God, so much hate on this thread. Damned if he do, damned if he don't. Always amazes me how HN crowd loves to project their ideals on how people with money should spend their money.
FTX Future Fund
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: FTX Future Fund
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles What.
Check out some of the fund breakdowns and look at how much is spent on climate change and renewable energy https://funds.effectivealtruism.org https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund The common argument is that the best way to try and make an impact on climate change is to fund lobbyists to make change at governmental levels https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/most...
Hi there exdsq, I run a nonprofit, Quill.org, that serves five million students in the United States, and I am building an educational tool that is very similar to the "cognitive aid" goal listed as a project idea. I'm hoping to get some feedback from someone who is familiar with this space, and I was wondering if you had a moment to scan over our application before we send it? If you're interested in taking a look, it'd be a huge help if you could reach out to me at peter (at) quill (dot) org! I'd be really grateful for your input.
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The learning tool we are building now maps to this project idea from the FTX Fund: "AI-based cognitive aids - One of the great hopes for advanced AI systems is that they might enhance human reason—allowing people to explore lines of argument more carefully and efficiently, and to detect important errors in their reasoning. We’d like to kickstart this work, so that it keeps up with AI progress as much as possible. For example, could a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 be trained to identify misleading statements, and provide the best arguments and counterarguments for different views? We’d love to see products with this sort of technology that people will actually want to use."
Re: FTX Future Fund
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy is a very important problem but also one that is heavily funded and researched. It makes more sense to focus on underfunded issues that offer a high reward. I argue that energy should be more funded for what it's worth, but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles.
> but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles What.
One of the basic metrics that EA people track is "neglect," so if there's a way to make a big impact that actually seems possible to do, but also there's already a lot of people and money doing it (ie., it's not "neglected"), then EA people will mostly just let the other people do it.
The idea is to spend each marginal dollar in a high impact way, and a marginal dollar into a cause area that is already flush with cash won't make a big difference.
Getting more talent (instead of money) into the field is a different kind of intervention, but the energy field fails a different metric here which is "tractability," in the sense that EA people don't have any particular expertise or advantage in recruiting or training game-changing talent for the field, so it's not "tractable" even though it would hypothetically be nice if more top talent were in the field.
Re: FTX Future Fund
#64The "Project Ideas" section has next to nothing regarding energy. Surprising given the focus on "humanity's long-term prospects".
FTX has a dedicated Climate initiative: https://www.ftx-climate.com/
Re: FTX Future Fund
#65textbook greenwashing. if they want to make the world a better place, shut down FTX and stop enabling the insane, planet incinerating, fraud enabling, money laundering, rogue regime financing, fake tech breakthrough called "crypto". crypto companies like FTX should be viewed with the same disdain as Big Oil and Big Tobacco. this is like investing with ExxonMobil to stop climate change. don't fall for it. https://corp…
Here's how FTX deals with climate: https://www.ftx-climate.com/
Is your stance on the environment what led you to leave the auto industry?
Re: FTX Future Fund
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to look at this founder and say he isn't extremely well intentioned. For a very young guy in this scene you'd expect expensive watches and cars, but instead he drives a budget car, is giving away a great majority of his wealth, and seems to truly care. The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. His track record…
> The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. There is no way you posted that with a straight face.
-_-
Sam's primary motivation to generate money is to fund Effective Altruism.
Re: FTX Future Fund
#67God, so much hate on this thread. Damned if he do, damned if he don't. Always amazes me how HN crowd loves to project their ideals on how people with money should spend their money.
Yes because no billionaire has ever actually been as amazingly ethical as they have claimed. It’s not really damned on either side for the guys who got rich off this.
Re: FTX Future Fund
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. There is no way you posted that with a straight face.
It's worth giving this a read [0]. [0] https://80000hours.org/stories/sam-bankman-fried/
If telling people you were going to do something was actually doing it, we wouldn't need contracts
Re: FTX Future Fund
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
"good things" is someone who claims to want to give his money away yet keeps getting richer, and is also getting a lot of his wealth by running an ethically dubious crypto exchange that is plastering its name on anything that will take their money?
He does give money away but it's hard to give quickly unless you just spray and pray which is against his ideals. And I don't agree that FTX is dubious, I think they're a genuine legit exchange. I take from your comment that your issue is with crypto, which is fine, but people are making money in that space and if someone wants to use that to their advantage to make a load of money for charitable causes I'm all for i…
So essentially, as long as he says he is only making all of this money so he can donate it, he gets the prestige of having already donated it without having done so yet, as well as a free pass to make the money however he sees fit?