Back
The FTX Future Fund needs to slow down
blogCredibility Rating
2/5
Mixed(2)Mixed quality. Some useful content but inconsistent editorial standards. Claims should be verified.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Substack
Written in September 2022 shortly before FTX's collapse, this post is historically notable as an early external critique of FTX Future Fund's spending pace, relevant to discussions of EA funding dynamics and governance failures.
Metadata
Importance: 38/100opinion piececommentary
Summary
Trevor Klee argues that the FTX Future Fund's rapid deployment of massive philanthropic capital creates harmful second-order effects, including attracting opportunistic actors to the EA community and risking counterproductive use of funds. Written in September 2022, before FTX's collapse, the post advocates for slower, more deliberate philanthropic decision-making prioritizing wisdom over speed.
Key Points
- •Rapid large-scale philanthropic spending can attract opportunistic actors seeking money rather than genuinely mission-aligned contributors to EA.
- •Fast capital deployment risks not just waste but actively counterproductive outcomes, undermining the longtermist goals the Fund aims to achieve.
- •The author supports the Fund's existential risk focus but argues the pace of spending outstrips the organization's wisdom to spend it well.
- •Examples like $500k opinion-change prizes and prediction market tournaments illustrate the unusual and potentially distortive incentive structures being created.
- •Published just weeks before FTX's collapse, the piece proved prescient about systemic risks of SBF-funded EA philanthropy.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| FTX Future Fund | Organization | 60.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Mar 15, 202617 KB
The FTX Future Fund needs to slow its charitable spending way down
Trevor Klee’s Newsletter
Subscribe Sign in The FTX Future Fund needs to slow its charitable spending way down
Alt title: I'm just a guy, standing in front of a multibillion dollar, crypto-funded, longtermist organization, asking them to please think about the second order consequences of philanthropy
Trevor Klee Sep 30, 2022 26 18 Share I wrote this post in response to a growing trend in the EA community that I’ve seen, where getting involved in EA has become a great way to get a large pot of money. This post is about how that’s bad.
On a separate, personal note, my crowdinvesting push for my feline autoimmune drug is just $10k off of its minimum of $100k. If you care about feline autoimmune disease (i.e. feline stomatitis), human autoimmune disease, or human neurodegenerative disease, click the link.
In AstralCodexTen’s last Open Thread, Scott posted two updates from the Effective Altruist (EA) community at large.
The first was an opportunity to win up to $500,000 to change the Future Fund’s opinion about AI risk. The Future Fund is spending millions of dollars per year on the assumption that artificial general intelligence is going to be a serious threat to the human race within the next 50 years, and they want people to convince them to change their opinions one way or another.
The second was a prediction market tournament for an EA regranting project through an organization called Clearer Thinking. A prediction market is a stock market for the outcome of an event in the future, in case you’re unfamiliar. In this case, it’s a prediction market to predict what projects the Clearer Thinking team will fund. There are cash prizes for getting the predictions right, as well as for providing helpful information to sway the judges one way or another. The cash prizes were up to $13000, while the regranting was for up to $500,000 for projects that would “significantly improve the future”.
Thanks for reading my newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, mostly about biology (but occasionally about stuff like this).
Subscribe Interestingly, both of these were funded by the FTX Future Fund, the crypto-funded EA organization. The FTX Future Fund is insanely well-funded thanks to its crypto billionaire founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, and is rapidly deploying huge amounts of capital towards solving what they consider to be existential risks to humanity.
This is admirable, and I appreciate where FTX’s heart is at. That being said, I’m writing this post to ask them to please slow their roll and drastically reduce their charitable output, at least until they get a better handle on how to spend it wisely.
Now, I know saying
... (truncated, 17 KB total)Resource ID:
23832363462cb6c9 | Stable ID: ZDE3NmMyNG