A thought that motivates my other comments on this thread: reviewing my GWWC donations a while ago, I realised that if I suddenly had lots of money, one of the first questions I would ask myself is “what friends and acquaintances should I fund?”. To an outsider this kind of thing can look like rather non-altruistic nepotism, but from the inside it seems like betting on the opportunities that you are unusually able to see. I think it actually is the latter, at least sometimes. My impression is that for profit investors do a lot of “nepotistic investing”, but I suspect that values like altruism and impartiality and transparency (as well as constraints of charitable legal status) make EA funders reluctant to go hard on this method.
A thought that motivates my other comments on this thread: reviewing my GWWC donations a while ago, I realised that if I suddenly had lots of money, one of the first questions I would ask myself is “what friends and acquaintances should I fund?”. To an outsider this kind of thing can look like rather non-altruistic nepotism, but from the inside it seems like betting on the opportunities that you are unusually able to see. I think it actually is the latter, at least sometimes. My impression is that for profit investors do a lot of “nepotistic investing”, but I suspect that values like altruism and impartiality and transparency (as well as constraints of charitable legal status) make EA funders reluctant to go hard on this method.