Cool! With the understanding that these aren’t your opinions, I’m going to engage with them anyway bc I think they’re interesting. I think for all four of these I agree that they directionally push toward for-profits being less good, but that people overestimate the magnitude of the effect.
For-profit entrepreneurship has built-in incentives that already cause many entrepreneurs to try and implement any promising opportunities. As a result, we’d expect it to be drastically less neglected, or at least drastically less neglected relative to nonprofit opportunities that are similar in how promising they are
Despite the built-in incentives, I think “which companies get built” is still pretty contingent and random based on which people try to do things. For instance, it’s been obvious that M-Pesa had an amazing business in Kenya since ~2012, but it still hasn’t had equally successful copycats, let alone people trying to improve it, in other countries. If the market were really efficient here I think something like Wave would be 4+ years further along in its trajectory.
The specific cause areas that the EA movement currently sees as the most promising—including global poverty and health, animal welfare, and the longterm future—all serve recipients who (to different degrees) are incapable of significantly funding such work
Similarly, this is directionally correct but easy to overweight—there are still for-profit companies working in all of these spaces that seem likely to have very large impacts (Wave, Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, SpaceX, OpenAI...)
For-profit organizations may produce incentives that make it unlikely to make the decisions that will end up producing enormous impact (in the EA sense of that term).
This is definitely a risk, and something that we worry about at Wave. That said:
In many cases, revenue/growth and impact are highly correlated. In the examples I can think of where they aren’t, it mostly involves monopolies doing anticompetitive or user-hostile things.
In the monopoly case, many monopolies seem to have wide freedom of action and are still controlled by founders (e.g. Google, Facebook) and their decisions are often driven as much by internal dynamics as external incentives. Uncertain here, but it seems likely that if these companies thought more like EA’s they would produce more impact.
Finally, I’ve also heard from several people the claim that today EA has an immense amount of funding, and if you’re a competent person founding a charity that works according to EA principles it is incredibly easy to get non-trivial amounts of funding
I think “nontrivial” for a nonprofit is trivial for a successful for-profit :) Wave has raised tens of millions of dollars in equity and hundreds of millions in debt, and we’re likely to raise 10x+ more in success cases. We definitely could not have raised nearly this much as a nonprofit. Same with eg OpenAI which got $1b in nonprofit commitments but still had to become (capped) for-profit in order to grow.
Well Musk was the richest, who notably pulled out and then the money seems mostly not to have manifested. I haven’t seen a public breakdown of commitments those sorts of statements were based on.
Cool! With the understanding that these aren’t your opinions, I’m going to engage with them anyway bc I think they’re interesting. I think for all four of these I agree that they directionally push toward for-profits being less good, but that people overestimate the magnitude of the effect.
Despite the built-in incentives, I think “which companies get built” is still pretty contingent and random based on which people try to do things. For instance, it’s been obvious that M-Pesa had an amazing business in Kenya since ~2012, but it still hasn’t had equally successful copycats, let alone people trying to improve it, in other countries. If the market were really efficient here I think something like Wave would be 4+ years further along in its trajectory.
Similarly, this is directionally correct but easy to overweight—there are still for-profit companies working in all of these spaces that seem likely to have very large impacts (Wave, Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, SpaceX, OpenAI...)
This is definitely a risk, and something that we worry about at Wave. That said:
In many cases, revenue/growth and impact are highly correlated. In the examples I can think of where they aren’t, it mostly involves monopolies doing anticompetitive or user-hostile things.
In the monopoly case, many monopolies seem to have wide freedom of action and are still controlled by founders (e.g. Google, Facebook) and their decisions are often driven as much by internal dynamics as external incentives. Uncertain here, but it seems likely that if these companies thought more like EA’s they would produce more impact.
I think “nontrivial” for a nonprofit is trivial for a successful for-profit :) Wave has raised tens of millions of dollars in equity and hundreds of millions in debt, and we’re likely to raise 10x+ more in success cases. We definitely could not have raised nearly this much as a nonprofit. Same with eg OpenAI which got $1b in nonprofit commitments but still had to become (capped) for-profit in order to grow.
If you look at OpenAI’s annual filings, it looks like the $1b did not materialize.
Which annual filings? Presumably the investment went to the for-profit component.
$1B commitment attributed to Musk early on is different from the later Microsoft investment. The former went away despite the media hoopla.
Was there a $1bn commitment attributed to Musk? The OpenAI wikipedia article says: “The organization was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel and others,[8][1][9] who collectively pledged US$1 billion.”
Well Musk was the richest, who notably pulled out and then the money seems mostly not to have manifested. I haven’t seen a public breakdown of commitments those sorts of statements were based on.
Semafor reporting confirms your view. They say Musk promised $1bn and gave $100mn before pulling out.