I apologize for the unproductive way I conveyed myself in the first iteration of this essay. The link will direct you to the original, less productive version of the essay, if you want the context on that.

I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll say it again: I’m worried about Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s (possible) IPOs.

Tl;dr: there’s a good chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI becomes a publicly traded company in the near future. Somehow this makes a lot of capital that was previously solid melt into a liquid. That liquid capital can then be given to whatever the people who own it want it to be given to. Some of those people have good intentions, and thus have committed to giving much of that liquid capital away to charitable causes.

Before I start: one thing I didn’t emphasize in the previous version of this, which I regret, is that this isn’t directed specifically at those who are currently giving their money away. The situation we’re currently in with all these IPOs is the result of a broader culture and set of institutions which have concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. I still believe that if you’re a billionaire, donating ~80% of your wealth is somewhere close to the bare minimum. But I recognize that it’s much better than, say, the SpaceX IPO, which is definitely not going to do anything good for society. And don’t get me started on Elon Musk himself.

Upon reflection, what genuinely upsets me is this broader culture in the background—the culture of moving fast and breaking things and moving on to the next. Someone drops out and upends their life, moves to SF, then pitches some halfway-decent idea, and they get their millions. Or they make a company that could end the world and which has everyone else racing to keep up. In this culture, everything is just a game. Money is just numbers on a screen, or tucked away in a remote account.

It’s something I think has only gotten worse over time. For example, I was outraged when I learned that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, no individuals were ever held accountable. The banks paid fat bonuses to their executives, none of whom were even charged AT ALL for their role in the crisis. Not even a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, ordinary people had to suffer the foreclosure of their homes and the loss of their jobs. The failure to hold those people accountable has, in all likelihood, only emboldened that culture.

It’s all the more outrageous when we think about the other side of this world. There are people in this world who have gone their whole lives without the tiniest fraction of what these Silicon Valley types let slip between their fingers. People who can’t buy a cart to hold their vegetables. People who sell their children into slavery because starvation is the alternative. People whose children are dying from malaria because they can’t even get nets to protect themselves. That money that could save lives regularly gets tossed around without a second, or even a first, thought in places like Silicon Valley does enrage me. And I want to recognize that Effective Altruists and our community share that outrage at such waste and unfairness.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so viscerally upset at our current state of affairs, as to say that the current vibe in some parts of the EA community is cavalier is a massive understatement. One of the first-place essays in the Manifund essay competition basically says: come to where all the money is; we don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna do with it, but we’ll figure something out. Come up with a halfway decent idea, and we’ll give you 6-7 figures per year and see if the “long shot” pans out.

I’m also upset because we’ve already seen how this kind of thing can fail before. FTX threw tens of millions of dollars into stupid shit like the halftime superbowl ad and various celebrity endorsements. I stand by my assessment that these were really stupid ideas dressed up as long-shots. Even many of the less stupid ideas, like the Carrick Flynn campaign, were costly and ultimately fruitless embarrassments. And then, of course, FTX and Alameda Research got exposed for fraud, and the EA movement did a surprised pikachu face. All of that promised windfall just blew away. And all of us were left to pick up the pieces. Though before we pity ourselves too much, let’s remember that we probably weren’t the most viscerally affected.

I joined the EA community right as the FTX fallout was happening, so maybe it left a greater impression on me than most. I was just shocked and outraged to hear datum after datum about how careless Sam and others at FTX and Alameda were. So forgive me if I see what’s happening right now and jump to conclusions that the same thing is happening again.

What’s so upsetting about all of this is that we know better. We are the community that is all about being effective, that wants to do the most good, that is supposed to take saving lives seriously. Yet I worry that what we’re doing is just falling into the Silicon Valley culture and dressing it up as altruism. Again.

GiveDirectly should be the reference point here, as it so often is elsewhere, because it’s literally as simple as giving money to people who actually need it. If your program can’t come close to saving a life for $10,000 or the equivalent, then don’t do it. Or make it better first.

Again, I should be clear again that much of the blame rests on the system we have and those before us who built (or broke) it. Ideally, we would follow something along the lines of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “skin in the game”: one should personally bear the consequences of his own policies. The architect who builds a bridge should be comfortable sleeping under it. The executive who pushes subprime loans should be comfortable with life in prison. It’s for the worse that our society has so enabled “fragilistas” (myself included) to set policies without cowering under the sharp blade of genuine consequences. Maybe there’s a small chance that society figures out the fragilista problem before Anthropic/OpenAI does its IPO thing, but in the event that it doesn’t, we’ll have to entrust the distribution of those billions of dollars to a few elite fragilistas who have no skin in the game; whose median worst case scenario is probably having to move back home with their affluent parents. To put it lightly, this is an incentive structure that does not inspire trust, and it is thus up to individuals to create something worthy of trust despite that. So it is to these people whom I now speak.

To the people pitching ideas for this windfall: think of the dozens, if not hundreds, of lives your ideas will cost in opportunity. And then think about whether it’s still worth it, given that.

And to the big funders themselves: above all, do not deceive yourselves. You know as well as I do that people will worship you if this windfall is distributed anywhere near successfully. So don’t worry about that. Worry about whether your donations, in total, will do as much good as saving at least 30 million human lives.

That’s right. 30 million lives.

How did I get that number? Well, a recent estimate of the size of the windfall puts it at about $370 billion in total. An estimate of GiveDirectly’s effectiveness puts it at about 7.7 WELLBYs for $1,000, or about one life for every $10,000. Yes, there are diminishing returns. Yes, you can nitpick the math. But the point still stands.

You have all the power here, and therefore, all the responsibility. This isn’t some kind of game where you exchange your casino chips for social credit points. You are playing with peoples’ lives.