I apologize for the unproductive way I conveyed myself in the first iteration of this essay. The link will direct you to the original, less productive version of the essay, if you want the context on that.
I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll say it again: I’m worried about Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s (possible) IPOs.
Tl;dr: there’s a good chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI becomes a publicly traded company in the near future. Somehow this makes a lot of capital that was previously solid melt into a liquid. That liquid capital can then be given to whatever the people who own it want it to be given to. Some of those people have good intentions, and thus have committed to giving much of that liquid capital away to charitable causes.
Before I start: one thing I didn’t emphasize in the previous version of this, which I regret, is that this isn’t directed specifically at those who are currently giving their money away. The situation we’re currently in with all these IPOs is the result of a broader culture and set of institutions which have concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. I still believe that if you’re a billionaire, donating ~80% of your wealth is somewhere close to the bare minimum. But I recognize that it’s much better than, say, the SpaceX IPO, which is definitely not going to do anything good for society. And don’t get me started on Elon Musk himself.
Upon reflection, what genuinely upsets me is this broader culture in the background—the culture of moving fast and breaking things and moving on to the next. Someone drops out and upends their life, moves to SF, then pitches some halfway-decent idea, and they get their millions. Or they make a company that could end the world and which has everyone else racing to keep up. In this culture, everything is just a game. Money is just numbers on a screen, or tucked away in a remote account.
It’s something I think has only gotten worse over time. For example, I was outraged when I learned that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, no individuals were ever held accountable. The banks paid fat bonuses to their executives, none of whom were even charged AT ALL for their role in the crisis. Not even a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, ordinary people had to suffer the foreclosure of their homes and the loss of their jobs. The failure to hold those people accountable has, in all likelihood, only emboldened that culture.
It’s all the more outrageous when we think about the other side of this world. There are people in this world who have gone their whole lives without the tiniest fraction of what these Silicon Valley types let slip between their fingers. People who can’t buy a cart to hold their vegetables. People who sell their children into slavery because starvation is the alternative. People whose children are dying from malaria because they can’t even get nets to protect themselves. That money that could save lives regularly gets tossed around without a second, or even a first, thought in places like Silicon Valley does enrage me. And I want to recognize that Effective Altruists and our community share that outrage at such waste and unfairness.
Perhaps that’s why I’m so viscerally upset at our current state of affairs, as to say that the current vibe in some parts of the EA community is cavalier is a massive understatement. One of the first-place essays in the Manifund essay competition basically says: come to where all the money is; we don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna do with it, but we’ll figure something out. Come up with a halfway decent idea, and we’ll give you 6-7 figures per year and see if the “long shot” pans out.
I’m also upset because we’ve already seen how this kind of thing can fail before. FTX threw tens of millions of dollars into stupid shit like the halftime superbowl ad and various celebrity endorsements. I stand by my assessment that these were really stupid ideas dressed up as long-shots. Even many of the less stupid ideas, like the Carrick Flynn campaign, were costly and ultimately fruitless embarrassments. And then, of course, FTX and Alameda Research got exposed for fraud, and the EA movement did a surprised pikachu face. All of that promised windfall just blew away. And all of us were left to pick up the pieces. Though before we pity ourselves too much, let’s remember that we probably weren’t the most viscerally affected.
I joined the EA community right as the FTX fallout was happening, so maybe it left a greater impression on me than most. I was just shocked and outraged to hear datum after datum about how careless Sam and others at FTX and Alameda were. So forgive me if I see what’s happening right now and jump to conclusions that the same thing is happening again.
What’s so upsetting about all of this is that we know better. We are the community that is all about being effective, that wants to do the most good, that is supposed to take saving lives seriously. Yet I worry that what we’re doing is just falling into the Silicon Valley culture and dressing it up as altruism. Again.
GiveDirectly should be the reference point here, as it so often is elsewhere, because it’s literally as simple as giving money to people who actually need it. If your program can’t come close to saving a life for $10,000 or the equivalent, then don’t do it. Or make it better first.
Again, I should be clear again that much of the blame rests on the system we have and those before us who built (or broke) it. Ideally, we would follow something along the lines of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “skin in the game”: one should personally bear the consequences of his own policies. The architect who builds a bridge should be comfortable sleeping under it. The executive who pushes subprime loans should be comfortable with life in prison. It’s for the worse that our society has so enabled “fragilistas” (myself included) to set policies without cowering under the sharp blade of genuine consequences. Maybe there’s a small chance that society figures out the fragilista problem before Anthropic/OpenAI does its IPO thing, but in the event that it doesn’t, we’ll have to entrust the distribution of those billions of dollars to a few elite fragilistas who have no skin in the game; whose median worst case scenario is probably having to move back home with their affluent parents. To put it lightly, this is an incentive structure that does not inspire trust, and it is thus up to individuals to create something worthy of trust despite that. So it is to these people whom I now speak.
To the people pitching ideas for this windfall: think of the dozens, if not hundreds, of lives your ideas will cost in opportunity. And then think about whether it’s still worth it, given that.
And to the big funders themselves: above all, do not deceive yourselves. You know as well as I do that people will worship you if this windfall is distributed anywhere near successfully. So don’t worry about that. Worry about whether your donations, in total, will do as much good as saving at least 30 million human lives.
That’s right. 30 million lives.
How did I get that number? Well, a recent estimate of the size of the windfall puts it at about $370 billion in total. An estimate of GiveDirectly’s effectiveness puts it at about 7.7 WELLBYs for $1,000, or about one life for every $10,000. Yes, there are diminishing returns. Yes, you can nitpick the math. But the point still stands.
You have all the power here, and therefore, all the responsibility. This isn’t some kind of game where you exchange your casino chips for social credit points. You are playing with peoples’ lives.
This level of aggression towards well-intentioned funders & NGO founders is a net negative. If this kind of discourse were normalized, I think it would reduce engagement with effective charity.
In response to “I hope [the big funders are not] fucking sleeping at night”:
I hope the big funders are sleeping well, getting rest, and engaged with their hobbies. Perpetual terror is not a good mindset for making high stakes decisions.
This is a fair criticism. I wasn’t clear that my negativity is directed towards the Silicon Valley/limited liability culture in general, and that these IPOs are just a manifestation of that.
Upvoted for recognizing a problem & responding thoughtfully.
I notice a huge influx of substack reposts on the forum, and with it, a decline in community norms around writing style.
It’s unfortunate that blog posts are generally designed to attract readers, and rarely to seek truth.
I was surprised to read the content of the post because the title is something I strongly agree with, but the post itself isn’t really about the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things. Instead, it’s a rant about the opportunity cost of spending money on long shots.
I think conversations around risk tolerance and our tolerance for mismanaged money are very important, but I think posts like this don’t do a good job of moving these conversations forward. There are good arguments to be made on both the risk-neutral and the risk-averse sides, but the effect of one side getting screamed at is likely to just raise hackles. Because these conversations are important, they should be conducted with the patience and grace appropriate to any major problem. I don’t think this sort of post is good for the forum.
Thank you for your feedback. I agree that my anger was aimed at the wrong target and not communicated well. I’ve made changes which hopefully clarify things a little.
One thing I should have done was to distinguish long shots from what I consider to be quixotic quests. Working on wild animal welfare or insect welfare is a long shot that I wholeheartedly support. Paying millions for a superbowl commercial is a quixotic quest. Of course, there’s disagreement on what falls into one or the other, but what my criticism is primarily aimed at is things that are quixotic quests or bordering on quixotic.
Thanks everyone for the constructive feedback. I apologize for two things: 1) misdirecting my anger towards the big donors when it was really directed at the Silicon Valley culture as a whole, and 2) not communicating myself as productively and effectively as I should have. I’ve made changes based on that and welcome further feedback and thoughts.
This post speaks to the first principles and EA-agnostic part of me. I think anger is totally fine and don’t really agree with the emotionless aspect of EA. If the forum’s objective is a professional organization with formality, then sure. But if its more flexible in the direction of Reddit, I’m happy to read and resonate the raw and hard aspects of striving for suffering alleviation. Good for diversity of thought. (Minus uh ecoterrorism equivalent sentiment)
Low confidence flag, but from what I’ve heard, even GiveDirectly would be saturated quite early by that amount of money, and not be able to distribute it. If anyone has a figure on where that threshold is (or thinks I’m wrong), I’d be interested!
My sense is that you’re right. IIRC diminishing returns are more salient for AMF than for GiveDirectly, and one of the key arguments pro GiveDirectly would be that flat returns persist longer—but probably when they make this argument they’re thinking on the scale of $100M–$1B, not hundreds of billions.
Perhaps the best case in point would be Bolsa Família: ~$30B yearly budget, one of the largest conditional cash transfer programs in the world, increased ~5-fold over the past few years, noticeably turned into a less effective program imho, but still seems like one of the most effective programs from the Brazilian government
I wouldn’t think of this as a matter of thresholds but continuously decreasing returns, tho
This makes sense to me, and I recognize it would be harder than just tossing money onto the streets. The point I was trying to make is that the bar is pretty high, and the vibes I’m getting are that we are far short of that bar at the moment.
I agree that something like Give Directly is in principle the right thing to compare to as a baseline. I do not think the comparison is obvious, and I think it may go the opposite way. GiveDireclty has a positive effect on the people you are actually giving money to. First order wise, it is a big win. However, I am pretty doubtful that is has meaningful second order effects. It doesn’t help an economy develop. It doesn’t change a countries society long term, much less humanities. To succeed long term, we need economies to develop, which requires large pools of capital and lots of long shot bets, which is exactly what silicon valley specializes in. That is the kind of investment that has the potential to dramatically increase the number and well-being of humans many years and centuries down the road. That said, that makes any actual quantitative comparison to GiveDirectly extremely fraught. I don’t know of a good way to do the comparison. If you think GiveDirectly still outweighs other uses of money, that is a respectable position, but it is not an obvious one even after accepting EA principles.