Published on April 29, 2025 8:40 PM GMT
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
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.
Discuss
