I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here.
> "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.
God I just don't buy the "these people will go on to benefit humanity" argument anymore. We don't need more tech companies. We don't need more hedge funds. We don't need to feed our genuinely brightest minds into the wealth consolidation machine.
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.
> 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?
Huge impact technologies like the steam engine, the factory line, electricity, and so on, that are not just incremental steps, things nobody asked for with minimal utility ("smart fridge") or glorified stupidification engines (the social web).
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.
Think about the counterfactual: a student doesn’t go to Harvard, they instead go to Duke or a public Ivy. They’re only marginally worse off. All of these schools already have enough money to where families making under $75-$100k won’t be paying anything.
Donations to Harvard are exposed to extremely diminished marginal utility at this point.
I think a lot of this investment for him is personal brand. Giving millions to community colleges would probably create tens of thousands of opportunities versus marginal benefit to Ivy leaguers, but having your name on a building at Harvard versus 180 community college libraries is big difference in prestige and brand-recognition for the types of graduates you want to apply to your firm.
> We don't need more tech companies. We don't need more hedge funds.
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.
Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy.
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.
> so massive that there's absolutely no possibility of competing
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.
I think your argument is missing GP's point entirely. The point was that a functioning market economy would evolve so that companies that sell products or services at a self-sustaining price survive, whereas companies that lose money continuously die. However, this is clearly not the case, given that companies like Uber, as you mention, do survive without being profitable at all. Competitors that are not backed by near-infinite money cannot survive this competition, regardless of their product or efficiency.
Whether or not a functioning market economy could ever exist in reality if of course another question.
I don't know that Uber turning a mere 14 years old is proof that the market economy isn't functioning. In a time of incredibly low interest rates and the resulting free-flowing money sloshing around looking for any possible return, I'd expect a lot of companies to reach their teens without that being proof that they can continue indefinitely without showing profits and returns to investors.
> Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy
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?
How about an even better -- and more salient -- example? Quant trading firms are gobbling up promising researchers in fields like physics and mathematics. These are people getting funded Ph.Ds at top universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, etc.), and they end up just going to companies which exist solely for the purpose of making rich people richer.
On the liquidity side, would you pay more for a security that you could easily and quickly sell with small slippage than you would for a security that could not be easily sold or only sold with a large slippage?
"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.
I assume you're saying that ads are irrelevant because we have AdBlock?
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.
I'm saying ads aren't "addictive", because they're pretty despised. They might be effective, when people see them, but I don't think anyone is "addicted" to ads.
It's the content (and personalized curation, based on what the platform's learned you want to see) that's addictive, not the ads.
Users are addicted to the content creators, and watching ads is the price they have to pay to sit through to watch free content.
Picking ads that are relevant, or at least not annoying enough to make you switch off, is part of the platform's experience.
And there are creators who blend ads in as organic content, or at least a personalized endorsement which doesn't come across as phony, which MrBeast said gets the most positive response.
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.
You're nitpicking an irrelevant detail. Expand "ads" in my comment to "screen time" (for the sake of serving ads) generally and the "despised" counterargument falls apart. The whole point of my comment is that brilliant minds are working on making stuff more addictive to people, instead of making the world a better place.
They're working together. Youtube algorithms compute the most likely influencer that is going to occupy your attention and serve you advertisements in the process.
"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.
The problem with this is who gets to decide what efficient means.
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?
The market as implemented in the past, in a world with technology form the past, worked well in the past. This doesn't mean it won't need to be changed ever. No one is saying the complete market should be removed. We always have had rules putting boundaries on free markets (child labour, slavery), and these rules should move with the times.
Playing devil’s advocate is a great antidote to this article.
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.
Harvard produced many of the people that built a society with staggering and increasing levels of income inequality. Consultants, hedge fund managers, architects of super addictive social media platforms, politicians who write laws favoring corporations over workers, etc. etc.
Partly, but it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago who helped lay the framework for the "shareholder primacy" theory that really paved the way for the poor longterm corporate management of the last couple of decades.
The real problem is that "shareholders" stopped being people and started being large funds.
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.
Who says large funds don't have long-term stakes and can't help make long-term decisions?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Huh? Shareholder primacy might be a good idea, but it's an aspiration at best.
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.
I'd say it leads to things like an average overinvestment in things that benefit shareholders rather than things that might benefit the company or society over the long term.
Weirdly timed stock buybacks instead of money going to R&D or attracting talent and the like.
Do those account for a significant portion of the effect, or are you just cherry picking a couple nice instances? The word modern is doing some heavy lifting as well; shareholder primacy certainly isn't responsible for most of the overall benefit from vaccines.
> They didn't do the foundational research. They licensed a patent that came out of research from University of Pennsylvania and applied it to COVID.
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.
Moderna spent a few months on it before they had a vaccine ready for trials. The lab spent just under a decade building on decades of prior research. It's pretty clear who did the bulk of the work when it comes to the mRNA discoveries, and it wasn't Moderna or its shareholders.
In almost every sector of the economy, companies partner with suitable university departments and then oddly enough the universities never get any patents, but the companies do. This is due to how our intellectual property laws work, not any special kind of magic that having shareholders will yield.
Harvard also taught John Franklin Enders Nobel Laureate and “The Father of Modern Vaccines.” Granted they handed him his PhD in 1930, but he played a pivotal role in developing a measles vaccine and Salk was heavily dependent on his work when developing the polio vaccine. That’s rarefied air in terms of net benefit to humanity.
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.
and yet, the problem remains that the US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980, regardless of what happens elsewhere
Global inequality has sort of fallen, insofar as China has reportedly lifted 800 or 900 million people out of extreme poverty. I suspect that's not what their were referring to though..!
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.
Not yet, you're right - but if the World Bank is to be believed, it has raised 900 million people out of extreme poverty. That's astonishing compared to how everywhere else seems to be doing.
> 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.
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.
Probably he means that by giving money to an “elite” school, it just makes it more likely that it will end up hurting the “non-elites”. I don’t necessarily agree with that point by the way because there are students who will have their cost of attendance potentially offset by this donation.
I never said trickledown economics. I just said that inequality doesn't hurt people. Some rich person having a 5 star steak dinner doesn't take anything away from how much I enjoyed my own dinner. It's not a zero sum game where a rich person enjoying something takes away from what I enjoy.
You ignored the part where money buys power, and ends up tilting the focus of an entire society towards benefiting the rich instead of ensuring the prosperity of its populace.
There are many zero sum things people want. Costal beaches are more accessible to the general public when their rental property rather than empty billionaire vacation homes.
> 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.
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 not generally in favour of elite universities so don't deeply disagree with the sentiment, but is there actually a way to justify more money under the pattern you established in your comment?
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?
But what? What would be lost without the 300 million? If you can’t be specific then I think it’s to the authors point. I mean, just consider that he spent 300 million and the impact isn’t obvious.
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.”
This is a fascinating question. It's incredibly rhetorical, and I've sat here pondering it for a bit. It's very easy to reply to this question with "well I suppose it depends." And then tack on "What do we consider 'doing good/more good'? What is the nature/species/alignment of the lives being saved, and how are are they equal? Who decides which two lives are better to save than the one, if it's somehow decided that one is better than two? Does the two lives vs one life involve picking between the same two lives, or is it an entirely different set of lives?" and a whole mountain of other questions. It's like asking a magical wish granter to "save two lives" and it does something predictably spiteful like saving two single celled organisms and causing a kitten to die. Thanks for giving me that to chew on.
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.
I don’t think EAs are focused on assigning credit here. It’s very consequentialist; they would say “it doesn’t matter who saved the 100 lives, it matters that they were saved.”
It matters if the 100 lives are suddenly 200 lives when you sum them up. It matters for decision making. It matters for questions like "should I rather do it myself or start a foundation to convince as many other people as possible to do it".
heya, you say that if they spent the money on helping more people vs. on vanity, "they wouldn't be a better person", but in fact they would be a better person
I'd go one further. There are plenty of actively harmful donations one could make. As one example, most people would probably feel that way about roughly half of political donations.
Actively harmful donations at least have an impact (Classic example: Hitler had arguably the greatest impact of anybody in the twentieth century). This donation probably won’t do much of anything at all, which is notable in and of itself
I'm sure it will have some impact, but a school that refuses to increase student body size at the expense of plenty of people trying to get in is disgusting to put it lightly. Not to mention their promulgation of a legacy system, which comprises nearly 30% of undergrads.
they have plenty of money given tiny, static class sizes, and that population you're referring to is already a small one of a small overall student body.
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 have a theory that every internet comment that starts with Eh is always wrong. So far I haven't been let down.
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
Education has a negative impact on society, because we are forcing young people to waste years of their lives that they often neither enjoy nor do those years make them more productive. They don't get those years back, and even pay dearly for that privilege.
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.
Do I understand correctly that you're making the argument that education is zero-sum? That's surprising to me, I feel like I have gotten a lot out of my education. In fact I would say that while most people agree that education system isnt perfect, we do gain quite a lot from a society where for example as a baseline everyone can read and write, and at a more advanced level understand at least the basics of other people's jobs.
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
I think he’s talking about the institutional capture and monopolization of higher education…essentially coming away with the same skills for free from YouTube but they’re worth nothing in the market because you didn’t pay $50k/year to the higher ed cartel.
I like the idea of Effective Altruism (EA), but it’s ironic to use EA to call out ineffective charitable spending in the wake of all the Effective Altruism ridiculousness of recent years. EA was a key part of SBF’s cover story to make his frauds appear to be coming from a philanthropic angle. An EA figurehead recently spent multiple millions, some of which was FTX donations, on a castle/chateau to “host events”, which they rationalized as a good use of funds for weird reasons that even the EA community isn’t buying ( https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pbe8x4AQDqftQoaT5/... ).
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.
> 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.)
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.
There are definitely EA organizations and figureheads like MacAskill operating under the EA name.
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.
A broken comparison. Communism is fundamentally bad, both the idea and implementations.
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?).
30k is 0.01% of 300m, or 1 part in 10,000. It was also just a small part of 900k of grants given out to many different works.
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.
> 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?
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.
In all fairness, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was a phenomenal fanfic and if someone wants to see it syndicated at $30k that seems fine by me.
Don’t forget the 80,000 hours organization, which started as a good idea to encourage people to go into altruistic careers but then seemingly only produced volumes of podcasts and inactionable blog posts.
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
In all fairness, the human driven ones crash an awful lot too!
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.
"Effective Altruism" (centered around William MacAskill), the "Rationalist Movement" (centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky), the general billionaire philanthropism (most prominent being Bill Gates), the "Universal Basic Income" crowd (of which apparently OpenAI and Sam Altman are spearheading a research project), miss the greater context in which charity takes place: all charity is fundamentally ineffective, charity is the side effect of a failed system, charity will never bring revolution and even worse charity will actively suppress revolution. In a better system there would be no need for charity.
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.
> charity will never bring revolution and even worse charity will actively suppress revolution.
...
> 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.
158 years ago was the First International [1]. More of a tongue-in-cheek joke.
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.
who knows. it seems there's pretty low correlation with charity spending and revolutions. probably CIA funding of opposition groups is more "impactful".
I meant that more in a state of mind way: you give food to an unhoused person, you feel good for the charity you are doing, they feel good because they forgotten how food tastes like, neither of you are interested in overturning the system that allows the greatest object in the universe as we know it, the human brain, to rot on a sidewalk: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."—Stephen Jay Gould.
I think this hard love approach to forcing people to revolt doesn't really work. Just as bringing democracy by guns didn't, as strategic bombing didn't, etc.
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.
This article very briefly encapsulates everything wrong with Effective Altruism: a boneheaded assumption that this money is being donated for its societal impact, an unwillingness to try to actually understand what's going on, instead choosing to engage with the Harvard endowment on its own terms by taking the university "mission statement" seriously, and a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet purporting to identify better ways to donate based on character sheet style min-maxing.
> a boneheaded assumption that this money is being donated for its societal impact
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.
I doubt anyone in EA is actually misled by what’s going on here. They’re trying to out it as not a charitable donation at all so no one who hasn’t thought about it is misled. This is a good thing to do.
Then why take it seriously at all. You're looking to perform a forensic analysis to determine whether the wallet inspector's credentials are a forgery. The whole thing is a scam.
If I point out that something you did is bad because of a particular outcome, that doesn't mean I thought your goal was to avoid that outcome. In fact it means exactly the opposite; if your goal was not to avoid that outcome, but it should have been, then my criticism is even more applicable.
Exactly. Anyone who knows Griffin knows he is essentially one of the core villains of the finance world already (which in of itself is a rather impressive feat, you really have to be villainous to be considered one of the worst people in finance). Trying to assume this isn’t just some villainous vanity play in the first place was the article’s mistake.
I don't think one donates money to Harvard just for the sake of a plaque.
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?
I think that’s thinking too much into it. He could have spent 1/10th of that and got those things in return.
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.
I'm fairly certain he already guaranteed that with his $150mm previous donation in 2014, which at the time was the largest gift in Harvard College's history. Note that in that case, $125mm was earmarked specifically for financial aid.
That's also one of the riskiest ways to try to buy the love of the masses.
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.
He previously donated $150m to Harvard College so his children are already all but guaranteed admission. He already has all the benefits Harvard gives mega donors, there isn’t any marginal benefit to this donation other than a department renaming. The only possible thing left for them to give him would be a seat on the Harvard Board of Overseers but that’s unlikely because he is now a politically controversial figure.
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)
They'll never have want of money their entire life. But a prestigious education... well that's something that's worth more than a lot of money to those who have almost limitless wealth.
I can’t imagine $300mm is the standard price for whatever favorable treatment he’s buying for his kids. I imagine there is a steep billionaire premium. Similar to how a Western tourist is overcharged non-local rates.
>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?
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.
His “donation” is essentially just a couple updates to some database tables. He doesn’t need the money, Harvard doesn’t need the money, neither will buy or not buy something as a result of the transaction, it’s just numbers moved from Griffin’s row to Harvard’s row. What else would you expect from two entities exchanging money when both have far more than they’ll ever need?
There is that story about KLF actually setting fire to a million pounds [1].
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.
It's called liquidity preference. No matter how rich you are, there is no downside to being liquid but severe downsides to being illiquid so having extra money, no matter whether you use it in practice or not, is always worth it, just in case something useful ever pops up. This also means the interest rate gets stuck at some positive value and "investment philanthropy" never happens. If people use net worth or money as a highscore or status symbol that would also be considered liquidity preference.
If we assume the central banks lower their reserve ratios (you know, like they already did), no deflation would happen. If the reserve ratio stays the same, then deflation would eventually happen. However, even if there is deflation, people will still be willing to lend out cash as reducing their cash holding means they reduce the amount of tax they have to pay. You would most likely always see full employment according to "Say's Law".
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.
One of the important things about them burning a million quid was that they weren't super rich. That money was pretty much all of the money they had left in their earnings from royalties. They then deleted their back catalogue, so they'd no longer earn royalties. I remember at the time that the only way to buy a KLF album was a Japanese import.
I take issue with this article under the Effective Altruism concept.
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.
Let's say charity X can save one life per $10,000 spent on average. Then $300M can save 30,000 lives. If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me.
> If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me.
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).
I could say about someone who kills a million people "well, they don't care. At least they didn't kill two million people." That doesn't seem like the right way to evaluate ethical claims. If we're talking about what would have been the right thing to do, it would have been to kill 0 people, regardless of what personality traits they have.
It's a bit weird to bring ethics into this. Of course, your example is unethical, but "donating to Harvard" is.... unethical? I have a really hard time with that. Is doing the Ice Bucket challenge unethical?
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.
I think my favorite was when Cards Against Humanity raised money for no other purpose than to dig a hole in the ground. The FAQ included the question, "why don't you give the money to charity?". Answer: "Why don't you give the money to charity?"
Meanwhile Americans complain about $2 per year per Indian citizen spent on the Indian space program as if $2 could somehow meaningfully solve "poverty" in India.
Who cares, have he kept that money there would be no article saying that 300mil sitting in his portfolio isn’t doing anything good to society. At least it’s a school, 5% months any the number to look at, it’s 300million of resources.
It seems like the only morally acceptable outcome for the author is that rich people give away all their money in a way that comports with their view of what a “good” use of these donations would be.
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".
This article misses the point. Charity is a personal thing and the only person it has to be impactful for is the person doing the charity and this was definitely impactful for ken. His ego gets a huge stroking every time his building gets mentioned in anything and he gets to flex on all the students at Harvard who walk by and use his building every day. That it isn't maximizing social welfare is pretty irrelevant.
The point is donating to worthless causes is morally repugnant and deserves to be derided. Sure he can do whatever he wants, and we can try to peer pressure him into making better decisions next time.
Medical devices and medical innovation in general. There are so many medical devices and therapies that are technically possible, exist in some form or another, but do not meet the 10x returns that typical VC and big medtech players demand on their products. There are so many opportunities to really help people that are suffering that may not be super profitable, but aren't money loosers either.
Ok, but the opportunity costs pertain solely to the spender, and even if not they are priced into the market. why do you feel entitled to the fortune that someone else decides to use for a vanity project.
Because the thousands of lives were never entitled to how someone decides to spend their money in the first place, and if you believe otherwise then this literally applies to everyone and their income. Example: How can we justify going out for an ice cream, when that same money could be spent to vaccinate several people from malaria and save their lives? Why is it ok for middle class earners to spend money on frivolous things, but not for the wealthy? All that surplus money can save tens of thousands of lives!
This is such a good demonstration of the problem with effective alturism. Does anyone in their right mind think that Ken Griffin made a calculation of what was going to provide the most efficient use of his capital when he made this decision?
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.
But how many generations of admission for his descendants does that buy? If you are trying to analyze this through some effective altruism lens, you are not going to explain it. Leave EA to SBF.
I see your $300M "least impactful" Harvard donation and raise you $4.1 billion Presidential candidates raised and spent in the 24 months of the 2019-2020 election cycle.
I dunno, the author could be right, but these kinds of posts always rub me the wrong way.
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?
Thinking in percents is not always the way to make a correct assumption. $300 mln is still $300 mln even if it's 0.6% of whatever budget, and claiming that it won't make a difference is not particularly logical. The man's motivation is pure vanity, but the act of donation is not useless (though Harvard management can make it so, but that's a different story).
If the elite universities are getting this much in funding and have an almost infinite amount of reserves, why don’t they just make the school free to attend? It makes so much sense, creates enormous good will and increases competition thereby getting even better students. They can charge for boarding and food may be and waive the tuition if needed
Effective Altruism not understand that this gift was never actually about being "effective", and if it does understand that then what's the point of bringing it up AGAIN as if it's an original idea("Geez, lets not waste money, I'm so smart").
I feel like paying for a new college at Oxford or Cambridge is a better use of money. They'll rename a graduate school at the drop of a hat, but John I de Balliol and Walter de Merton aren't too far off having had their name live on for almost 1,000 years now
Using that same logic, no one should aim to join (or continue to stay with) Apple or MSFT or Google or $LARGECORP as they are already very large corps with lots of talented people. They should take their talent elsewhere. /s
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.
Even without all that, donating highly apprechiated assets is super useful for taxes because you not only get to deduct the value from your ordinary income, you also don't have to pay capital gains on the disposition of the asset.
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)
Maybe it sounds conspiratorial but if such schemes were available, I believe Harvard is too well connected to be subject to such scrutiny by those with the power to do such an audit.
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’m just going to ignore the petulant complaining, but does it not dawn on anyone that is not really a donation, as much as it’s an investment? I’ll just leave it at that.
Sure, but how do you know who that is? And if you give it to 300 random people it probably gets very little done.
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.
I’m always curious why more new universities/schools aren’t started by the super rich, seems like there were lots of them started 100-200 years ago, and but that trend has tailed off, and there is certainly the demand…
Same as why they don't make new sports teams. Much less risk in sticking your name on an existing institution that's already running.
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.
A donation like this would be extremely impactful because it would: 1. Get a lot of people talking and 2. Probably cause a bureaucratic headache for a LOT of people and waste insane amounts of time nation wide.
Hmm I didn't consider second-order impact, but still think it's gotta be one of the least impactful ways, strictly speaking. "Spending," is a loose term but if burning a sum of cash that large... maybe that's impactful to the climate
Invest it in a beverage company whose customer base is conservative, frat boys, and the working class then aggressively rebrand it with everything they oppose front and center. Proceed to lose six billion dollars of capitalization in six days.
> "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...