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MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

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Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#41

Post by Starman_Jones »

joshjob42 wrote: post #36

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…

For the cost to develop the polio vaccine, March of Dimes could have bought enough iron lungs to save 12,000 lives. Of course, they had no idea what the actual number would be beforehand; all they knew is that they were spending enormous sums of money on something that could turn out to be a catastrophic waste, rather than saving thousands of lives. At the end of the day, they felt that was a worthwhile risk. With hindsight, we can see that they right.

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#42

Post by red-iron-pine »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #27
ks2048 wrote: post #15

Even if all her donations were a complete waste, one can argue every $1B taken from the oligarch class is a win - less money to buy media outlets and politicians.

Vanguard, black rock, fidelity etc own /manager 3x the AMZN that bezos does, so more concretely you're taking $3 out of random Americans retirement funds for every dollar you take out of bezos' pocket

those funds sit on far more than just Amazon and are hedged across many different companies entirely for the purposes of avoiding the risks associated with one company.

most Americans have trivial amounts of money in retirement anyway; the median balance is at about $38,176

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#43

Post by apparent »

smt88 wrote: post #21
rescripting wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not seeing any evidence that she was an early Amazon investor. Where is that claim from? Of course she was an investor through her marriage, but you claim she'd be a billionaire without the divorce, so presumably you're referring to investment other than through her husband.

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#44

Post by joshjob42 »

Starman_Jones wrote: post #41
joshjob42 wrote: post #36

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…

For the cost to develop the polio vaccine, March of Dimes could have bought enough iron lungs to save 12,000 lives. Of course, they had no idea what the actual number would be beforehand; all they knew is that they were spending enormous sums of money on something that could turn out to be a catastrophic waste, rather than saving thousands of lives. At the end of the day, they felt that was a worthwhile risk. With hi…

Sure and if she was funding high cost high risk high reward research I'd say that's a good case for that being higher in expected value but higher variance than GiveWell, but she is mostly not doing that, instead giving to basically normal causes and institutions to spend money on the things they were anyway.

The value of a billionaire lies on their ability to concentrate large sums of capital on high risk projects with enormous upside. Spending money instead on fairly pedestrian applications of money for philanthropy doesn't do that, she has more closely approximated taking an index fund or generic philanthropy. That's fine but has none of the benefits of concentrated wealth to kick us over local maximuma and none of the enormously higher utility of genuinely effective causes.

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#45

Post by cyanydeez »

xhevahir wrote: post #39
mattgrice wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

effective altruism is about saying to yourself "I deserve this" and then pretending there's some divine right to deserve it because you'll go outrace capitalisms broad damage.

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#46

Post by oklahomasports »

Paradigm2020 wrote: post #34
oklahomasports wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Amazon has generated hundreds of billions in value. She has no interest in generating anything useful. Her charity is lazy unoriginal and self aggrandizing

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#47

Post by jambalaya8 »

smt88 wrote: post #32
jambalaya8 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. I think the most likely scenario is probably neither of them would have become wealthy, or at least nearly as wealthy. So much of success in tech up til the early through even sorta late-90s ('97-'99) was timing and what could pass as luck. And people weren't nearly as vicious. So few people, relatively, were in a position to start online companies back then. I am sure many of us have moments we look back at and just cringe at opportunities we didn't follow through on.

I do wonder who would have been Bezo's alternate (someone would have built something like Amazon). I wonder less who would have been Scott's, at least up until 2003/2005 when she started being known more as a name of her own.

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#48

Post by Paradigm2020 »

oklahomasports wrote: post #46
Paradigm2020 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you agree that buying / getting a mega yacht build is even less creative and definitely countless times less impactful ?

Amazon has generated hundreds of billions in value. She has no interest in generating anything useful. Her charity is lazy unoriginal and self aggrandizing

Someone else would have won the everything store / market if bezos had never been born...

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#49

Post by oklahomasports »

Paradigm2020 wrote: post #48
oklahomasports wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has generated hundreds of billions in value. She has no interest in generating anything useful. Her charity is lazy unoriginal and self aggrandizing

Someone else would have won the everything store / market if bezos had never been born...

Most definitely would not have been someone of her caliber though!

Re: MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

#50

Post by Paradigm2020 »

oklahomasports wrote: post #49
Paradigm2020 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else would have won the everything store / market if bezos had never been born...

Most definitely would not have been someone of her caliber though!

Not sure I understand what you mean... Anyway have a pleasant evening/day
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