I find some of the statements in your post a bit jarring, and this is not the first time I feel like this when reading your writing. The founders of Good Ventures are multi-billionaires who have been influenced by EA ideas which stem to some extent from the EA community. This is excellent. But the EA community does not have ownership over this money. Your writing makes it sound like it does, which I find presumptuous and off-putting.
For the future, I would recommend that you should try to better understand the relationships between different individuals and institutions that are associated with the Effective Altruism community before asking questions like this one.
The founders of Good Ventures are multi-billionaires who have been influenced by EA ideas which stem to some extent from the EA community. This is excellent. But the EA community does not have ownership over this money.
I’m very fond of this quote from Louis C.K. (comedian) below and generally view the world through this lens:
“I never viewed money as being ‘my money’ I always saw it as ‘The money’ It’s a resource. if it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.”
In other words, Cari and I are stewards of this capital. It’s pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. We are not perfect in applying this attitude, but we try very hard.
All that said, it turns out to be quite difficult to flush such a large sum back into the world in a way you can feel confident about, which is why we started Good Ventures (http://www.goodventures.org/) and work so closely with GiveWell. But we’re learning more and more every day and accelerating our pace as we do. We intend not to have much left when we die (i.e. we have a “burn down” foundation).
fwiw, a printout of that quote was posted on the wall at GiveWell when I worked there. I think it’s a great sentiment & it made me happy to be regularly reminded of it.
I find some of the statements in your post a bit jarring, and this is not the first time I feel like this when reading your writing. The founders of Good Ventures are multi-billionaires who have been influenced by EA ideas which stem to some extent from the EA community. This is excellent. But the EA community does not have ownership over this money. Your writing makes it sound like it does, which I find presumptuous and off-putting.
For the future, I would recommend that you should try to better understand the relationships between different individuals and institutions that are associated with the Effective Altruism community before asking questions like this one.
(writing in personal capacity here, not as a mod)
cf. this Quora answer (a) by Dustin Moskovitz:
fwiw, a printout of that quote was posted on the wall at GiveWell when I worked there. I think it’s a great sentiment & it made me happy to be regularly reminded of it.