Your objection falls flat. We can definitely analyze everybody else’s behavior another time - it’s not relevant here and only serves to distract.
This one person had a huge fortune and explicit goals to spend it in efficacious charities.
From that point of view, this particular story is one of exorbitant waste and missed opportunity, the magnitude of which should stupefy people.
We’re not talking about some other joe schmoe who failed to be as ascetic as possible - that’s just rhetorical deflection. We’re talking about this particular instance of egregious waste.
Your comment is like if some heard about the Deepwater Horizon spill and replied, “everything looks like waste or hazards if you measure every cubic milliliter of spilled oil, can’t we just given them a break for trying to harvest it and do something with it?”
I guess I’m still don’t understand the fundamental shock and sense of waste you describe. Frenzy didn’t hurt anyone here and provided a net benefit to society.
Failure to optimize is equivalent to directly perpetrating harm, especially when the stakes are high ($8 billion) and optimizing is jaw-droppingly simple and easy (read recommendations from Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, GiveWell, etc., and spend some ultra tiny fraction of time comparing the impact on lives between e.g. donating $1 billion to fucking Cornell vs $1 billion to a cause like Against Malaria or SCI).
Tell the children who have died and will die from directly preventable malaria or waterborne parasites that Feeny’s negligence has done no harm.
By not spending the money on them, he literally facilitated their deaths. For what? Cornell has a fancier campus? Obamacare had a nicer grassroots website? It’s sickening.
And it’s no defense to distract by saying nobody can be perfectly ascetic or optimize away every wasteful purchase or discretionary spending. That’s not at all related or up for discussion. We’re talking about one guy with a stated goal of funding efficacious charities with $8 billion of available funds to do it over time. Just about as pure a thought experiment of negligence as there ever was.
This one person had a huge fortune and explicit goals to spend it in efficacious charities.
From that point of view, this particular story is one of exorbitant waste and missed opportunity, the magnitude of which should stupefy people.
We’re not talking about some other joe schmoe who failed to be as ascetic as possible - that’s just rhetorical deflection. We’re talking about this particular instance of egregious waste.
Your comment is like if some heard about the Deepwater Horizon spill and replied, “everything looks like waste or hazards if you measure every cubic milliliter of spilled oil, can’t we just given them a break for trying to harvest it and do something with it?”