Seems like a good time to remember this deleted hagiography of SBF by Sequoia: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
He's also somewhat self aggrandizing. Like he knows something others don't. "I don't know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner." My guy, SBF was allegedly worth 20+ billion already and you're predicting that he'll be a winner? It's like predicting that Brazil, up 4 goals at the half, will win the game.
Sounds like every venture capitalist to me. Most of them got lucky selling some random software company to Yahoo or some analogous route or riding the biggest tech and stock boom in history but come out thinking they’re oracles and literally better than everyone else. Couple that with cult of personality and the worship they get.
and a follow up when called out on it: https://twitter.com/AdamcFisher/status/1590805407949533184
"Lots of lessons" indeed.
I reviewed that part, and it's not a contradiction[1]. Risk-neutral is the opposite of being risk-averse, and so the former means you favor the riskier ventures. In the language of that paragraph, risk-neutral means you will spend $1 for a 50% + epsilon chance of winning $2, and spend $1 for a 1-in-a-million plus epsilon chance of $1,000,001.
This risk-neutrality, of course, violates the Kelly Criterion and came back to bite him.
[1] Which is not, of course, to defend the article generally!
"He only gave himself a 20 percent chance of success, but, in his mind, SBF needed extreme risk to maximize the expected value of his lifetime earnings—and, therefore, the good his earn-to-give strategy could do. The fact that he was, by his own lights, overwhelmingly likely to fail was beside the point."
I guess that the whole mess boils down to a few old chestnuts - #1) Don't bet money you can't afford to lose (investors) and also that #2) you can only run at the red-line in terms of pharmacology for so long before it bites you in the arse.
The bit about making as much money money as you can is not at all what effective altruism is about, but as usual nuance is the first thing to go when social or traditional media reports on something.
Effective Altruism is not the same as Earning to Give, and I really wish that the distinction was being made more clear.
You can embrace EA to, for instance, make the most of the $1,000 you give to charity every year. There's nothing nefarious about asking "Where does this money do the most good?"
Earning to Give is a becoming a bit of a nightmare though as it's turning out that a lot of people embracing and pushing Earn to Give aren't giving as much as they're keeping, and aren't earning as much as they're stealing.
Good old wish to tell others how to live in a cozy fuzzy warm blanket of dogood. See also politician, dictator, clergy etc.
No. It's rather "the marginal utility of this money for me is much less than it is for others". As far as effective altruism is imposing anything on anyone else, it's more of "It's immoral to spend money on things you don't need. You could be saving people's lives instead."
Note I'm not part of the movement. I'm using money to buy free time for myself.
For me, the quota for benefit of the doubt has been mostly used up.
By what?
It reminds me of this tweet/picture/article
>Rebecca Grossman’s perfect life became a perfect nightmare. “Everything changed in a split second—overnight,” she tells Los Angeles during a half-hour Zoom call from her lawyer’s office in October.
that conveniently buries the lede that she was a drunk who ran down and killed two kids.
I mean, yeah, wow, this could have been seen as a view to the future.