The least impactful way to spend $300M?

Post by abaageh » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 10:29 AM UTC

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…

Post by abaageh » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 10:37 AM UTC

55555 wrote: post #66

moneycantbuy wrote: post #26

the war in afghanistan cost taxpayers $300,000,000 per day every day for 20 years, for a total of ~$2,000,000,000,000

That is so obscene. So basically every American paid a dollar per day, I guess. (I know, ~most don't pay income taxes, but yeah.)

Post by bheadmaster » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 10:50 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #232

jwestbury wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about an even better -- and more salient -- example? Quant trading firms are gobbling up promising researchers in fields like physics and mathematics. These are people getting funded Ph.Ds at top universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, etc.), and they end up just going to companies which exist solely for the purpose of making rich people richer.

Quant firms provide value to society, hence why they are compensated for it. Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

Post by coldtea » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

blackshaw wrote: post #197

koromak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by pas » Fri, Apr 14, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #168

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…

"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…