3 ms·

> you personally should do the good things you want to do in the world rather than just donating money for someone else to do it on your behalf Let's take an e

by jefftk 4y ago

> you personally should do the good things you want to do in the world rather than just donating money for someone else to do it on your behalf Let's take an example mentioned in the article, Sam Bankman-Fried. After hearing about EA in college, he decided to earn as much money as he could first in traditional finance and then in crypto, so that he would be able to fund work he thought was important that was currently not happening. He was very successful at this, and currently has about $12B he's working on donating. I think it's a pretty difficult claim to support that he would have furthered his goals more by picking one of the things he thinks needs to happen and working on it? On the other hand, a lot of early effective altruist writing is from a time when there was very little money available for some of the most valuable things, a time when even "go work as a regular software engineer and donate a large percentage" beat directly working on valuable things for a lot of people. If you look at that writing now, however, since it is assuming a very different funding environment it looks like it sets the bar way too low for how much money you need to be able to earn before earning to give is likely your best option.

m101 4y ago
As another comment on here has said so well - how people make their money matters. I believe that crypto generally is a massive scam, so making money from it and donating it to what you think is a good thing is still net bad. I disagree with what sbf is doing wrt political donations.
mtremsal 4y ago
Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? It’s possible that this money can be reallocated more “effectively” according to some quantifiable measure identified by SBF, yet this doesn’t sit well with me. What happened to the Golden Rule? Or to Sartre’s “in choosing for himself, [each man] chooses for all men”? Surely if EA leads some to causing such wide-scale short-term pain in its name, at the very least it cannot be a humanism. I realize this isn’t a strong argument, but when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. They’re wealthy, so clearly what they do is valued by the market and we should ignore externalities that aren’t priced into their income. It’s like Big Oil pointing to specific green outcomes that they fund; these outcomes are quantifiable yet funded by hard to price but reprehensible practices. It all feels like Catholic indulgences… Maybe this is still a net-positive for society in that it provides people who wouldn’t be humanist anyway (e.g. libertarians) with a well-intentioned philosophy?
- eru 4y ago
  > Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? No. What kinds of weird definitions are you using? (You might be right in practice, I don't know. But you are not right by definition.) > It all feels like Catholic indulgences… And that is wrong somehow? If you grant the assumption that the Catholic church was a worthwhile organisation doing good work, then the indulgences seemed like a perfectly good idea to me on a practical real-world level. (No clue about the intricacy of Christian doctrine, so I can't say whether they were kosher from a theological point of view.)
- jefftk 4y ago
  > Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? Yes. Initially he worked in regular finance, at Jane Street, and then crypto, founding the Alameda Research trading firm and FTX exchange. > By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? I'm not very knowledgeable about crypto, but I don't understand how the definition of crypto means this? The article we're commenting on describes one of the early successes of Alameda, where they saw that Bitcoin was consistently trading for much higher prices in Japan than in the rest of the world. In normal finance you mostly don't see this sort of thing for very long, because global markets are highly interconnected, but in this case it was logistically difficult to sell Bitcoin in Japan. In fixing this, Alameda lowered the price at which Japanese investors were able to buy Bitcoin, and raised the price at which people elsewhere were able to sell Bitcoin, keeping a fraction of the difference for themselves; I don't see how Alameda made others worse off? With FTX they're making money by providing a platform that makes it easier for people to trade with each others. A bit of, 'in a gold rush cell shovels'. Again, I don't see how they're making others worse off? > when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. Sort of! If someone is initially not altruistic and accumulates a bunch of money doing something questionable, then if they later come around to doing good things with their money I'm going to be happy about that. So while I am not a fan of, say, Microsoft's business practices in the '90s which made Gates a billionaire, I do think his decision to spend his fortune the way he has is a good one, and one that should be commended. The alternative is that, like most other billionaires, the money goes to houses, yachts, and other things which are far less positive for the world. On the other hand, SBF is in a different category: he was trying to be an effective altruist from the beginning. So if he did something massively harmful to earn his money (which, as discussed above, I don't think he did) we would need to consider that in figuring out his net impact. Additionally, it is pretty common for EAs to argue that you shouldn't do harmful things even if they are majorly profitable and allow you to do a lot of good through your donations.

by jefftk 4y ago

m101 4y ago

As another comment on here has said so well - how people make their money matters. I believe that crypto generally is a massive scam, so making money from it and donating it to what you think is a good thing is still net bad. I disagree with what sbf is doing wrt political donations.

mtremsal 4y ago

Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? It’s possible that this money can be reallocated more “effectively” according to some quantifiable measure identified by SBF, yet this doesn’t sit well with me. What happened to the Golden Rule? Or to Sartre’s “in choosing for himself, [each man] chooses for all men”? Surely if EA leads some to causing such wide-scale short-term pain in its name, at the very least it cannot be a humanism. I realize this isn’t a strong argument, but when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. They’re wealthy, so clearly what they do is valued by the market and we should ignore externalities that aren’t priced into their income. It’s like Big Oil pointing to specific green outcomes that they fund; these outcomes are quantifiable yet funded by hard to price but reprehensible practices. It all feels like Catholic indulgences… Maybe this is still a net-positive for society in that it provides people who wouldn’t be humanist anyway (e.g. libertarians) with a well-intentioned philosophy?

eru 4y ago
> Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? No. What kinds of weird definitions are you using? (You might be right in practice, I don't know. But you are not right by definition.) > It all feels like Catholic indulgences… And that is wrong somehow? If you grant the assumption that the Catholic church was a worthwhile organisation doing good work, then the indulgences seemed like a perfectly good idea to me on a practical real-world level. (No clue about the intricacy of Christian doctrine, so I can't say whether they were kosher from a theological point of view.)
jefftk 4y ago
> Didn’t SBF make his fortune in the crypto space? Yes. Initially he worked in regular finance, at Jane Street, and then crypto, founding the Alameda Research trading firm and FTX exchange. > By definition this would mean capturing real money from retail investors, right? I'm not very knowledgeable about crypto, but I don't understand how the definition of crypto means this? The article we're commenting on describes one of the early successes of Alameda, where they saw that Bitcoin was consistently trading for much higher prices in Japan than in the rest of the world. In normal finance you mostly don't see this sort of thing for very long, because global markets are highly interconnected, but in this case it was logistically difficult to sell Bitcoin in Japan. In fixing this, Alameda lowered the price at which Japanese investors were able to buy Bitcoin, and raised the price at which people elsewhere were able to sell Bitcoin, keeping a fraction of the difference for themselves; I don't see how Alameda made others worse off? With FTX they're making money by providing a platform that makes it easier for people to trade with each others. A bit of, 'in a gold rush cell shovels'. Again, I don't see how they're making others worse off? > when I hear about an EA champion, there’s often this dynamic where how they made money doesn’t matter. Sort of! If someone is initially not altruistic and accumulates a bunch of money doing something questionable, then if they later come around to doing good things with their money I'm going to be happy about that. So while I am not a fan of, say, Microsoft's business practices in the '90s which made Gates a billionaire, I do think his decision to spend his fortune the way he has is a good one, and one that should be commended. The alternative is that, like most other billionaires, the money goes to houses, yachts, and other things which are far less positive for the world. On the other hand, SBF is in a different category: he was trying to be an effective altruist from the beginning. So if he did something massively harmful to earn his money (which, as discussed above, I don't think he did) we would need to consider that in figuring out his net impact. Additionally, it is pretty common for EAs to argue that you shouldn't do harmful things even if they are majorly profitable and allow you to do a lot of good through your donations.