I agree with your meta point (even though I half expected to read the opposite, in which case, I’d have had a point to make about the list being curated)
One thing I will say is that the list probably isn’t at all representative of “altruistic people” or “people who join EA groups”. Not only is it a set of extremely wealthy people, but there’s no actual obligation of anyone on the list to follow through with their pledge or do anything genuinely altruistic at all. I’m sure many are sincere about it, probably including the likes of Branson with actual convictions to their names, but for others it may just be relatively straightforward form of reputation laundering without the expense of actually giving the money away!
Fair point about the company age, and yeah I agree that this list is not representative of “people who join EA groups” (for many reasons), but my intuition is that these people actually are relatively altruistic by commonsense morality standards. Anil Agarwal stuck out to me as arguably the most egregious person on this list, and he pledged 75% of his wealth to charity. Milken is maybe number two, and he’s given > $1B. And of course SBF is probably high in the list of egregiousness, and seemingly was sincere in giving lots of money to charity. (Though note that SBF wasn’t in my data set because the giving pledge kicked him out.)
I would be interested in someone filtering this list by “people who have actually given >$X” and seeing if that changes the results though.
The companies are even younger than the founders!
I agree with your meta point (even though I half expected to read the opposite, in which case, I’d have had a point to make about the list being curated)
One thing I will say is that the list probably isn’t at all representative of “altruistic people” or “people who join EA groups”. Not only is it a set of extremely wealthy people, but there’s no actual obligation of anyone on the list to follow through with their pledge or do anything genuinely altruistic at all. I’m sure many are sincere about it, probably including the likes of Branson with actual convictions to their names, but for others it may just be relatively straightforward form of reputation laundering without the expense of actually giving the money away!
Fair point about the company age, and yeah I agree that this list is not representative of “people who join EA groups” (for many reasons), but my intuition is that these people actually are relatively altruistic by commonsense morality standards. Anil Agarwal stuck out to me as arguably the most egregious person on this list, and he pledged 75% of his wealth to charity. Milken is maybe number two, and he’s given > $1B. And of course SBF is probably high in the list of egregiousness, and seemingly was sincere in giving lots of money to charity. (Though note that SBF wasn’t in my data set because the giving pledge kicked him out.)
I would be interested in someone filtering this list by “people who have actually given >$X” and seeing if that changes the results though.