I lead a small think tank dedicated to accelerating the pace of scientific advancement by improving the conditions of science funding. As well, I’m a senior advisor to the Social Science Research Council. Prior to these roles, I spent some 9 years at Arnold Ventures (formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation) as VP of Research.
Stuart Buck
Or this: Open Phil recently was hiring a General Counsel. Imagine two options: 1) “We’ll pay $125k, but no more than that, because we want a General Counsel who has essentially taken a vow of poverty, and/or who is so desperate for a job that they’ll work anywhere.” 2) “We’ll pay market rate for the best non-profit lawyer we can find.”
Which option is likely to lead to a General Counsel who gives better advice to Open Phil about its operations, its legal structure, etc.?
With Asana’s stock down 82% in the past six months, Meta down 43%, and SBF’s net worth cut in half in the past month, maybe the bigger worry should be a period of austerity and cutbacks?
Is the submission system working? I clicked “submit,” but then saw a blank page:
I also asked for my submission to be emailed to me, but it wasn’t.
Thanks!
Fair enough, that was probably too dramatic of a rhetorical flourish! :)
I guess my point is that if you want top corporate counsel to consider working for Open Phil, you have to the market into account. Someone who could make $700k as General Counsel for the Gates Foundation or $1m+ at a public corporation probably isn’t going to take an 80% or 90% pay cut to work at Open Phil. Even the most well-motivated altruist is probably still going to find a reason to convince themselves that they’ll do as much good for the world at Gates, and they’ll have much more money to contribute to charity themselves, so they might as well take the job that allows them to easily pay for their kids’ college, etc.
Why Effective Altruists Should Put a Higher Priority on Funding Academic Research
Fair point! Perhaps a more modest standard would be appropriate—i.e., “giving that produces a net positive effect in the world, something more than 1x.”
If the bar is set so high, then obviously there will be almost nothing worth funding except for a miniscule set of interventions on a miniscule number of issues, and large foundations will be left with piles of money that they don’t know what to do with, and meanwhile the world still has lots of problems that need solving even if there’s no 10X intervention in sight.
Lots of great points here, and I agree with much of what you say!
Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to focus solely on RCTs, and tried throughout to use broader terms like R&D, or “other forms of evaluation,” or “difference-in-differences,” so as to encompass other research methods that might be more suitable for everything from 1) trying to develop a new program, to 2) evaluating country-wide policies that could never be subjected to an RCT.
If You Were Hoping Musk Would Donate to EA . . .
Other interesting essays to consider: https://ez.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-silence?sd=pf
https://coingeek.com/tether-links-to-questionable-market-makers-yet-another-cause-for-concern/
- 23 Nov 2022 2:22 UTC; 17 points) 's comment on EA should blurt by (
This NY Post story also struck me as odd: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/sam-bankman-fried-has-few-billion-to-help-crypto-industry/
On one or two occasions, Bankman-Fried, who made billions arbitraging cryptocurrency prices in Asia beginning in 2017, said he has used his own cash to backstop failing crypto companies when it didn’t make sense for FTX to do so.
“FTX has shareholders and we have a duty to do reasonable things by them and I certainly feel more comfortable incinerating my own money,” he said.
Since when do people go to such lengths (including their own personal cash!) to bail out other people’s Ponzi schemes or securities fraud?
Unsurprisingly, I really like this article and the simulation-based approach here. :)
FTX is in trouble with the FDIC: https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2022/ftx-harrison-letter.pdf
[Cause Exploration Prizes] Meta-science
I submitted an entry to Open Phil (not sure if it came through) that was short and sweet. Reprinted here:
This essay will be short and simple.
The problem at hand is this: Far too much potential philanthropy isn’t happening at all.
First, when you look at the list of Giving Pledge signatories (https://givingpledge.org/pledgerlist), all of whom are billionaires who have promised to give away half their wealth, most of them haven’t set up foundations or made any significant effort to actually follow through on their pledge. Indeed, even the Pledgers that have engaged in serious philanthropy have often been able to increase their net worth by more than they gave away (see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/giving-away-money-well-is-very-hard-the-giving-pledge-turns-10-and-its-signers-are-richer-than-ever-2020-08-08).
Second, the Initiative to Accelerate Charitable Giving estimates that over $1 trillion is locked up in private foundations and donor-advised funds, most of which don’t provide any transparent way to apply for funding. Indeed, the major firms that manage DAFs (e.g., Schwab) are highly incentivized by management fees not to facilitate transfers out to actual charities.
Open Philanthropy and associated efforts in EA have focused on how to optimize the philanthropy that already occurs. But what if a focused public campaign and some policy work on DAFs etc. could vastly increase the amount of philanthropy available to optimize? Getting DAFs and Giving Pledge members to distribute 5% of their assets a year could be worth at least $50 billion a year.
What would have been really interesting is if someone wrote a piece critiquing the EA movement for showing little to no interest in scrutinizing the ethics and morality of Sam Bankman-Fried’s wealth.
To put a fine point on it, has any of his wealth come from taking fees from the many scams, Ponzi schemes, securities fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. in the crypto markets? FTX has been affiliated with some shady actors (such as Binance), and seems to be buying up more of them (such as BlockFi, known for securities fraud). Why isn’t there more curiosity on the part of EA, and more transparency on the part of FTX? Maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation (and if so, I’ll certainly retract and apologize), but it seems like that explanation ought to be more widely known.
- 11 Nov 2022 8:36 UTC; 142 points) 's comment on The FTX Future Fund team has resigned by (
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- 8 Nov 2022 23:46 UTC; 13 points) 's comment on FTX Crisis. What we know and some forecasts on what will happen next by (
This wasn’t unforeseeable. Over a month ago I posted a comment about worries I’ve had for a long time:
All of which means it’s not a real “exchange.” The New York Stock Exchange could never go bankrupt like this. They make money just by small fees on transactions and by membership fees. But an “exchange”that gambles with customers’ assets by engaging in self-serving loans to sister corporations—well, that’s crazy, and it’s part of why humans invented financial regulation in the first place. Looks like Bankman-Fried has just been using new technology to reinvent old forms of fraud.
I wrote that comment from over a month ago. And I actually followed it up with a more scathing comment that got downvoted a lot, and that I deleted out of a bit of cowardice, I suppose. But here’s the text:
Consider this bit from the origin story of FTX:
In 2019, he took some of the profits from Alameda and $8 million raised from a few smaller VC firms and launched FTX. He quickly sold a slice to Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange by volume, for about $70 million.
Binance, you say? This Binance?
During this period, Binance processed transactions totalling at least $2.35 billion stemming from hacks, investment frauds and illegal drug sales, Reuters calculated from an examination of court records, statements by law enforcement and blockchain data, compiled for the news agency by two blockchain analysis firms. Two industry experts reviewed the calculation and agreed with the estimate.
Separately, crypto researcher Chainalysis, hired by U.S. government agencies to track illegal flows, concluded in a 2020 report that Binance received criminal funds totalling $770 million in 2019 alone, more than any other crypto exchange. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao accused Chainalysis on Twitter of “bad business etiquette.”
Or consider FTX’s hiring of Daniel Friedberg as a chief compliance officer. This article claims that he had been involved in previous cheating/fraud at other businesses:
Crypto’s ongoing addiction to the Tether stablecoin is nearly as alarming as the sector’s questionable embrace of lawyers linked to online gambling fraud. . . .
If one ever doubted the insincerity of SBF’s compliance commitment, . . . the company’s former GC, Daniel S. Friedberg, is now FTX’s new chief compliance officer, a role for which Friedberg is almost comically inappropriate. . . .
Friedberg’s presence on FTX’s payroll means Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) either didn’t do his due diligence before hiring, or he knew of Friedberg’s past sins and didn’t care. Neither of these options paints Sam Bankman-Fried in an overly flattering light.”
Then there are all the recent examples of FTX trying to buy up other crypto players. For example, in July, FTX signed a deal to buy BlockFi for up to $240 million, and to give it $400 million in revolving credit. BlockFi is most famous for having agreed to pay $100 million in penalties for its securities fraud. It’s not clear why FTX would want to spend this amount of money on buying a fraudulent firm.
Just last week, there was a story that FTX is thinking about buying Celsius, another fraudulent firm.
Another story from July had the remarkable claim that SBF is even thinking of putting his own cash into bailing out other crypto firms:
On one or two occasions, Bankman-Fried, who made billions arbitraging cryptocurrency prices in Asia beginning in 2017, said he has used his own cash to backstop failing crypto companies when it didn’t make sense for FTX to do so.
“FTX has shareholders and we have a duty to do reasonable things by them and I certainly feel more comfortable incinerating my own money,” he said.
Why is FTX and perhaps SBF himself putting so much money into buying up other people’s scams? I would hope it’s because they intend to reform the crypto industry and put it on more of a moral footing, although that would reduce the market size by an order of magnitude or two.
***
At least, SBF and FTX ought to provide more transparency into where exactly all the wealth came from, and what (if anything) they are actively doing to prevent crypto frauds/scams. And one might argue that FTX Foundation has a particular moral duty to establish a fund to help out all of the people whose lives were ruined by falling for crypto’s many Ponzi schemes and other assorted scams.
There are about a hundred different letters to the judge, many of them speaking of the fear and depression caused by having money that they desperately need to help keep their families fed locked up in Celsius’ coffers. Each one feels more desperate than the last, with some speaking of money they’d lost because—ironic, considering why Celsius is insolvent—they weren’t able to cover their margin calls, as the platform had stopped accepting new collateral, meaning that they had loans liquidated through no fault of their own. One woman from Australia spoke of needing money to pay for the hospital when her third child was born, her life savings locked up in the platform. In fact, many people talk about losing their life savings, and others speak of having little cash to their name, the majority trapped in Celsius.
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- FTX FAQ by 13 Nov 2022 5:00 UTC; 144 points) (
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- “EA is very open to some kinds of critique and very not open to others” and “Why do critical EAs have to use pseudonyms?” by 24 Feb 2023 17:10 UTC; 8 points) (
I wouldn’t be very confident in the level of due diligence undertaken by supposedly sophisticated investors:
https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1590394857474109441
Very much agree with this post. It reminds me of a problem we see in certain other fields (entry-level journalism, congressional staff, etc.)--the salaries are so low that it’s as if the job is selecting for people who are either 1) independently wealthy (or heavily supported by parents), or 2) eager for some other job benefit (such as access to power). Neither characteristic is likely to make an employee . . . effective. Passion about EA might be good for some things, but in many roles, there is no reason to think that personal passion equates to skill, knowledge, personal productivity, etc.
Imagine there’s a top CEO who earns $10 million currently, and who knows MacKenzie Scott well. If paid $20 million, he would leave his job, and spend a year designing and implementing a strategy to convince MacKenzie Scott to take an EA approach with 25% of her yearly giving. Wouldn’t that be worth it, if it worked?