The least impactful way to spend $300M?
passingtime.substack.com
passingtime.substack.com
> "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it."
Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today's money) was spent on a frozen fish factory next to a lake... a lake that regularly disappears... and in a location without reliable electricity [1] [2]. It was utterly useless.
There's a shocking amount of charitable money that just winds up having utterly no impact whatsoever.
On the other hand, giving $300 million to Harvard is probably going to have a good chance of some long-term impact. It is ultimately funding education for smart people who are well-positioned to use that education productively, and for research and arts that are meant to benefit humanity. It's not just throwing it away. I absolutely agree there are many institutions with a much greater need for the money, but "zero good" is extreme exaggeration. People have done much, much, MUCH worse with donating money.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/04/05/h...
[2] https://www.ibtimes.com/kenyas-turkana-learns-failed-fish-pr...
I also agree that Harvard doesn’t need any more money, but…
You notice something in that article, which is that Harvard is almost twice the size of the next largest school in that article’s list of richest schools per student. The undergraduate part of Harvard is extremely small and exclusive. Griffin gave the money to the graduate school of arts and sciences, which is actively building the capacity to serve more students. They’re building what is effectively a second campus on the Boston side of the river, with even more land than they have in Cambridge.
For poor students, Harvard and its peers are pretty much the only free college options besides merit scholarships.
That distribution really is extremely heavily skewed, so I think the original comment is correct, I can't see how it's improving equality.
If 1.8% were poor and Harvard helped them become rich adults, probably 65% were rich and Harvard helped them stay rich as adults.
55% receive needs based scholarships, with families making less than 150k per year paying less than 15k per year.
Sure there are a lot of rich kids and legacies. But to say it only benefits the wealthy is just wrong.
1 - https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet
But extreme inequality is also very unhealthy for society. People with less get exploited. People with more feel entitled to exploit them.
Incremental research is still research. Application research is still research.
The over-emphasis on foundational research from the media & the general public has led to a myopic view of "revolution"-ism, wherein incremental progress in science is considered to be worthless relative to incremental improvements.
The discovery of penicillin was a medical breakthrough, but that doesn't mean that the industrial scale-up of penicillin production was comparatively worthless. In fact, in this specific case, the opposite is true: The benefits of penicillin wouldn't have been received if everyone thought that research into scaling up its production was worthless.
When the shareholders are people with a long-term stake in the company, like the founders, they can make long-term decisions or choose not to want the absolute most profit-maximizing thing because actually they're already pretty rich and maybe some things are more important.
When they're fund managers, they want quarterly profits because that's how they get their bonus, and their fund may not even own shares in that company in a year's time.
Fund managers want perhaps to see quarterly profits for their fund, but that's not the same thing as quarterly profits at the underlying companies. Your fund can also profit, if the stock prices of the underlying companies rise.
To give some existence proofs, have a look at how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla etc had rising share prices long before they ever returned any money to shareholders.
Or how shortly into the covid pandemic market prices for stocks recovered, even though the pandemic wasn't over at all: that was purely based on investors looking to the longer term future.
> [...] and their fund may not even own shares in that company in a year's time.
For that to happen, they need to sell the company to someone else, and that other person will pay more for a company with a bright future.
This is why almost every sector of the economy is dominated by a few large firms.
This was also true of Juicero and Pets.com.
Moreover, the people investing in small startups are generally not huge funds. The funds buy in after the company is established. Tesla turned a profit before they were added to the S&P 500.
> For that to happen, they need to sell the company to someone else, and that other person will pay more for a company with a bright future.
Most of the scam comes from information asymmetries. The current owners hire managers who they know will boost short-term prospects in a conspicuous way by damaging long-term prospects in subtle and hidden ways, e.g. by removing slack that increases short-term efficiency but is an existential risk to the company if anything goes wrong. This makes the company look like it's in better shape than it is to less than fully informed investors (also known as investors) and allows you to sell the shares to them for more than the company would be worth if they fully understood the risks they were taking.
Yes, it's hard to predict the future.
> Moreover, the people investing in small startups are generally not huge funds. The funds buy in after the company is established. Tesla turned a profit before they were added to the S&P 500.
One reason those small startups can attract capital in the first place, is because their early investors can reasonably expect to cash out by selling to huge funds once the company gets established.
Remove the late investors, and you dry up the payouts for early investors.
> Most of the scam comes from information asymmetries.
That's hardly news. Investors take that into account.
What keeps investing from turning into a market for lemons is that companies can communicate to prospective investors and show them transparently that they eg didn't remove the slack.
As an investor, you can go by the maxim of 'guilty, unless proven innocent'. So if a company does not have that transparency, you should value them as-if they have skeletons in the closet.
(And if companies explicitly lie, that's already a crime.)
Which only makes the problem worse, because the early investors then have the incentive to create and prop up garbage companies as long as they think they can sell them to do the next guy before the crash. Which is more possible the less the funds need to pay attention to each stock, i.e. the more "diversified" each person's investments are.
> One reason those small startups can attract capital in the first place, is because their early investors can reasonably expect to cash out by selling to huge funds once the company gets established.
The funds are an abstraction over the underlying investors. Right now you have Joe Middle Class who has a retirement account which is invested in thousands of companies he has no incentive to pay any attention to because none of them individually affect his savings by a significant amount. If it was four or five companies, he would have the incentive to keep track of management decisions there. He may even be working for one of them, because he is then using an information asymmetry to his advantage when he knows from the inside how well that company is managed. But then we try to inhibit this kind of thing even though it would make markets more efficient.
The bigger cause of the problem is that companies are huuuge, so that they can't be owned by any reasonable number of people. A trillion dollar company has to be owned by millions of separate individuals because even the 99th percentile individual doesn't have enough wealth to own a significant fraction of a company that size. But why do we need companies to be that big? Break them up. They could have the same total valuation as many separate companies, without each being so unmanageably large.
Potentially even higher total valuations, because the need to do the following is less when each company is smaller and less complicated:
> As an investor, you can go by the maxim of 'guilty, unless proven innocent'. So if a company does not have that transparency, you should value them as-if they have skeletons in the closet.
And that's the point. The transparency isn't possible, not because the company doesn't publish the numbers, but because it's not worth deep diving into their conglomerated operations when they're only 0.2% of your portfolio. And when investors will be doing this regardless of whether the company is actually sacrificing long-term prospects for short-term numbers, the company has the incentive to do just that.
In practice, companies are run for the benefit of their managers.
Especially when they talk about something like 'stakeholder capitalism', because it's inevitable the managers that decide which stakeholders to listen to and how to balance their interests.
More recent examples aren’t as impressive by comparison, but graduates of Harvard school of medicine has collectively done a great deal of critical medical research. And of course many recent graduates have their best breakthroughs ahead of them.
What exactly are you talking about? Global inequality has been on a downward trend in the last few decades.
US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980.
UnAmerican people have moral value, too.
Because income and wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in (almost)all developed countries
However keep in mind that China is still only about as rich as Mexico or Russia in terms of GDP per capita. So hasn't joined the rich world, yet.
Ethnic Chinese people are very successful around the world. Mainland China actually has on average the poorest Chinese people. Compare eg Singapore, Taiwan, or even the ethnic Chinese populations in Thailand or the US.
(Not completely sure about the Chinese people in Thailand. Need to dig up stats.)
I myself migrated to Singapore a few years ago, as I agree with their pro-market policies. We also have great food here. Just the weather is a bit muggy.
> weather is a bit muggy
On a rainy day in England, I can very much sympathise!
Just because eg inequality in the US might have increased, and inequality in China might have increased, doesn't mean that the inequality in their combined population has increased.
I'm talking about the combined population of all humanity.
See eg https://archive.is/7xWtr
Because our local society is the society against which we, as humans, tend to measure ourselves, and inequality within our in-group is the strongest predictor of crime, perhaps?
Why wouldn’t you? The fact that Chinese people are much better off than they were a few decades ago has almost no bearing on the well-being of me, my family, relatives, friends or almost anyone I know.
Increasing inequality in the country I live (or countries I have the right to live in or would ever consider moving to) does.
At least in your fish example they used it for the intended purpose for some period of time and there is still some low utilization for dried fish. It’s also half of 300 million so it seems they did more with less despite it being a failure.
Regardless, effective altruism is bullshit. They can donate the money however they want. They wouldn’t be a better person or even more charitable if they were an “effective altruist.”
Future potential (“women and children first”), societal compliance (criminals vs not), etc.
What you think is objectively better with something as open ended as $300m is completely subjective.
One glaring obvious problem with the EA people, is that they double count.
Say I give money for bed nets, and the bed nets save 100 lives.
But say I only gave that money because Eliezer Yudkowsky convinced me to. Was it really him that saved 100 lives? Or do we divide them between us somehow? How many should go to the people who actually distributed the bed nets I paid for?
You'd think the EA people would have good answers to these questions. Or at least, any answers. But they don't. Not any consistent ones. They cheerfully double-count in all their most famous arguments.
You have to account for it as the marginal dollar, not the average dollar. If Harvard had less money, and they're competent, they would cut the least effective programs. But because their budget is so large, they've already fully funded everything in their wheelhouse with high utility and the least effective programs would be mostly waste and vanity. (And if they're not competent then you obviously don't want to be giving them more money either.)
I'm guessing your intention was to suggest that in the presence of a large surplus (Harvard's massive endowment etc) it is reasonable to assume this goes unspent because it can't be turned into worthwhile education or research. Is that about the sum of the argument?
Meanwhile, somewhere with high impact research but nearly zero in reserves would presumably be more deserving?
Occasioanlly one of these people will find some one-off bit of brilliance that lifts an entire class of people out of poverty, but that ticket has an expiration date tied to the 19th century. Eventually those free spaces will run out. They're already starting to in the western world.
I'm sorry but I genuinely don't understand what you're saying here. What will expire? Which "free spaces" are running out where?
Not OP but the college entrance scandal is a great example. With the super wealthy taking up all the philanthropic entrance positions the "just" wealthy set had to resort to cheating and rorts to ease little Johnny Blueblood's way into society.
There is only so much room at the top.
What we absolutely don’t need, is autocrats dictating what society needs.
Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy. It’s not perfectly efficient (especially in the short term), but pretty damn efficient.
By throwing off price signals, the market allows us to allocate efforts to things society wants more of. Unfortunately, contrary to the wishes of the King, it turns out society wants more tech companies.
But sometimes we do indeed over-allocate resources to tech companies! Luckily we have the hedge funds incentivized to make profit by arbitraging those prices back to reality (As we’ve just witnessed in tech). I guess we also need more hedge funds.
Market economy got us into the situation where the most brilliant minds in the world are researching best ways to make internet advertisements as addictive as they can be.
Very cool innovation, indeed. Ever read The Space Merchants?
They're doing a great job, ads are so addictive I've even turned off my Ad blocker so I can get more of them! Won't someone save me!
Ads would always exist, but think about how many great (even lifesaving) solutions we're missing out on because market decided they aren't worthy of pursuit.
"Nobody is addicted to ads" is true if you think only about the pop-ups and couple-second videos as "ads" - but the concept of advertisements is much wider than that. Some adverisements may not even be presented as such - they may be presented as "useful content", but which is chosen above other such useful content by the virtue of being paid for to the advertising company.
I recently turned off tracking, and suddenly started getting served ads for 'green cremation'. I guess statistically few people are interested in that, but conversions are lucrative, although the 99% of users who don't want to see it probably get mildly annoyed.
Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.
Is there any other evidence of their usefulness beyond "people pay for it"?
"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.
We don't really though. There are companies, and individuals, with enough wealth and influence to compete with entire markets. A well-funded startup can undermine whole industries by spending VC money to run at a loss long enough that the rest of the market fails (Uber, AirBNB) or they can become so massive that there's absolutely no possibility of competing (Amazon). People can start private companies that do things only governments have done before (SpaceX, Palantir). These businesses are not influenced by pricing, because they're either too well funded to care, or too influential for others to get a foot in the door.
Free market economics is a beautiful idea, but every big business (and some small businesses) do all they can to subvert the market and hold a monopoly on something. Heck, Peter Thiel literally wrote a book about how to do exactly that - Zero To One.
Scale has no value unless it offers something to your customer base. What you're ignoring is that Uber, Amazon et al are so huge and dominant because customers flock to them. I can summon a taxi to my location in most cities in the world with a single app. I can have pretty much any item delivered to my door within one or two days. These were unfathomable 10-15 years ago.
Amazon has huge amounts of competition, as does Uber. I have absolutely no idea where you get this idea they are not influenced by pricing. Uber hasn't made any money in its entire existence. That is not characteristic of a monopoly.
Whether or not a functioning market economy could ever exist in reality if of course another question.
It's not exactly news that the market throws off price signals, the question is whether those signals are the correct signals.
After all, the market also decided it wanted opioids, slaves, and a betting shop on every high street in the UK. Are we wrong to question whether Mr Market is right?
Donations to Harvard are exposed to extremely diminished marginal utility at this point.
In the sense, that most of education is about signalling, and funneling more money into education just fuels the arms race.
See Bryan Caplan's Case against Education for more details.
(The part of education that's actually about learning has mostly become cheaper than ever, thanks to the power of the Internet. But unless you got a piece of paper from a university, hiring managers seldom care. (Especially outside of tech.))
So donating money to further educational institutions is bad for society. It has a negative impact.
I don't understand how you could possibly say education has negative impact on society. Top universities can and do hire faculty for the purpose of research alongside teaching. Top minds performing research obviously benefits everyone as they can make new discoveries and innovations. That has the side effect of a worse undergrad education as researchers view teaching as a side gig but ultimately necessary to fund the university and it's research ventures
How can I become high energy physicist on YouTube ?
Individuals benefit from getting more education, but only in the sense of getting ahead in a signalling.
Perhaps an analogy helps: an individual tree benefits from growing taller than its neighbours, but the 'society' of trees scarcely gains any net benefit from that arms race.
Research is an entirely different topic that I didn't want to broach here.
For the sake of argument, let's accept that research is good for society. But we could get plenty of research without having to cross-subsidize it via education spending.
At a university level, I can't say I have studied every course or "type" of education, but it would be really surprising to me if there were any that gave nothing at all to their students
So not educating people would benefit them? I'd say it just makes them more vulnerable - looking at humanity's history.
When you look into the history of EA movements, a lot of the spending becomes weirdly self-serving and requires a lot of mental gymnastics to justify. One shining example that comes to mind is the $30K grant they allocated to printing Harry Potter rationalist fan fiction and distributing it (Yes, this really happened: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... ). Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old.
Imagine if Disney came out with “Effective Avengers” tomorrow
Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candle."
(Also, HPMoR does a great job at getting more people into EA - it isn't quite as superfluous as your comment makes it seem.)
The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are actual reasons to sponsor HPMoR, which you seem to ignore. Perhaps you disagree with those reasons - but there are still reasons.
> The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
It kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind; when you examine any large-enough organization under a microscope, you'll probably find something. Why not grind it against the millions of people who aren't donating to charity?
Keep in mind that truly reliable and robust AI driving will save 10s of millions of lives and trillions of dollars of avoided economic losses.
Creating AI that can drive a car that virtually never crashes will be the pinnacle of software engineering, and a turning point in our civilization.
The savings in blood and money can’t come soon enough, but otherwise it’s basically a Very Good Thing it’s going to take a little while to get it really working.
We’re not really ready for the implications of software that can reason that well in the real world.
I recommended it to a student once who was asking about career guidance. They came back and said they couldn’t figure it out, so I went looking into it deeper. I couldn’t get anything out of it either. It was just endless rambling podcasts at the time
There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.
You can call it an abstract philosophy, but there are actual organizations leading the charge, collecting funds, and doing things with them (like buying castles). I don’t find it compelling to argue that all of these EA orgs and people are somehow not true EA when the movement and money flow seemingly revolves around them.
Comparing EA with education is better.
Education is a fundamentally good idea, however, there exist corrupt universities and teachers, e.g. giving students too good grades, just to attract more students and funding. Or teachers asking for bribes.
But that doesn't make education as a concept, a bad idea.
And EA-the-concept: thinking about how you spend any money you donate, instead of following your first impulses and feelings -- that is, like education, a fundamentally good idea.
But just like there are corrupt people in the education system, there are in EA as well.
And there are more in EA (or so it seems), because EA involves more money (and prestige?).
This is how art grants work. They are tiny - in the 10k to 50k range, a few thousand are given out. Some of these artists produce great works and some don't. But it's cheap as heck compared to other things, and if we spend nothing on art, we don't get any great art. Are you also one of those people that hates federal arts funding?
Btw HPMOR is also pretty good. Harvard probably spent more than 30k on their sign and got a lot less.
Ignoring the fact that you don't know how art grants work, you seem to be (carefully) ignoring the entire proposed idea behind Effective Altruism.
Why would any of that stop you from trying to make effective donations?
I think people like to attack EA because it makes them uncomfortable to think about how little they themselves are doing
Revolution used to mean pitchforks and guillotines (the French especially loved them), but today, funnily enough, that would be ineffective even if the people would be able to close their favorite streaming channel and wake up. Even in the 1950s it would have been ineffective. A revolution in the 1950s would have probably looked like this: 100% taxation over $50 million (in today's money). Like in a memory-constrained video game, once you reach 9999 coins you can't store more. We should have capped capitalism a long time ago, give the lucky winner a medal, and that's it. We could probably try today this idea, but (i) there is no coagulated we to make it work after at least 158 years of divisiveness and (ii) it's probably too late and it would also be ineffective.
A revolution today would take completely other form from the past. After all, "you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions". Today's revolution, able to wake up every single human from whatever slumber and coagulate them into a we, the people would probably be raising the lifespan to 1,000 years. Not 120, not 200, but straight 1,000, an x10 improvement just like the venture capitalists enjoy. The fact that today you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 90 doesn't seem too much of an issue, and you are willing to accept the system for some minor benefit, if any. But if you might die at 30 and some guy dies at 900, now that's when you start having issues.
How to get to 1,000 years lifespan? 2-3 years ago I would have said mind-uploading, thinking that biochemistry has been surpassed by our magnificent, crystalline-structured silicon. After a global pandemic and some personal eye-openings, literally looking inside myself on the operating table, I would say that we won't be near biochemistry with our toys for the next thousands of years, and it won't actually be needed, we can learn to programatically interface with the cells and just say, top-down, "you, the cells, already know how to build an eye, you did it once, rebuild one here", don't scar, regenerate [1]. 1,000 year lifespan is achievable with 100% organ, tissue regeneration, and then the revolution begins, hopefully.
Coming back to the point, an "effective altruism" would put all the billions and trillions into organ regeneration research, however, oddly enough, that's not even in the general discussion.
[1] Michael Levin talk on bioelectricity at Stanford Chemical Engineering Colloquium, https://youtu.be/WM8bQWfmeB8?t=470
who knows. it seems there's pretty low correlation with charity spending and revolutions. probably CIA funding of opposition groups is more "impactful".
Giving someone charity makes both parties very aware that this is an exceptional one time deal, that might be repeated, but the default is no-charity.
It takes time to build trust and alliances which is needed to then make a change.
...
> Revolution used to mean pitchforks and guillotines (the French especially loved them), but today, funnily enough, that would be ineffective even if the people would be able to close their favorite streaming channel and wake up.
This strikes me as a strange way to say 'people are too happy to lead a violent revolt'.
> We could probably try today this idea, but (i) there is no coagulated we to make it work after at least 158 years of divisiveness and
What was before those 158 years? Unity? Until we get rid of nationalism, racism and religion divisiveness is going to be the rule, not the exception.
> A revolution today would take completely other form from the past.
Because the French revolution with guillotines was the same as the ones before it?
> we can learn to programatically interface with the cells and just say, top-down, "you, the cells, already know how to build an eye, you did it once, rebuild one here", don't scar, regenerate [1]. 1,000 year lifespan is achievable with 100% organ, tissue regeneration, and then the revolution begins, hopefully.
What? This could be on a sandwich board worn by the guy who in 2013 had to remove those Apocalypse 2012 stickers from his blacked out panel van.
What strange, hollow rhetoric that post is.
Watch the video I linked in order not to put your ignorance in front of you and don't cower behind the guise of rationality to expunge heterodoxical worldviews.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...
Pretty hard disagree. The subtitle of this article is "Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be." The author seems pretty clear-headed about what the purpose of this gift is. The also seem to say "sure, EA isn't the end all/be all of donation guidance", but it is an easy way to highlight that Griffin's act of altruism is a vanity play.
Who knew?
I guess there is some sort of indirect benefit to be had after such a donation, like an entry pass for a child, an entry pass for a PhD, or something of that vein?
If I was one of the kids, I would have taken $100m directly.
Once you have so much money an Ivy League education is not important. you can buy your way into anything.
These billionaires want fame and to be the focus of discussions like this one. They know people will be in awe over such a huge sum of money. That’s what $300M buys you and is so much more interesting than buying a product: attention and fame.
Countless rich guys have become persona non grata in the communities where they bought and mishandled the local club.
There's a few Chelsea or Leicester type stories where the buyer really is loved, a few where fans grudgingly accept they've done well but they'd rather not talk about where the (oil) money came from, and then quite a few where the new owners are reviled.
You could get that for a million probably. He donated it because he's a vain billionaire who wants the world to remember him despite not achieving anything memorable.
He also has a history of mega donations to universities in exchange for department renaming, like his $150m donation to UChicago which renamed their economics department after him (the most prestigious part of the university)
Why don’t the ultra rich give away more money? Why do they spend it on super yachts, houses with 50 bathrooms, and horridly expensive luxury trinkets? Even more to the point, why do they just hang on to vast sums of money they don’t need in bank accounts or other investments? My conclusion is that there isn’t a reason, in the same way that there wasn’t really a reason KLF burned a million quid. Counterfactualising the lives of the rich and powerful is a profound waste of time.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_...
Burning a million quid in some thing like housing, on the other hand, selfishly removes wealth from society and the economy.
This is a much better idea than having a zero lower bound and an endlessly growing welfare state. I mean, imagine if you didn't have to pay for municipal garbage collection. You would produce more trash than is optimal as someone else is eating the cost. A guaranteed legal minimum wage that is excessively high (think $50 per hour) also encourages more workers to apply for jobs than is optimal.
The zero lower bound not only contains a price control, it also contains an implicit subsidy that guarantees that the government has to subsidize the difference between the interest rate on the capital market, which may in theory be negative and the guaranteed interest rate on cash. It may not sound like a subsidy since no money is being paid, except if you don't pay the subsidy you get something like the great depression. The economy grinds to a halt. The subsidy has to be paid indirectly, the government has to guarantee to keep borrowing enough money until the interest rate is above 0%. I.e. the government has to take on more debt than is optimal and then it somehow has to recycle it back into the private economy. It will have to micromanage more and more parts of the economy simply because of some illogical decision to say "the private capital market ends at the zero lower bound". This is why I am in favor of negative interest rates above some threshold like $250k.
100% agree with the title, that the it is very not impactive. But it isn't actively harmful, which there's a LOT of other ways to spend $300m and actually be harmful.
So the article takes issue with buying status overall - agreed. But, saying that Griffin should have donated the money to "better things". Even the article writer points out that Griffin is a egomaniac and a "villian". I disagree with the core issue and argue this is a fantastic outcome all things considered.
Like if Martin Shkreli donated to Harvard to get building as well I'd be super happy because he didn't actively invest in extracting money from people in disadvantaged medical situations.
This statement forgets that the person who donated doesn't care. They actively like to hurt companies who don't deserve it and profit from it (unlike Hindenburg Research).
The problem with ethics discussion is we like to boil it down to it binary, ethical vs unethical. And donating to Harvard is hard pressed to be unethical. It's just not ideal.
And that's what I dislike about Effective Altruism, is it shames people for "not doing the _most_ ideal thing", which in my eyes is a pretty poor belief system to take on.
I'm saying, we're human, it's okay just don't make the world net negative... i.e. don't do unethical things.
Ken Griffin didn't do a net-negative thing (he's done plenty of net negative/unethical things in the past). So, can we just call this a win and move on? Name and shame? I'm just happy he's not deploying that money to destroy more companies.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...
That man is chasing after something that he will never find.
No one ever comes out ahead by donating to charity, this is a common held misconception.
Don’t disagree that the marginal utility for the world populace might be pretty limited, but it seems like it has utility for the donor
Some items are "condition rarities" -- it's worth a fortune in never used condition, but nothing special when worn.
Other items are rare as long as they can be reliably attributed. You could run a 1804 US dollar over with a locomotive and it would still be worth six or seven figures as long as the date could be identified. I'd expect plenty of the "rare" stamps would hold a significant slice of value even used. Now, the fact you gave up possession of the expensive item is another issue.
Returning to main HN stamping grounds: that's what makes some of these "new collectible" schemes sort of weird (i. e. professionally graded/certified video games)-- they're not necessarily trading on inherently rare items, just creating a "condition scarcity" economy that previously didn't really exist. It's not "the only one of its kind", it's "the only one the grading service gave 9.452345/10".
There's a reason people call this guy (Ken Griffin) Madoff 2.0
At this level, these donations are less about the actual concrete impact but moreso the press and prestige of the funding event itself.
Trying to fit these gifts into the philanthropy mindsets of maximum impact, long termism, EA, etc is missing the point.
Nope!
And this is a problem that EA has always suffered from - they view a complex social and emotional problem as a logic puzzle, and are often blind to their own idiosynchrasies. How much time does EA waste whining on about AI safety? Way too much! But from their actuarial perspective it's almost a divide by zero bug - "What's the chances of an AI? Some small number, what could it's impact be? Oh, infinite. Ok, guess we should dedicate every penny we have to that then...". EA doesn't meet charity on it's own terms.
If everybody thought the same then no one would donate to them and they wouldn’t be the richest school.
Isn’t it similar to saying “what’s the point of voting, in my state my party always wins anyway”.
(Plus, the way he wasted $50M in the Illinois primary is probably the least effective way to have spent money)
I just don't like the idea that someone is out there telling you that you're doing charity wrong. It could be coming from a good place but comes off with an air of moral superiority. If this guy finds out that I buy some pepperoni rolls for my kid's ballet fundraiser, is he gonna guilt trip me with malaria nets too?
Perhaps the money will be used by Harvard to buy a security he holds or has options on washing his hands clean of SEC oversight.
Then he executes on the predictable market move, makes the money back and writes down the donation for taxes. Meanwhile, Harvard is still holding whatever long term position they opened so they too are happy.
Their cover story is some rather cheap commemorative plaque they put on a wall "thanking" him.
I'm not saying this IS what happened but the facts are a hedge fund guy "donating" lots of money to a tax deductible nonprofit that has a giant investment portfolio with rather lax regulatory oversight.
Also if I was working for Harvard, I'd absolutely think of offering services like this to court donations.
The idea that people tossing around hundreds of millions of dollars are on the up and up otherwise they would have consequences doesn't seem to have much historical evidence supporting this dynamic
The Paradise papers leak outlined a lot of these schemes
I don't know where Mr. Griffin pays taxes, but if you have the right conditions, donating apprechiated assets is very inexpensive.
For example, if you're in california with oodles of income, your ordinary income will be at a marginal rate of 37 federal and 12.3 state, and your capital gains will be a total of 23.8 federal (includes niit) and again 12.3 state. So donating $1 of highly apprechiated assets avoids 26.1 cents of tax, and allows a deduction for 49.3 cents; it has the same effect on wealth as donating 14.6 cents. So it may have only cost $44M to donate $300M.
Of course, most people don't have $300M of ordinary income to deduct against, and aren't at the highest of the high brackets (and Mr. Griffin has residences in no income tax states, so he may not pay state income tax on capital gains anyway)
I'd certainly do nothing of value with it, and I like to think I'm both a decent dev and a decent communicator, so it's not beyond imagination I could convince someone I was worth it if they were just looking for people to dump $1,000,000 on.
Modern universities are also a heck of a lot more complex than 150 years ago. Same as modern sports teams, there was a period where those are also just founded by a company as a side arm.