In his post announcing the new found wealth of EA movement stemming from FTX Will included this argument for why charitable enterprises are more dangerous than for profit companies:
There’s one huge difference between aiming to do good and aiming to make profit. If you set up a company aiming to make money, generally the very worst that can happen is that you go bankrupt; there’s a legal system in place that prevents you from getting burdened by arbitrarily large debt. However, if you set up a project aiming to do good, the amount of harm that you can do is basically unbounded.
At the time I remarked at how wrongheaded this seemed to me. Of course for profit companies can do a large amount of harm! In fact, because for profit companies have ability to use their profits to increase their scale, they have the potential to do immense harm.
Hopefully, the FTX fallout makes abundantly clear the original point I was trying to make and encourages some deeper reflection in this community of about how earn part of earn to give has potential to cause great harm.
This feels like a weird interpretation of Will’s comment, which doesn’t (in my view) imply that for-profit companies can’t do a lot of harm, but rather that if you start a company with the sole goal of making a profit, usually the worst outcome (with regards to your goal of making a profit) is that you go bankrupt.
As FTX just spectacularly demonstrated, Will was wrong. This is because even though FTX was ostensibly started with the sole goal of making a profit, it turns out there were other important implicit goals like “don’t steal billions of dollars from thousands of people”, implicit goals like that always exist, and failure to meet those implicit goals is very bad.
In his post announcing the new found wealth of EA movement stemming from FTX Will included this argument for why charitable enterprises are more dangerous than for profit companies:
There’s one huge difference between aiming to do good and aiming to make profit. If you set up a company aiming to make money, generally the very worst that can happen is that you go bankrupt; there’s a legal system in place that prevents you from getting burdened by arbitrarily large debt. However, if you set up a project aiming to do good, the amount of harm that you can do is basically unbounded.
At the time I remarked at how wrongheaded this seemed to me. Of course for profit companies can do a large amount of harm! In fact, because for profit companies have ability to use their profits to increase their scale, they have the potential to do immense harm.
Hopefully, the FTX fallout makes abundantly clear the original point I was trying to make and encourages some deeper reflection in this community of about how earn part of earn to give has potential to cause great harm.
Should have called it, but I’ll do it now: It’s a double standard applied, so the comparison is not what you think.
Exactly, just as charities might unintentionally do harm, so can for-profit entities. Will’s statement erred in assuming financial viability for companies is the only dimension on which they can be assessed.
In his post announcing the new found wealth of EA movement stemming from FTX Will included this argument for why charitable enterprises are more dangerous than for profit companies:
At the time I remarked at how wrongheaded this seemed to me. Of course for profit companies can do a large amount of harm! In fact, because for profit companies have ability to use their profits to increase their scale, they have the potential to do immense harm.
Hopefully, the FTX fallout makes abundantly clear the original point I was trying to make and encourages some deeper reflection in this community of about how earn part of earn to give has potential to cause great harm.
This feels like a weird interpretation of Will’s comment, which doesn’t (in my view) imply that for-profit companies can’t do a lot of harm, but rather that if you start a company with the sole goal of making a profit, usually the worst outcome (with regards to your goal of making a profit) is that you go bankrupt.
As FTX just spectacularly demonstrated, Will was wrong. This is because even though FTX was ostensibly started with the sole goal of making a profit, it turns out there were other important implicit goals like “don’t steal billions of dollars from thousands of people”, implicit goals like that always exist, and failure to meet those implicit goals is very bad.
This sounds like a human form of alignment failure, specifically, the What Failure Looks Like story part I.
Here’s a link to it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like
Should have called it, but I’ll do it now: It’s a double standard applied, so the comparison is not what you think.
Exactly, just as charities might unintentionally do harm, so can for-profit entities. Will’s statement erred in assuming financial viability for companies is the only dimension on which they can be assessed.