Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The least impactful way to spend $300M?

passingtime.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 291 posts

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

#151

Post by layman51 »

charcircuit wrote: post #131
layman51 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably he means that by giving money to an “elite” school, it just makes it more likely that it will end up hurting the “non-elites”. I don’t necessarily agree with that point by the way because there are students who will have their cost of attendance potentially offset by this donation.

Income inequality doesn't hurt the nonelite.

Are you being serious? I thought that trickle-down economics theory was pretty much debunked in the eyes of most of the nonelite people.

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

#152

Post by travisjungroth »

jononomo wrote: post #83
EamonnMR wrote: post #79

Earlier 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.

Consider the state of airplanes, rockets and nuclear weapons in 1923 vs 1955.

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

#153

Post by bagacrap »

boie0025 wrote: post #134
27153 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is a fascinating question. It's incredibly rhetorical, and I've sat here pondering it for a bit. It's very easy to reply to this question with "well I suppose it depends." And then tack on "What do we consider 'doing good/more good'? What is the nature/species/alignment of the lives being saved, and how are are they equal? Who decides which two lives are better to save than the one, if it's somehow decided that…

Yes good point. Would be better to save just one life if the two in question are Hitler and Stalin.

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

#154

Post by hinkley »

jimbokun wrote: post #65
hinkley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a popular communication platform and then ruin it by making it a mockery of both free speech and censorship at the same time.

That costs a lot more than $300 million.

Apparently he borrowed a lot of it, but he did have $4 billion in Twitter stock so that's fair.

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

#155

Post by charcircuit »

layman51 wrote: post #151
charcircuit wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income inequality doesn't hurt the nonelite.

Are you being serious? I thought that trickle-down economics theory was pretty much debunked in the eyes of most of the nonelite people.

I never said trickledown economics. I just said that inequality doesn't hurt people. Some rich person having a 5 star steak dinner doesn't take anything away from how much I enjoyed my own dinner. It's not a zero sum game where a rich person enjoying something takes away from what I enjoy.

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

#157

Post by dd36 »

celestialcheese wrote: post #70
JoshTko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

20% of Harvard students pay nothing. [1] 55% receive needs based scholarships, with families making less than 150k per year paying less than 15k per year. Sure there are a lot of rich kids and legacies. But to say it only benefits the wealthy is just wrong. 1 - https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet

It connects wealthy to smart kids so they can continue to protect their wealth.

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

#158

Post by bagacrap »

fancy_hammer wrote: post #100
jonifico wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is 100% not what the link says.

Hey, 82% are not 1%ers!

That distribution really is extremely heavily skewed, so I think the original comment is correct, I can't see how it's improving equality.

If 1.8% were poor and Harvard helped them become rich adults, probably 65% were rich and Harvard helped them stay rich as adults.

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

#160

Post by m3kw9 »

Who cares, have he kept that money there would be no article saying that 300mil sitting in his portfolio isn’t doing anything good to society. At least it’s a school, 5% months any the number to look at, it’s 300million of resources.
Post reply on HN