I suspect that altruistic impact is less linear in money, and that there are a lot of other details about the way things play out, that affect altruistic impact. For instance, I suspect that FTX could have had a significant positive impact if it had quit with SBF making enough to earmark a billion dollars for charity. That would have been enough money to champion the values and start a pattern of altruism that ultimately could have been continued by other donors (ironically, Nick Beckstead makes the point that individual funders may have relatively few good grants to make and that’s why Future Fund experimented with delegating grantmaking to a larger number of regrantors; I think a similar point applies at the foundation level as well).
This would obviously have been better than what ultimately transpired, but I suspect it would have been better even in properly done expected value calculations. This is a tricky point to justify and I won’t attempt to do it here.
This doesn’t seem so hard to argue to me. Diminishing marginal returns to the amount invested in these innovative exploratory long termist research and impact projects. The fact that they found it hard to scale quickly and felt ‘talent and vetting constrained’ offers evidence of this.
This doesn’t seem so hard to argue to me. Diminishing marginal returns to the amount invested in these innovative exploratory long termist research and impact projects. The fact that they found it hard to scale quickly and felt ‘talent and vetting constrained’ offers evidence of this.