I obviously can't prove I am not biased in such a way, but I don't think that is a fair assumption.

I don't think my reasoning is around wanting to stay sane at all. Most of my reasoning revolves around base rates, examining current systems, and assessing current progress.

I think I'm in this peculiar position where I have ~medium (maybe many reading this would consider them to be long) timelines and fairly low "p(doom)", and I still think AI risk is among the most important things to work on.

I'm not sure. I definitely think there is a chance that if I earnestly believed those things, I would go fairly crazy. I empathize with those who, in my opinion, are overreacting.

I don't think the probability of AGI this year is above 10%, nor do I think that doom, given AGI is above 10%

I made a similar comment here so I wont re-hash all of it but I still haven't seen a compelling case for caring about biodiversity. I dont want the EA community to be closed off, especially to people who are trying to do good in the world, but I think there needs to be a much stronger reason to care about biodiversity inherently. Otherwise, it feels hard to distinguish this from high impact projects to improve the Toronto Raptors and talking about basketball analytics.

Nice comment. One follow-up.

The only cases I see where I deviated heavily from the process and it went well was when I had worked extensively with the person before and knew them quite well 

Do you think this basically supports "hiring people you know to be good" and using your network and previous interactions with people not in an interview setting to seek out good candidates?

I feel like I might pull back on (1) by maybe 20% or so but the general ethos I still want to convey.

The part I didn't do as good a job of conveying is that most people won't donate out of risk aversion or keeping their options open and I think people are also far overestimating their odds of pivoting their career into a government role, especially in the next 3 years.

Even if you accept that the Trump administration wouldn't hire anyone who has ever donated to a Democrat, this is the first time this has happened and thus you shouldn't assume this type of thing is going to be common. 

All in all, I think it's going to be quite rare that someone shouldn't make political donations.

Thanks for not deleting the comment. Apology accepted, all good.

In what way is Canva a PfG company? They've had 7 (depending on how you count, up to 19) funding rounds from traditional venture capital firms. Equity is entirely ownership by private individuals, not charities. 

Hi Brad, appreciate the praise though it's unnecessary :). I'll reply to your points here. If there are some others you particularly want me to address, feel free to let me know.

We assert that, in expectation, a set of PFG equities should outperform an index fund. 

I don't think this has been shown. For example, the largest and most profitable companies in existence are normal for-profit companies.

That is to say, if all else is equal (same price, same quality, same convenience and other relevant factors), people would rather money go toward saving a kid from malaria than enriching a random investor. 

Maybe, though I haven't seen much/any evidence for this and I think things are very rarely ever equal like this.

In the next bit, you give several anecdotes. I think those are very easy to give. You probably don't show the failures (most of which you probably don't know of!) and I could give you millions of anecdotes about the free advertising, preferential treatment, etc. of other businesses. I agree, people wish the world were more charitable, but they don't want to pay for that.

Actually, I think there is a real-world example where what you are hoping for didn't happen, Glo dollar. They've been around for a while with a current Mcap of ~3M circulating, which is basically nothing (they can't even cover operating costs). Stablecoins are as close as one gets to a commodity/undifferentiated good, where, according to my understanding of PfG theory, they should have been able to dominate the market. The best talent should have flocked to develop Glo dollar. Stablecoin holders should have been more than happy to hold Glo dollars instead of USDC/USDT, since it's just a change of who gets the interest from treasuries. There should have been several compounding advantages and such.

I suppose my overall point about PfG would be that we should basically invest in good companies insofar as our discount rate is less than our expected returns, and we should seek to invest in good companies that will maximize our (risk-adjusted) returns. Focusing on so-called PfG companies will cause us to deviate from good investment strategies because people are going to see imaginary gains.

As a thought, why do we need to "start new companies" with this strategy, why can't we just buy up the stock of a random public company and then tell people, "you will further our philanthropic goals if you choose company A over company B since philanthropic holders own company A stock"?