How bad is it to fund someone untrustworthy? Obviously if they take the money and run, that would be a total loss, but I doubt that’s a particularly common occurrence (you can only do it once, and would completely shatter social reputation, so even unethical people don’t tend to do that). A more common failure mode would seem to be apathy, where once funded not much gets done, because the person doesn’t really care about the problem. However, if something gets done instead of nothing at all, then that would probably be (a fairly weak) net positive. The reason why that’s normally negative is due to that money then not being used in a more cost-effective manner, but if our primary problem is spending enough money in the first place, that may not be much of an issue at all.
I think it’s easier than it might seem to do something net negative even ignoring opportunity cost. For example, actively compete with some other better project, interfere with politics or policy incorrectly, create a negative culture shift in the overall ecosystem, etc.
Besides, I don’t think the attitude that our primary problem is spending down the money is prudent. This is putting the cart before the horse, and as Habryka said might lead to people asking “how can I spend money quick?” rather than “how can I ambitiously do good?” EA certainly has a lot of money, but I think people underestimate how fast $50 billion can disappear if it’s mismanaged (see, for an extreme example, Enron).
How bad is it to fund someone untrustworthy? Obviously if they take the money and run, that would be a total loss, but I doubt that’s a particularly common occurrence (you can only do it once, and would completely shatter social reputation, so even unethical people don’t tend to do that). A more common failure mode would seem to be apathy, where once funded not much gets done, because the person doesn’t really care about the problem. However, if something gets done instead of nothing at all, then that would probably be (a fairly weak) net positive. The reason why that’s normally negative is due to that money then not being used in a more cost-effective manner, but if our primary problem is spending enough money in the first place, that may not be much of an issue at all.
I think it’s easier than it might seem to do something net negative even ignoring opportunity cost. For example, actively compete with some other better project, interfere with politics or policy incorrectly, create a negative culture shift in the overall ecosystem, etc.
Besides, I don’t think the attitude that our primary problem is spending down the money is prudent. This is putting the cart before the horse, and as Habryka said might lead to people asking “how can I spend money quick?” rather than “how can I ambitiously do good?” EA certainly has a lot of money, but I think people underestimate how fast $50 billion can disappear if it’s mismanaged (see, for an extreme example, Enron).
That’s a fair point, thank you for bringing that up :)