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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.)

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The Harry Potter fan fiction thing was something they got together and voted for. It’s not something they’d criticize because they chose it themselves. I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants.

The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.

> I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants.

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?

HPMoR and the weird adoration of it also put a lot of people off of EA. I know that a large portion of my friend group would be intellectually likely to support EA and its objectives but find the community fairly juvenile and non-serious in a lot of their social interactions and endeavours.

If you can’t manage small amounts of money, you can’t manage large ones

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