I’m at a good resting point in my current projects, so I’d like to take some time off to decide on “ambitious* projects Linch should be doing next,” whether at RP or elsewhere.
Excited to call with people who have pitches, or who just want to be a sounding board to geek out with me.
*My current filter on “ambition” is “only consider projects with a moral value >> that of adding 100M to Open Phil’s coffers assuming everything goes well.” I’m open to arguments that this is insufficiently ambitious, too ambitious, or carving up the problem at the wrong level of abstraction.
One alternative framing is thinking of outputs rather than intermediate goals, eg, “only consider projects that can reduce x-risk by >0.01% assuming everything goes well.”
It’s hard to know what adding an extra $100M to Open Phil would do, since they’re already having a hard time spending more on things, especially x-risk-related stuff (which also presumably has support from Sam Bankman-Fried, with a net worth of >$20B, but maybe only a small share is liquid).
I think a better framing might be projects that Open Phil and other funders would be inclined to fund at ~$X (for some large X, not necessarily 100M), and have cost-effectiveness similar to their current last dollar in the relevant causes or better.
It seems smaller than megaprojects ($100M/year, not $100M in total).
If you wanted to do something similar to adding $100M to Open Phil, you could look into how to get them to invest better or reduce taxes. $100M is <0.5% of Dustin Moskovitz’s/Open Phil’s wealth, and I think 0.5% higher market returns is doable (a lame answer that increases risk is to use a tiny bit of leverage or hold less in bonds, but there may be non-risk-increasing ways to increase returns, e.g. sell FB stock and invest more broadly).
I think a better framing might be projects that Open Phil and other funders would be inclined to fund at ~$X (for some large X, not necessarily 100M), and have cost-effectiveness similar to their current last dollar in the relevant causes or better.
I think I disagree and would prefer Linch’s original idea; there may be things that are much more cost-effective than OPP’s current last dollar (to the point that they’d provide >>$100M of value for <<$100M to OPP), but which can’t absorb $X (or which OPP wouldn’t pay $X for, due to other reasons).
If you wanted to do something similar to adding $100M to Open Phil, you could look into how to get them to invest better or reduce taxes. $100M is <0.5% of Dustin Moskovitz’s/Open Phil’s wealth, and I think 0.5% higher market returns is doable (a lame answer that increases risk is to use a tiny bit of leverage or hold less in bonds, but there may be non-risk-increasing ways to increase returns, e.g. sell FB stock and invest more broadly).
Michael Dickens has already done a bunch of work on this, and I don’t feel confident in my ability to improve on it, especially given that, to the best of my knowledge, Michael D’s advice are currently not followed by the super-HNWs (for reasons that are not super-legible to me, though admittedly I haven’t looked too deeply).
I think a better framing might be projects that Open Phil and other funders would be inclined to fund at ~$X (for some large X, not necessarily 100M), and have cost-effectiveness similar to their current last dollar in the relevant causes or better.
I agree that this might be a better framing. I feel slightly queasy about it as it feels a bit like “gaming” to me, not sure.
Michael D’s advice are currently not followed by the super-HNWs (for reasons that are not super-legible to me, though admittedly I haven’t looked too deeply).
I don’t really know, but my guess is it’s mostly because of two things:
Most people are not strategic and don’t do cost-benefit analyses on big decisions. HNW people are often better at this than most, but still not great.
On the whole, investment advisors are surprisingly incompetent. That raises the question of why this is. I’m not sure, but I think it’s mainly principal-agent problems—they’re not incentivized to actually make money for their clients, but to sounds like they know what they’re talking about so they get hired. And the people who evaluate investment advisors know less than the advisors do (almost by definition), so aren’t good at evaluating them.
There is a reasonable third possibility, which is that nobody implements my unorthodox investing ideas because I’m wrong. I believe it would be valuable for a competent person with relevant expertise to think about the same things I’ve thought about, and see if they come up with different results.
ETA: One counterexample is Bill Gates. One of my pet issues is that people concentrate their wealth too much. But Bill Gates diversified away from Microsoft fairly quickly, and right now only a pretty small % of his wealth is still in Microsoft. I don’t know how he pulled that off without crashing the stock, but apparently it’s possible.
For the sake of clarification, I do think it’s more likely than not that I’ll stay at Rethink Priorities for quite some time, even if I do end up incubating a new project (though of course details depend on organizational needs etc). I mention this because I talked to multiple people who thought that I was more likely to leave than stay, and in some cases made additional inferences about the quality or importance of research there based on pretty little information.
(I’m still fairly confused about this implication and this isn’t the first time that a job-related post I made apparently had the wrong connotation (I left Google on good terms to join a startup, some people emailed me being worried that I was laid off). My best guess here is that people are usually just really reluctant to be candid about their career-change-related considerations so there’s more of a euphemism treadmill here than elsewhere).
I’m at a good resting point in my current projects, so I’d like to take some time off to decide on “ambitious* projects Linch should be doing next,” whether at RP or elsewhere.
Excited to call with people who have pitches, or who just want to be a sounding board to geek out with me.
*My current filter on “ambition” is “only consider projects with a moral value >> that of adding 100M to Open Phil’s coffers assuming everything goes well.” I’m open to arguments that this is insufficiently ambitious, too ambitious, or carving up the problem at the wrong level of abstraction.
One alternative framing is thinking of outputs rather than intermediate goals, eg, “only consider projects that can reduce x-risk by >0.01% assuming everything goes well.”
It’s hard to know what adding an extra $100M to Open Phil would do, since they’re already having a hard time spending more on things, especially x-risk-related stuff (which also presumably has support from Sam Bankman-Fried, with a net worth of >$20B, but maybe only a small share is liquid).
I think a better framing might be projects that Open Phil and other funders would be inclined to fund at ~$X (for some large X, not necessarily 100M), and have cost-effectiveness similar to their current last dollar in the relevant causes or better.
It seems smaller than megaprojects ($100M/year, not $100M in total).
If you wanted to do something similar to adding $100M to Open Phil, you could look into how to get them to invest better or reduce taxes. $100M is <0.5% of Dustin Moskovitz’s/Open Phil’s wealth, and I think 0.5% higher market returns is doable (a lame answer that increases risk is to use a tiny bit of leverage or hold less in bonds, but there may be non-risk-increasing ways to increase returns, e.g. sell FB stock and invest more broadly).
I think I disagree and would prefer Linch’s original idea; there may be things that are much more cost-effective than OPP’s current last dollar (to the point that they’d provide >>$100M of value for <<$100M to OPP), but which can’t absorb $X (or which OPP wouldn’t pay $X for, due to other reasons).
I think you can adjust my proposal for this:
Cost-effectiveness similar to or better than Open Phil’s last dollar.
Impact similar or better than the last $100 million Open Phil spends.
Maybe having a single number is preferable. Ben Todd recommended going for the project with the highest potential impact (with a budget constraint).
Michael Dickens has already done a bunch of work on this, and I don’t feel confident in my ability to improve on it, especially given that, to the best of my knowledge, Michael D’s advice are currently not followed by the super-HNWs (for reasons that are not super-legible to me, though admittedly I haven’t looked too deeply).
I agree that this might be a better framing. I feel slightly queasy about it as it feels a bit like “gaming” to me, not sure.
I don’t really know, but my guess is it’s mostly because of two things:
Most people are not strategic and don’t do cost-benefit analyses on big decisions. HNW people are often better at this than most, but still not great.
On the whole, investment advisors are surprisingly incompetent. That raises the question of why this is. I’m not sure, but I think it’s mainly principal-agent problems—they’re not incentivized to actually make money for their clients, but to sounds like they know what they’re talking about so they get hired. And the people who evaluate investment advisors know less than the advisors do (almost by definition), so aren’t good at evaluating them.
I just wrote a longer essay about this: https://mdickens.me/2021/10/29/obvious_investing_facts/ (I had been thinking about this concept for a while, but your comment motivated me to sit down and write it.)
There is a reasonable third possibility, which is that nobody implements my unorthodox investing ideas because I’m wrong. I believe it would be valuable for a competent person with relevant expertise to think about the same things I’ve thought about, and see if they come up with different results.
ETA: One counterexample is Bill Gates. One of my pet issues is that people concentrate their wealth too much. But Bill Gates diversified away from Microsoft fairly quickly, and right now only a pretty small % of his wealth is still in Microsoft. I don’t know how he pulled that off without crashing the stock, but apparently it’s possible.
Can you link to this work?
Hmm most of his EAForum output looks like this. These posts may be especially important/salient:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g4oGNGwAoDwyMAJSB/how-much-leverage-should-altruists-use
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TXgrYjW2D9JbgbTk7/the-risk-of-concentrating-wealth-in-a-single-asset
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zKFcC87iZXvk7yhbP/uncorrelated-investments-for-altruists
For the sake of clarification, I do think it’s more likely than not that I’ll stay at Rethink Priorities for quite some time, even if I do end up incubating a new project (though of course details depend on organizational needs etc). I mention this because I talked to multiple people who thought that I was more likely to leave than stay, and in some cases made additional inferences about the quality or importance of research there based on pretty little information.
(I’m still fairly confused about this implication and this isn’t the first time that a job-related post I made apparently had the wrong connotation (I left Google on good terms to join a startup, some people emailed me being worried that I was laid off). My best guess here is that people are usually just really reluctant to be candid about their career-change-related considerations so there’s more of a euphemism treadmill here than elsewhere).