functionality is also broken for me, atm. Could you post a reply with an anonymous email address for me to email the letter to? I'll email from [email protected].

Separately, you seem to think the $500k figure is particularly important. Does that mean that, even if we reached a settlement with the FTX estate to return some lower amount, you believe that we ought to return $500k anyways? This is how I interpret your original post, but this seems somewhat unintuitive to me and I'd appreciate you explaining more.

I've set up a poll now on Manifold: 

(I first tried an EA Forum poll, but 1. it error'd and wouldn't create, and 2. it doesn't support multiple choice, just a spectrum agree/disagree, and I couldn't figure out how to express these options correctly.)