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The least impactful way to spend $300M?

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

#191

Post by jessekv »

jessekv wrote: post #188
Gatsky wrote: post #136

There is that story about KLF actually setting fire to a million pounds [1]. Why don’t the ultra rich give away more money? Why do they spend it on super yachts, houses with 50 bathrooms, and horridly expensive luxury trinkets? Even more to the point, why do they just hang on to vast sums of money they don’t need in bank accounts or other investments? My conclusion is that there isn’t a reason, in the same way that t…

You could argue that burning plain quid efficiently distributes the value back to the other holders of quid (deflation). Burning a million quid in some thing like housing, on the other hand, selfishly removes wealth from society and the economy.

It makes me wonder- what would happen if we had wealth taxes on cash, but the money went to... no one?

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

#192

Post by kortilla »

27153 wrote: post #84
nonethewiser wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, quite frequently there are two lives less valuable than one. This is true on the many dimensions you can “measure” the value of lives.

Future potential (“women and children first”), societal compliance (criminals vs not), etc.

What you think is objectively better with something as open ended as $300m is completely subjective.

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

#193

Post by kortilla »

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

The poor kids are there to benefit the legacy kids.

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

#194

Post by PixyMisa »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44
cool_dude85 wrote: post #20

This article very briefly encapsulates everything wrong with Effective Altruism: a boneheaded assumption that this money is being donated for its societal impact, an unwillingness to try to actually understand what's going on, instead choosing to engage with the Harvard endowment on its own terms by taking the university "mission statement" seriously, and a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet purporting to identify be…

> a boneheaded assumption that this money is being donated for its societal impact Pretty hard disagree. The subtitle of this article is "Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be." The author seems pretty clear-headed about what the purpose of this gift is. The also seem to say "sure, EA isn't the end all/be all of donation guidance", but it is an easy way to highlight that Griffin's act of altruism is a…

Wait, spending $300 million to get a plaque with your name on it a vanity play?

Who knew?

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

#195

Post by ascorbic »

Gatsky wrote: post #136

There is that story about KLF actually setting fire to a million pounds [1]. Why don’t the ultra rich give away more money? Why do they spend it on super yachts, houses with 50 bathrooms, and horridly expensive luxury trinkets? Even more to the point, why do they just hang on to vast sums of money they don’t need in bank accounts or other investments? My conclusion is that there isn’t a reason, in the same way that t…

One of the important things about them burning a million quid was that they weren't super rich. That money was pretty much all of the money they had left in their earnings from royalties. They then deleted their back catalogue, so they'd no longer earn royalties. I remember at the time that the only way to buy a KLF album was a Japanese import.

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

#196

Post by vintermann »

27153 wrote: post #84
nonethewiser wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, how do you count?

One glaring obvious problem with the EA people, is that they double count.

Say I give money for bed nets, and the bed nets save 100 lives.

But say I only gave that money because Eliezer Yudkowsky convinced me to. Was it really him that saved 100 lives? Or do we divide them between us somehow? How many should go to the people who actually distributed the bed nets I paid for?

You'd think the EA people would have good answers to these questions. Or at least, any answers. But they don't. Not any consistent ones. They cheerfully double-count in all their most famous arguments.

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

#197

Post by blackshaw »

koromak wrote: post #166
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…

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…

> 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

I'm sorry but I genuinely don't understand what you're saying here. What will expire? Which "free spaces" are running out where?

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

#198

Post by diceduckmonk »

johnfn wrote: post #72
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…

> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old. Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candl…

If you can’t manage small amounts of money, you can’t manage large ones

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

#199

Post by never_inline »

jliptzin wrote: post #190
thejman5200 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory that every internet comment that starts with Eh is always wrong. So far I haven't been let down. I don't understand how you could possibly say education has negative impact on society. Top universities can and do hire faculty for the purpose of research alongside teaching. Top minds performing research obviously benefits everyone as they can make new discoveries and innovations. That has the side effe…

I think he’s talking about the institutional capture and monopolization of higher education…essentially coming away with the same skills for free from YouTube but they’re worth nothing in the market because you didn’t pay $50k/year to the higher ed cartel.

> coming away with the same skills for free from YouTube

How can I become high energy physicist on YouTube ?

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

#200

Post by AnthonyMouse »

eru wrote: post #170
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that "shareholders" stopped being people and started being large funds. When the shareholders are people with a long-term stake in the company, like the founders, they can make long-term decisions or choose not to want the absolute most profit-maximizing thing because actually they're already pretty rich and maybe some things are more important. When they're fund managers, they want quarterly prof…

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 sha…

> 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.

This was also true of Juicero and Pets.com.

Moreover, the people investing in small startups are generally not huge funds. The funds buy in after the company is established. Tesla turned a profit before they were added to the S&P 500.

> 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.

Most of the scam comes from information asymmetries. The current owners hire managers who they know will boost short-term prospects in a conspicuous way by damaging long-term prospects in subtle and hidden ways, e.g. by removing slack that increases short-term efficiency but is an existential risk to the company if anything goes wrong. This makes the company look like it's in better shape than it is to less than fully informed investors (also known as investors) and allows you to sell the shares to them for more than the company would be worth if they fully understood the risks they were taking.

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