What do you think of waiting to give for now (investing in the stock market instead) and reassessing in a few years whether to donate, in the hope that we will have a better collective understanding of the relevant considerations by that time?
I definitely think it’s relevant that we can get a better sense of the considerations, and that this will affect our future decisions.
To a first order approximation, waiting a few years means passing on the immediate (non-financial) investment opportunities. There may have analogues later, but there could be low-hanging fruit which will remain forever unpicked if we pass now, and this is what drives the impetus to invest even given the rate of improving knowledge. Whether those are ultimately good enough to invest in now comes back to being a matter of messy empirics.
As a meta-consideration, I’m particularly excited about investments which will help us in the future to assess which investments are worthwhile. This could mean early experiments with different types of thing, or putting work into measuring the effects of different investments.
Overall I still feel in favour of a bit more spending at current margins, but far from wanting longtermists to spend down all of our capital this year. But I’m super interested to have discussion about which funded/unfunded things actually do or don’t represent stock-market—beating investments for the community.
What do you think of waiting to give for now (investing in the stock market instead) and reassessing in a few years whether to donate, in the hope that we will have a better collective understanding of the relevant considerations by that time?
I definitely think it’s relevant that we can get a better sense of the considerations, and that this will affect our future decisions.
To a first order approximation, waiting a few years means passing on the immediate (non-financial) investment opportunities. There may have analogues later, but there could be low-hanging fruit which will remain forever unpicked if we pass now, and this is what drives the impetus to invest even given the rate of improving knowledge. Whether those are ultimately good enough to invest in now comes back to being a matter of messy empirics.
As a meta-consideration, I’m particularly excited about investments which will help us in the future to assess which investments are worthwhile. This could mean early experiments with different types of thing, or putting work into measuring the effects of different investments.
Overall I still feel in favour of a bit more spending at current margins, but far from wanting longtermists to spend down all of our capital this year. But I’m super interested to have discussion about which funded/unfunded things actually do or don’t represent stock-market—beating investments for the community.