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The least impactful way to spend $300M?

passingtime.substack.com

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Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#81

Post by 27153 »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #24

I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…

Playing devil’s advocate is a great antidote to this article. I also agree that Harvard doesn’t need any more money, but… You notice something in that article, which is that Harvard is almost twice the size of the next largest school in that article’s list of richest schools per student. The undergraduate part of Harvard is extremely small and exclusive. Griffin gave the money to the graduate school of arts and scien…

Nah the money he gave was unrestricted. They just decided to name the grad school after him. The money isn’t earmarked for anything in particular.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#82

Post by jonifico »

odd_perfect_num wrote: post #58
JoshTko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A donation to Harvard only accelerates opportunity inequality. Harvard benefits only rich kids.

Harvard and it's peers are some of the very few academic institutions that have need blind admissions and generous need-based financial aid. For poor students, Harvard and its peers are pretty much the only free college options besides merit scholarships.

Only 1.8% are students from poor families: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#83

Post by jononomo »

EamonnMR wrote: post #79
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

Somehow EA always comes back to spending money on 'working on AI risk' which somehow never produces anything but blog posts.

Funny how AI risk is seen as this big threat, but self-driving cars apparently can't avoid crashing.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#84

Post by 27153 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #56
crazygringo wrote: post #24

I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…

But what? What would be lost without the 300 million? If you can’t be specific then I think it’s to the authors point. I mean, just consider that he spent 300 million and the impact isn’t obvious. At least in your fish example they used it for the intended purpose for some period of time and there is still some low utilization for dried fish. It’s also half of 300 million so it seems they did more with less despite i…

You don’t think doing more good with the same resources is a good thing? Is it not better to save two lives than one life, all else equal?

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#85

Post by vivegi »

Using that same logic, no one should aim to join (or continue to stay with) Apple or MSFT or Google or $LARGECORP as they are already very large corps with lots of talented people. They should take their talent elsewhere. /s

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#86

Post by Galanwe »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

EA is a philosophy, or a mindset. It is not defined by the actions of some group of people that pretend to follow it.

There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#87

Post by seangrogg »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

In all fairness, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was a phenomenal fanfic and if someone wants to see it syndicated at $30k that seems fine by me.

Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?

#90

Post by PragmaticPulp »

EamonnMR wrote: post #79
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, whic…

Somehow EA always comes back to spending money on 'working on AI risk' which somehow never produces anything but blog posts.

Don’t forget the 80,000 hours organization, which started as a good idea to encourage people to go into altruistic careers but then seemingly only produced volumes of podcasts and inactionable blog posts.

I recommended it to a student once who was asking about career guidance. They came back and said they couldn’t figure it out, so I went looking into it deeper. I couldn’t get anything out of it either. It was just endless rambling podcasts at the time

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