Yes, I guess it matters a lot whether this was quite close to the best they could do or the best they could do given specific resource constraints or whether they just didn’t bother to try doing better (eg to invest more tokens into readable papers)?
> I guess it matters a lot whether this was quite close to the best they could do
As the author of the post points out, there is no way this is “the best they could do”. It’s a write up that didn’t involve someone with the math + communication skills required to clearly explain the result.
In this hypothetical case funding agencies would probably happily pay for “alien maths translation grants” and you could write papers about advances in that field and get jobs etc. So arguably for better or worse it would create a specialised academic cottage industry that somehow interfaces with the rest of maths.
Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically.
If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)
If you're a charity, you aren't optimizing for max(value_generated) in an immediate way.
If your mission is to help children with cancer, you don't want to spend 100% of your funding on chemotherapy and drug development, because that way, you eventually run out of money (donors die and their cards expire, and you aren't spending on marketing to bring in new ones). You may spend some of it on buying a fancy yacht and organizing a ball for the rich, which will bring in 4x as much in donations as you spend on getting it to happen, and that's the money you spend on chemo and new drugs. If you care about as much money being spend on cancer research as possible, that's potentially a better way to make it happen than spending your donations on cancer research.
Imagine a donor is willing to give you $1m, but you believe you can get up to $500k in extra donations from strangers on the internet if you do donation matching (it's essentially a free marketing campaign). So you ask them for $500k in hard cash and $500k in matched funds. Even if you overestimate and only get $400k in donations, you're still getting an extra $200k of free money.
Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations.
However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get.
Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.
Isn’t the point more “it’s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally”?
That aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that’s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible… or perhaps a bit circular since it “assumes away” the ceiling.
Predicting when the sigmoid bends is difficult and predicting how long until it unbends is equally difficult.
The simpler assumption is that over enough time, the S functions stack together for long enough that working backwards from exponential is a better predictor of reality.
These stacked S curves have continually been true with most technology.
It is great that he’s doing this and it’s making the world a better place.
It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has.
We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”?
If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a donation to an art museum in a developed country - and I think people should, and it matters morally.
The difference between for profit and non-profit isn’t really important either compared to “what concretely did they spend money on and what does that plausibly achieve”.
(Tbc some cause areas he donates to are explained, and they seem reasonable and close to his life, but unfortunately not in any depth).
It says right there in the article that he donates to military veterans' charities and animal rescue charities. I don't see him as a big arts benefactor considering that the main motive the ultra-rich have for making lavish donations to fancy museums is to get invited to the right parties, Met Gala and the like.
He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.
I think what would be great is to have eg a concise example where it works well for you and a concise example where it doesn’t. This shows you have explored it and thought about it enough to explain interesting observations. It’s good to then be ready to go deeper if of interest.
Agreed. I feel like Alphabet (who wrote this post) has kind of lost track of what they're espousing here.
Self driving cars were the "monkey" 10 years ago but now they are largely derisked. I'd like to see Alphabet working on the next generation of innovations. For me personally, I'd like to see them work on:
- Teleportation.
- Talking animals.
- A cure for death.
I'm not seeing them work on anything remotely as ambitious these days!
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