His “donation” is essentially just a couple updates to some database tables. He doesn’t need the money, Harvard doesn’t need the money, neither will buy or not buy something as a result of the transaction, it’s just numbers moved from Griffin’s row to Harvard’s row. What else would you expect from two entities exchanging money when both have far more than they’ll ever need?
The least impactful way to spend $300M?
121–130 of 291 posts
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#122I 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.
Do you think the same argument applies to communism?
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
30k is 0.01% of 300m, or 1 part in 10,000. It was also just a small part of 900k of grants given out to many different works. This is how art grants work. They are tiny - in the 10k to 50k range, a few thousand are given out. Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those p…
> Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding? Ignoring the fact that you don't know how art grants work, you seem to be (carefully) ignoring the entire proposed idea behind Effective Altruism.
Why do you assume making a bunch of cheap but potentially impactful bets is an ineffective strategy?
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought buying a really rare stamp, then mailing it thus destroying its value, was pretty cool :)
That might not work as he expected. Some items are "condition rarities" -- it's worth a fortune in never used condition, but nothing special when worn. Other items are rare as long as they can be reliably attributed. You could run a 1804 US dollar over with a locomotive and it would still be worth six or seven figures as long as the date could be identified. I'd expect plenty of the "rare" stamps would hold a signifi…
Totally pedantic here but he didn’t have to destroy the stamps value - he just had to transfer that value without “giving it away”.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#125I 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…
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#126Could this be some tax and investment dance? Perhaps the money will be used by Harvard to buy a security he holds or has options on washing his hands clean of SEC oversight. Then he executes on the predictable market move, makes the money back and writes down the donation for taxes. Meanwhile, Harvard is still holding whatever long term position they opened so they too are happy. Their cover story is some rather chea…
I think neither a 40-billionaire nor Harvard would risk legal trouble by pulling off such an easily auditable maneuver.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Shareholder primacy" led to the invention of modern vaccines and mRNA discoveries. Was this a poor longterm corporate investment?
Did it really? Wasn't the research leading to mRNA vaccines performed in a grant-funded university lab?
It was Moderna and they are not a grant funded university lab
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvard produced many of the people that built a society with staggering and increasing levels of income inequality. Consultants, hedge fund managers, architects of super addictive social media platforms, politicians who write laws favoring corporations over workers, etc. etc.
Partly, but it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago who helped lay the framework for the "shareholder primacy" theory that really paved the way for the poor longterm corporate management of the last couple of decades.
As if CEOs wouldn't be trying to max their stock value without the word of Milton Friedman
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did it really? Wasn't the research leading to mRNA vaccines performed in a grant-funded university lab?
It was Moderna and they are not a grant funded university lab
They didn't do the foundational research. They licensed a patent that came out of research from University of Pennsylvania and applied it to COVID.
Re: The least impactful way to spend $300M?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In all fairness, the human driven ones crash an awful lot too!
Keep in mind that truly reliable and robust AI driving will save 10s of millions of lives and trillions of dollars of avoided economic losses.
Creating AI that can drive a car that virtually never crashes will be the pinnacle of software engineering, and a turning point in our civilization.
The savings in blood and money can’t come soon enough, but otherwise it’s basically a Very Good Thing it’s going to take a little while to get it really working.
We’re not really ready for the implications of software that can reason that well in the real world.