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The least impactful way to spend $300M?

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

#281

Post by cutemonster »

inertiatic wrote: post #122
Galanwe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA is a philosophy, or a mindset. It is not defined by the actions of some group of people that pretend to follow it. There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.

Do you think the same argument applies to communism?

A broken comparison. Communism is fundamentally bad, both the idea and implementations.

Comparing EA with education is better.

Education is a fundamentally good idea, however, there exist corrupt universities and teachers, e.g. giving students too good grades, just to attract more students and funding. Or teachers asking for bribes.

But that doesn't make education as a concept, a bad idea.

And EA-the-concept: thinking about how you spend any money you donate, instead of following your first impulses and feelings -- that is, like education, a fundamentally good idea.

But just like there are corrupt people in the education system, there are in EA as well.

And there are more in EA (or so it seems), because EA involves more money (and prestige?).

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

#282

Post by irjustin »

fasterik wrote: post #278
irjustin wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me. This statement forgets that the person who donated doesn't care. They actively like to hurt companies who don't deserve it and profit from it (unlike Hindenburg Research).

I could say about someone who kills a million people "well, they don't care. At least they didn't kill two million people." That doesn't seem like the right way to evaluate ethical claims. If we're talking about what would have been the right thing to do, it would have been to kill 0 people, regardless of what personality traits they have.

It's a bit weird to bring ethics into this. Of course, your example is unethical, but "donating to Harvard" is.... unethical? I have a really hard time with that. Is doing the Ice Bucket challenge unethical?

The problem with ethics discussion is we like to boil it down to it binary, ethical vs unethical. And donating to Harvard is hard pressed to be unethical. It's just not ideal.

And that's what I dislike about Effective Altruism, is it shames people for "not doing the _most_ ideal thing", which in my eyes is a pretty poor belief system to take on.

I'm saying, we're human, it's okay just don't make the world net negative... i.e. don't do unethical things.

Ken Griffin didn't do a net-negative thing (he's done plenty of net negative/unethical things in the past). So, can we just call this a win and move on? Name and shame? I'm just happy he's not deploying that money to destroy more companies.

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

#283

Post by npteljes »

eru wrote: post #172
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…

Eh, education is mostly bad for society. In the sense, that most of education is about signalling, and funneling more money into education just fuels the arms race. See Bryan Caplan's Case against Education for more details. (The part of education that's actually about learning has mostly become cheaper than ever, thanks to the power of the Internet. But unless you got a piece of paper from a university, hiring manag…

>education is mostly bad for society.

So not educating people would benefit them? I'd say it just makes them more vulnerable - looking at humanity's history.

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

#284

Post by vintermann »

27153 wrote: post #268
vintermann wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think EAs are focused on assigning credit here. It’s very consequentialist; they would say “it doesn’t matter who saved the 100 lives, it matters that they were saved.”

It matters if the 100 lives are suddenly 200 lives when you sum them up. It matters for decision making. It matters for questions like "should I rather do it myself or start a foundation to convince as many other people as possible to do it".

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

#285

Post by 27153 »

j0hnyl wrote: post #264
nmca wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity costs are real. Opportunity costs are real. Opportunity costs ARE REAL. OPPORTUNITY COSTS ARE REAL. ¡¡¡ OPPORTUNITY COSTS ARE REAL !!!

Ok, but the opportunity costs pertain solely to the spender, and even if not they are priced into the market. why do you feel entitled to the fortune that someone else decides to use for a vanity project.

How do the costs not apply to the tens of thousands of lives that could have been saved?

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

#286

Post by pas »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #250
pas wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> charity will actively suppress revolution who knows. it seems there's pretty low correlation with charity spending and revolutions. probably CIA funding of opposition groups is more "impactful".

I meant that more in a state of mind way: you give food to an unhoused person, you feel good for the charity you are doing, they feel good because they forgotten how food tastes like, neither of you are interested in overturning the system that allows the greatest object in the universe as we know it, the human brain, to rot on a sidewalk: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s b…

I think this hard love approach to forcing people to revolt doesn't really work. Just as bringing democracy by guns didn't, as strategic bombing didn't, etc.

Giving someone charity makes both parties very aware that this is an exceptional one time deal, that might be repeated, but the default is no-charity.

It takes time to build trust and alliances which is needed to then make a change.

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

#287

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#288

Post by shjake »

eru wrote: post #219
shjake wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by ‘Global Inequality’? Because income and wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in (almost)all developed countries

Why do you worry about borders? Just because eg inequality in the US might have increased, and inequality in China might have increased, doesn't mean that the inequality in their combined population has increased. I'm talking about the combined population of all humanity. See eg https://archive.is/7xWtr

> Why do you worry about borders?

Why wouldn’t you? The fact that Chinese people are much better off than they were a few decades ago has almost no bearing on the well-being of me, my family, relatives, friends or almost anyone I know.

Increasing inequality in the country I live (or countries I have the right to live in or would ever consider moving to) does.

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

#289

Post by j0hnyl »

27153 wrote: post #285
j0hnyl wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but the opportunity costs pertain solely to the spender, and even if not they are priced into the market. why do you feel entitled to the fortune that someone else decides to use for a vanity project.

How do the costs not apply to the tens of thousands of lives that could have been saved?

Because the thousands of lives were never entitled to how someone decides to spend their money in the first place, and if you believe otherwise then this literally applies to everyone and their income. Example: How can we justify going out for an ice cream, when that same money could be spent to vaccinate several people from malaria and save their lives? Why is it ok for middle class earners to spend money on frivolous things, but not for the wealthy? All that surplus money can save tens of thousands of lives!

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

#290

Post by smcin »

a4a4a4a4 wrote: post #252
bheadmaster wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're saying that ads are irrelevant because we have AdBlock? Ads would always exist, but think about how many great (even lifesaving) solutions we're missing out on because market decided they aren't worthy of pursuit.

I'm saying ads aren't "addictive", because they're pretty despised. They might be effective, when people see them, but I don't think anyone is "addicted" to ads.

It's the content (and personalized curation, based on what the platform's learned you want to see) that's addictive, not the ads. Users are addicted to the content creators, and watching ads is the price they have to pay to sit through to watch free content. Picking ads that are relevant, or at least not annoying enough to make you switch off, is part of the platform's experience. And there are creators who blend ads in as organic content, or at least a personalized endorsement which doesn't come across as phony, which MrBeast said gets the most positive response.

I recently turned off tracking, and suddenly started getting served ads for 'green cremation'. I guess statistically few people are interested in that, but conversions are lucrative, although the 99% of users who don't want to see it probably get mildly annoyed.

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