Returning to this 5 years later, having been reminded of it by Jeff Kauffman’s recent post. I’m a bit embarrassed to recall having written this, because in the past few weeks I’d actively resisted being informed about the Alex Bores campaign, despite being fairly close to some of its organizers.
I rate this a 2⁄5 post retrospectively.
I agree the title is bad and misleading. There are two basic theses going on in here which I still agree with:
Small donors are currently irrelevant in most philanthropic endeavors compared to institutional funding (at the time FTX, and currently Anthropic).
Conversely, if charitable money should be spent on political action, it is best supplied by small donors.
As you pointed out, this is not a complete argument for(3. Small donors should supply money to political action); it’s missing (2.1. Charitable money should be spent on political action). That’s fine; this could have been deliberately written to expose the partial proof, and signposted that 2.1 still needed a strong case built for it. It would have been more useful in that format.
From Jeff’s post linked above, it seems like some people did have this takeaway nevertheless.
But I also know that I wrote this post in a disingenuous way, and dislike it for that reason more than the poor logic. The main point was to drive people towards Elizabeth’s potential donor list, and that’s a disguised motive that becomes a gotcha towards the end.
I’m not sure how many signatures Elizabeth got from this, but I feel that it would have been both more honest and more effective to just have a convincing direct argument for why you should get on that list, and for me not to have published this piece until I could come up with one.
I think the further work section still roughly holds up. Glad to see Eric Neyman championing work in this vein.
Returning to this 5 years later, having been reminded of it by Jeff Kauffman’s recent post. I’m a bit embarrassed to recall having written this, because in the past few weeks I’d actively resisted being informed about the Alex Bores campaign, despite being fairly close to some of its organizers.
I rate this a 2⁄5 post retrospectively.
I agree the title is bad and misleading. There are two basic theses going on in here which I still agree with:
Small donors are currently irrelevant in most philanthropic endeavors compared to institutional funding (at the time FTX, and currently Anthropic).
Conversely, if charitable money should be spent on political action, it is best supplied by small donors.
As you pointed out, this is not a complete argument for (3. Small donors should supply money to political action); it’s missing (2.1. Charitable money should be spent on political action). That’s fine; this could have been deliberately written to expose the partial proof, and signposted that 2.1 still needed a strong case built for it. It would have been more useful in that format.
From Jeff’s post linked above, it seems like some people did have this takeaway nevertheless.
But I also know that I wrote this post in a disingenuous way, and dislike it for that reason more than the poor logic. The main point was to drive people towards Elizabeth’s potential donor list, and that’s a disguised motive that becomes a gotcha towards the end.
I’m not sure how many signatures Elizabeth got from this, but I feel that it would have been both more honest and more effective to just have a convincing direct argument for why you should get on that list, and for me not to have published this piece until I could come up with one.
I think the further work section still roughly holds up. Glad to see Eric Neyman championing work in this vein.