Conversation

SBF
@SBF_FTX
Replying to
@SBF_FTX
14) 400,000 people die of malaria each year. It costs something like $5k to save one person from malaria, or $2b total per year. So if you want to save lives in the developing world, you can blow $2b a year just on malaria.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
15) And that’s just the start. If you look at the scale of funds spent on diseases, global warming, emerging technological risk, animal welfare, nuclear warfare safety, etc., you get numbers reaching into the trillions.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
16) So at the very least, you should be using that as your baseline: and kelly tells you that when the backdrop is trillions of dollars, there’s essentially no risk aversion on the scale of thousands or millions.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
17) Put another way: if you’re maximizing EV(log(W+$1,000,000,000,000)) and W is much less than a trillion, this is very similar to just maximizing EV(W).
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
18) Does this mean you should be willing to accept a significant chance of failing to do much good sometimes? Yes, it does. And that’s ok. If it was the right play in EV, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
19) And more generally, if you look at everyone contributing to the cause as one portfolio--which is certainly true from the perspective of the child dying from malaria--they aren’t worried about who it was that funded their safety.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
20) So what does all this mean? It means that, when you’re thinking about your career, sometimes the altruistic thing to do is to take chances. Seek out the opportunities with the biggest upside, not the ones which are the safest, and hone in on that vision.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
21) Sometimes that means a startup, or an experimental field, or a bold play. Sometimes it means starting a charity or a movement. When it comes to the scales of money, better is bigger.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
22) So given all that, why not bet all $100k? Why only $50k? Because if you bet $100k and lose, you can never bet again. And to the extent you think you have future ways to provide value that are contingent on having some amount of funding, it can be important to keep that.
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William Kiely
@William_Kiely
Replying to
@SBF_FTX
and
@SBF_Alameda
That's an important consideration, but by betting $100k you're not betting the whole EA portfolio. You're betting a small fraction of it. You'll still have future income with which you can make new bets and others may give you charity in the meantime (I certainly would).
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