Patrick Collison
Article
Patrick Collison is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between April 19, 2021 and December 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “celebrity special guests including Stripe’s Patrick Collison”; “working within Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, etc’s Progress Studies movement”; “Working within Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, etc’s Progress Studies movement”. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Tyler Cowen, Tesla.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 8
- Issue count: 8
- First seen: April 19, 2021
- Last seen: December 29, 2025
Appears In
- Open Thread 168
- Links For September
- So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
- Open Thread 231
- Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
- Links for July 2024
- Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
- Open Thread 414
Related Pages
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- Elon Musk (5 shared issues)
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- Tyler Cowen (5 shared issues)
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- Tesla (4 shared issues)
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- Progress Studies (3 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- Apple (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- facebook (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
3: Joshua Fox wants to remind you that there are still ACX online meetups scheduled at least until June, with various celebrity special guests including Qualia Research Institute’s Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, and meditation expert Daniel Ingram. Check out https://joshuafox.com/ssc-online-meetups/ for more information or to sign up. I’ve added this to the blogroll so you don’t forget about it.
Inline links: ACX online meetups
14: Congratulations to Jason Crawford, whose Roots Of Progress blog is now a nonprofit organization working within Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, etc’s Progress Studies movement to “[establish] a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century”. They are fundraising and also looking for a Chief of Staff.
Sometimes people gave me pitches like “[Fintech billionaire] Patrick Collison gave us our first $X, but he didn’t fund us fully because he wanted to diversify our income streams and demonstrate wider appeal. Can you fill the rest of our funding for the year?” This was a pretty great pitch, because Patrick is very smart, has a top-notch grant-making infrastructure, and shares many of my values. I was pretty desperate to be able to rely on something other than my wits alone, and Patrick’s seal of approval was a tempting proxy. I tried to give all these people a fair independent evaluation, because otherwise it would defeat the point of Patrick making them seek alternative funding sources. But it sure did get them to the top of the pile.
Then people started sending me requests like “Please give us whatever you can spare, just so that when we’re pitching to some other much richer person, we can say that other grantmakers such as yourself are on board.” This made me really nervous. It was bad enough risking my own money (and the money of my generous donors). But risking my reputation was something else entirely. If all grantmakers secretly relied on other grantmakers to avoid the impossibly complex question of figuring out who was good, then my decisions might accidentally move orders of magnitude more money than I expected. It’s all nice and well to replace your own judgment with Patrick Collison’s. But what if someone tried to replace their own judgment with mine?
A lot of these italicized sections here are trying to get at the same point: when you’re truly lost in a giant multidimensional space that requires ten forms of expertise at once to make real progress, you’ll retreat to prejudices and heuristics. That’s what credentialism is, that’s what relying on other grantmakers is, and - when you have neither Harvard nor Patrick Collison to save you, you’ll rely on that one blog post you read that one time saying X never works.
2: Isaak Freeman asks me to signal-boost the Future Forum, from August 4-7 in San Francisco, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Anders Sandberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowen. They are bringing together 250 people from EA, Silicon Valley, and related communities to “arm the world's brightest minds with the tools they need to tackle global problems” and to potentially offer funding and mentoring. Apply at the link above.
Inline links: Future Forum
I do think billionaires have the ability to have a lot of impact by pulling the ropes sideways, ie by doing things that are by definition outside the normal political system. Things like Patrick Collison promoting open science, Elon Musk trying to revolutionize spacecraft, or Bill Gates trying to cure tropical diseases. Maybe some people are angry about that, but if so that’s a real ethical difference between us - I think it’s generally good for people have the power to make a difference, the ability to exercise agency, etc, and that lopping that off at some level is anti-human. This isn’t true if you’re lopping off some people’s power to preserve other people’s, but I think what I mean by saying “outside the normal political system” is that this is specifically about cases where that isn’t true.
Inline links: pulling the ropes sideways
14: Arc Institute (Patrick Collison et al’s biotech research lab) claims to have discovered a gene editing method which is safer and more precise than CRISPR (Nature paper, Twitter discussion).
Inline links: Nature, Twitter discussion
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
Inline links: Marginal Revolution, wrote an article
1: Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison are sponsoring A Call For New Aesthetics, $5K - $250K grants to “artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define” a new aesthetics for the 21st century. Seems crazy ambitious, but that’s what people said about Progress Studies, and that one worked, so this duo has earned my trust. But please do me a favor and only apply if your aesthetics are good. It would be a shame if they put in all this work, and we just got another hundred years of bad aesthetics.
Inline links: A Call For New Aesthetics