She is an outlier in the sense that she is both “new money” and also “old money” (she did the equivalent of inheriting money in her settlement with Bezos). She was, at one time, a normal person, with normal friends and normal parents. However unlike most other “new money” billionaires she acquired her wealth without the corrupting influence of being a master of the universe business person where everyone in your circ…
She wasn’t a passive housewife who inherited money in a divorce. She was an early Amazon investor and helped build the first stage of the company. She’d be a billionaire even without the divorce.
Would she have made money from Amazon had she not married Bezos? Or even from any dotcom?
She wasn’t a passive housewife who inherited money in a divorce. She was an early Amazon investor and helped build the first stage of the company. She’d be a billionaire even without the divorce.
Would she have made money from Amazon had she not married Bezos? Or even from any dotcom?
Would Bezos have made Amazon if he hadn’t married Scott? The answer seems to be no. She was an instrumental early contributor, and she supported him while he lost enormous amounts of money for many years before Amazon became profitable.
Speaking for myself, just knowing there is someone in the billionaire class who is still an incandescent beacon of humanity, humility, and hope has in some nontrivial way increased the quality of my years since she started on this path. She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.
the worlds GDP is like $120,000,000,000,000. Her work is worthless in comparison. the only possible benefit of concentrated wealth is taking concentrated bets on a new research or technology or social organization. But to give to generic charities is a waste of time and reveals a profound lack of creativity on her part.
Would you agree that buying / getting a mega yacht build is even less creative and definitely countless times less impactful ?
Interesting that I could _immediately_ tell the model visualization was built with Claude
same. i see the unadulterated Claude Design-ness everywhere then i start eating burnt sienna crayons and before you know it my commode has a style guide
It's a real shame that she has wasted her money so catastrophically. You can save a life via GiveWell for what 5k or so? At best she saves one year of life for a dozen times that. On a QALY basis, she's probably 300x or more worse. I'm not saying someone has to give all their charitable giving to GiveWell or similar, but if you're not you should probably have a very strong argument why not (for instance, high risk basic research you find unusually promising, or trying to solve an engineering challenge that would unlock huge value etc), or admit to yourself that you aren't primarily trying to help people but to further some particular value to yourself. You could donate $5k to the local school so they can renovate the art room, but in doing so you're deciding to do that rather than save a life. That's fine, but it's functionally more like buying concert tickets or a new TV -- the improvements you're making in others lives are tiny by comparison to what you could have bought with that money instead (a save life with GiveWell), so that part obviously has negligible weight in your decision, it's primarily about your personal enjoyment of furthering particular values. Again, that's fine, we all do that. She's just decided to take a course of action that is much closer to buying giant yachts and football teams or a vanity run for office than try to make the world a better place while trying to look like she's trying to make the world a better place.
Smells like EA. The "Evidence stance" measure in particular, which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage, is rank pseudoscience.
> which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage
That's not what it does.
Some of the studies showed a causal relationship clearly. Some showed merely an association with a plausible argument about why it was mostly causal. You can decide what proportion of the unproven effects to include.
In reality, there's more causal effects than those that are proven, but not all of these measured associations are causal.
It's a real shame that she has wasted her money so catastrophically. You can save a life via GiveWell for what 5k or so? At best she saves one year of life for a dozen times that. On a QALY basis, she's probably 300x or more worse. I'm not saying someone has to give all their charitable giving to GiveWell or similar, but if you're not you should probably have a very strong argument why not (for instance, high risk ba…
There's room for lots of improvement to our world, and "lives saved" is not the only metric.
Smells like EA. The "Evidence stance" measure in particular, which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage, is rank pseudoscience.
It's just trying to visualize bang for buck. Not science, much less pseudoscience. EA ended up getting coopted by people who weren't interested in altruism at all but that doesn't seem like this.
It's an arbitrary metric that creates an illusion of rigor. That looks to me like an instance of the quantitative (or McNamara) fallacy, and a pretty typical application of pseudoscience.
Speaking for myself, just knowing there is someone in the billionaire class who is still an incandescent beacon of humanity, humility, and hope has in some nontrivial way increased the quality of my years since she started on this path. She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.
Right, but she is not pathologically like the other billionaires. She married a man who became one. Same with Melinda Gates. So I guess our hope is that more billionaires will lust after young Russians or hot newscasters and get divorced, so their normal wives can do what normal people do with more money than they’d even need and help others.
Precisely, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to have 100 million dollars and decide that you need to "keep going".