In general, if you have to spend money and you do so by giving it to someone more creative, or to someone whose marginal needs are still within "personal spending competence" scale, it's a bit of a copout.
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Since people suck at spending more than about $4m, giving money to anyone who has less than $4m is a way to burn optionality for creativity.
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Hypothesis: If you can make a clear spending plan for a billion dollars, one that's specific rather than categorical, and either pops from parent category or is sui generis, and is clearly socially situated, someone will immediately give you a couple of million to get started
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By socially situated, I mean something that almost everybody will have a clear opinion on as good or bad and want to stop it or get behind it. This is why categories fail. Many people vaguely approve or disapprove of general categories like "fund green energy."
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But to actually socially situate it is to turn that vague approval/disapproval into clear versions. Like for eg. propose paving the Sahara with solar panels. Everybody will have very clear opinions on that, and it won't necessarily match their categorical opinions.
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The instinct to fund people who are smarter/more creative than you is a really dangerous one. Unless you're giving money to people who are clearly *less* creative/dumber than you in some key way (but more so in a different way), you're not really doing any work. It's dumb money.
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"Spotting and investing in smart and creative people" is not a kind of smartness or creativity. Investing that way is not smart money.
Money is only smart money if it is smart in some way that is *not* purely social judgment.
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Replying to
Isn’t the point to find alpha in areas where one doesn’t have alpha oneself? I get the distinction about blindly assuming “smart” people are a good investment vs understanding from where a “smart” person’s alpha springs but surely people can be more knowledgeable than oneself
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alpha is a bad mental model for this... but to the extent you want to apply it, it is distributed across you and the counterparty, not in either side alone
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I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's a bad mental model for the underlying phenomenon. You're reifying unique information by locus. I'm reifying unique patterns of connection. The "alpha" is inbetween 2 things -- the way 1 thing sees another thing. Created, not acquired.
It instantiates as cultivating certain creative sensibilities in yourself
alpha lies in the beholder
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