As of yesterday, my position on mission hedging was that it was probably crowded out by other investments with better characteristics[1], and therefore not worth doing. But I didn’t have any good justification for this, it was just my intuition. After messing around with the spreadsheet in the parent comment, I am inclined to believe that the optimal altruistic portfolio contains at least a little bit of mission hedging.
Some credences off the top of my head:
70% chance that the optimal portfolio contains some mission hedging
50% chance that the optimal portfolio allocates at least 10% to mission hedging
20% chance that the optimal portfolio allocates 100% to mission hedging
[1] See here for more on what investments I think have good characteristics. More precisely, my intuition was that the global market portfolio (GMP) + mission hedging was probably a better investment than pure GMP, but a more sophisticated portfolio that included GMP plus long/short value and momentum had good enough expected return/risk to outweigh the benefits of mission hedging.
EDIT: I should add that I think it’s less likely that AI mission hedging is worth it on the margin, given that (at least in my anecdotal experience) EAs already tend to overweight AI-related companies. But the overweight is mostly incidental—my impression is EAs tend to overweight tech companies in general, not just AI companies. So a strategic mission hedger might want to focus on companies that are likely to benefit from AI, but that don’t look like traditional tech companies. As a basic example, I’d probably favor Nvidia over Google or Tesla. Nvidia is still a tech company so maybe it’s not an ideal example, but it’s not as popular as Google/Tesla.
As of yesterday, my position on mission hedging was that it was probably crowded out by other investments with better characteristics[1], and therefore not worth doing. But I didn’t have any good justification for this, it was just my intuition. After messing around with the spreadsheet in the parent comment, I am inclined to believe that the optimal altruistic portfolio contains at least a little bit of mission hedging.
Some credences off the top of my head:
70% chance that the optimal portfolio contains some mission hedging
50% chance that the optimal portfolio allocates at least 10% to mission hedging
20% chance that the optimal portfolio allocates 100% to mission hedging
[1] See here for more on what investments I think have good characteristics. More precisely, my intuition was that the global market portfolio (GMP) + mission hedging was probably a better investment than pure GMP, but a more sophisticated portfolio that included GMP plus long/short value and momentum had good enough expected return/risk to outweigh the benefits of mission hedging.
EDIT: I should add that I think it’s less likely that AI mission hedging is worth it on the margin, given that (at least in my anecdotal experience) EAs already tend to overweight AI-related companies. But the overweight is mostly incidental—my impression is EAs tend to overweight tech companies in general, not just AI companies. So a strategic mission hedger might want to focus on companies that are likely to benefit from AI, but that don’t look like traditional tech companies. As a basic example, I’d probably favor Nvidia over Google or Tesla. Nvidia is still a tech company so maybe it’s not an ideal example, but it’s not as popular as Google/Tesla.
Very cool—thanks for doing this.
I agree that EA-related resources are skewed towards the US tech sector (see Ben Todd’s recent post) and that should definitely be taken into account.