The least impactful way to spend $300M?

Hmm I didn't consider second-order impact, but still think it's gotta be one of the least impactful ways, strictly speaking. "Spending," is a loose term but if burning a sum of cash that large... maybe that's impactful to the climate

The rich also enjoy healthcare

God I just don't buy the "these people will go on to benefit humanity" argument anymore. We don't need more tech companies. We don't need more hedge funds. We don't need to feed our genuinely brightest minds into the wealth consolidation machine.

Occasioanlly one of these people will find some one-off bit of brilliance that lifts an entire class of people out of poverty, but that ticket has an expiration date tied to the 19th century. Eventually those free spaces will run out. They're already starting to in the western world.

"Effective Altruism" (centered around William MacAskill), the "Rationalist Movement" (centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky), the general billionaire philanthropism (most prominent being Bill Gates), the "Universal Basic Income" crowd (of which apparently OpenAI and Sam Altman are spearheading a research project), miss the greater context in which charity takes place: all charity is fundamentally ineffective, charity is the side effect of a failed system, charity will never bring revolution and even worse charity will actively suppress revolution. In a better system there would be no need for charity.

Revolution used to mean pitchforks and guillotines (the French especially loved them), but today, funnily enough, that would be ineffective even if the people would be able to close their favorite streaming channel and wake up. Even in the 1950s it would have been ineffective. A revolution in the 1950s would have probably looked like this: 100% taxation over $50 million (in today's money). Like in a memory-constrained video game, once you reach 9999 coins you can't store more. We should have capped capitalism a long time ago, give the lucky winner a medal, and that's it. We could probably try today this idea, but (i) there is no coagulated we to make it work after at least 158 years of divisiveness and (ii) it's probably too late and it would also be ineffective.

A revolution today would take completely other form from the past. After all, "you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions". Today's revolution, able to wake up every single human from whatever slumber and coagulate them into a we, the people would probably be raising the lifespan to 1,000 years. Not 120, not 200, but straight 1,000, an x10 improvement just like the venture capitalists enjoy. The fact that today you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 90 doesn't seem too much of an issue, and you are willing to accept the system for some minor benefit, if any. But if you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 900, now that's when you start having issues.

How to get to 1,000 years lifespan? 2-3 years ago I would have said mind-uploading, thinking that biochemistry has been surpassed by our magnificent, crystalline-structured silicon. After a global pandemic and some personal eye-openings, literally looking inside myself on the operating table, I would say that we won't be near biochemistry with our toys for the next thousands of years, and it won't actually be needed, we can learn to programatically interface with the cells and just say, top-down, "you, the cells, already know how to build an eye, you did it once, rebuild one here", don't scar, regenerate [1]. 1,000 year lifespan is achievable with 100% organ, tissue regeneration, and then the revolution begins, hopefully.

Coming back to the point, an "effective altruism" would put all the billions and trillions into organ regeneration research, however, oddly enough, that's not even in the general discussion.

[1] Michael Levin talk on bioelectricity at Stanford Chemical Engineering Colloquium, https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470

Who says large funds don't have long-term stakes and can't help make long-term decisions?

Fund managers want perhaps to see quarterly profits for their fund, but that's not the same thing as quarterly profits at the underlying companies. Your fund can also profit, if the stock prices of the underlying companies rise.

To give some existence proofs, have a look at how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla etc had rising share prices long before they ever returned any money to shareholders.

Or how shortly into the covid pandemic market prices for stocks recovered, even though the pandemic wasn't over at all: that was purely based on investors looking to the longer term future.

> [...] and their fund may not even own shares in that company in a year's time.

For that to happen, they need to sell the company to someone else, and that other person will pay more for a company with a bright future.