I’m unclear on this paragraph, whose last sentence arguably gives away most of the main point:
It doesn’t seem like an update on the idea that billionaires have too much influence on cause prioritisation in effective altruism. I don’t think SBF had much influence on cause prioritisation, and the Future Fund mainly supported causes that were already seen as important. I agree SBF was having some influence on the culture of the community (e.g. towards more risk taking), which I attribute to the halo effect around his apparent material success. Billionaires can also of course have disproportionate influence on what it’s possible to get paid to work on, which sucks, but I don’t see a particular promising route to avoiding that.
I take it that “billionaires can exert heavy control what EA does because they ultimately control the funding” is not an update because that was already obvious. Is the idea that SBF didn’t have much influence on people’s thinking about cause prioritization, that he didn’t have much actual influence because his ideas were largely already popular, or that his funding dried up soon enough that it didn’t have much effect on cause prioritization as funded?
Yes, something like that: he of course had an influence on what you could get paid for (which seems hard to avoid given some ppl have more money than others) but I don’t think he had a big influence on people’s thinking about cause pri.
I don’t think SBF impacted cause prioritization by promoting pet causes that weren’t already favored by parts of the EA community. But I do think SBF, through the FTX Future Fund, likely shifted how people prioritized across different EA causes.
My sense is that the easy availability of longetermist funding made people more likely to work in that space, as people were well aware of a dynamic where (in Peter Wildeford’s words): “it’s clear that global poverty does get the most overall EA funding right now, but it’s also clear that it’s more easy for me to personally get my 20th best longtermism idea funded than to get my 3rd best animal idea or 3rd best global poverty idea funded and this asymmetry seems important.”
Yes, I’d basically agree – he didn’t influence the thinking that much but he did impact what you could get paid to do (and that could also have long term impacts on the structure of the community).
Though, given income inequality, the latter problem seems very hard to solve.
I’m unclear on this paragraph, whose last sentence arguably gives away most of the main point:
I take it that “billionaires can exert heavy control what EA does because they ultimately control the funding” is not an update because that was already obvious. Is the idea that SBF didn’t have much influence on people’s thinking about cause prioritization, that he didn’t have much actual influence because his ideas were largely already popular, or that his funding dried up soon enough that it didn’t have much effect on cause prioritization as funded?
Yes, something like that: he of course had an influence on what you could get paid for (which seems hard to avoid given some ppl have more money than others) but I don’t think he had a big influence on people’s thinking about cause pri.
I don’t think SBF impacted cause prioritization by promoting pet causes that weren’t already favored by parts of the EA community. But I do think SBF, through the FTX Future Fund, likely shifted how people prioritized across different EA causes.
My sense is that the easy availability of longetermist funding made people more likely to work in that space, as people were well aware of a dynamic where (in Peter Wildeford’s words): “it’s clear that global poverty does get the most overall EA funding right now, but it’s also clear that it’s more easy for me to personally get my 20th best longtermism idea funded than to get my 3rd best animal idea or 3rd best global poverty idea funded and this asymmetry seems important.”
Yes, I’d basically agree – he didn’t influence the thinking that much but he did impact what you could get paid to do (and that could also have long term impacts on the structure of the community).
Though, given income inequality, the latter problem seems very hard to solve.