How billionaires decide where to invest

When I lived in San Francisco a few years ago, I started hearing people toss around the words “effective altruism” (often with a dose of side-eyed skepticism). EA is a philosophy that aims to find evidence-based ways to benefit humanity, often through philanthropy. I am not a philanthropist and don’t hang out with billionaires, but the idea that there can be an objectively efficient way to move humanity forward feels noble, fascinating, and misguided to me all at the same time. So I was intrigued by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s recent Medium post grappling with his approach to philanthropy.

Effective altruism sounds good in theory, but in practice it can have sinister implications. Maybe you’ve heard that FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, who was recently convicted of seven counts of criminal fraud, used the philosophy of EA to justify his desire to make as much money as possible (so he could give it all away). On Medium, entrepreneur Joan Westenberg rips into EA, calling it “a doctrine born to the rationalist cradle, promising to solve the world’s woes through a calculator.” When taken to its extreme, EA can fuel a hyper-rational worldview that ignores empirical reality in favor of building fantastical utopias that benefit no one. (Or, in the words of P.J. O’Rourke: “Everyone wants to save the world, no one wants to help mom do the dishes.”)

What I like about Moskovitz’s post is his attempt to find nuance in the movement. Nothing is all good or all bad, and I agree with one reader who calls this post “How to Be Sane in Effective Altruism: 101.” Moskovitz reminds us: “When a group has a shared sense of identity, the people within it are still not all one thing, a homogenous group with one big set of shared beliefs — and yet they often are perceived that way.”

What else we’re reading

• Novelist and screenwriter Cole Haddon interviews 12 filmmakers, authors, and comic book writers about how they weather the highs and lows of a creative life. In the words of author Wiz Wharton, “You have to accept that dreaded internal critic as an occupational hazard, but one that — if you’re serious about writing — makes you excited to improve rather than defeats you into creative paralysis.”
• If you’ve already seen Dune: Part Two or are planning to, this deep dive on the origins of novels on which the movie is based is a worthwhile read. Did you know Frank Herbert was originally inspired to write the story of Arrakis when he was a journalist covering the environmental issues facing the Oregon Dunes? “This struggle between man and nature — the effort to form something as wild as a landscape into a stable environment to build on — would be the foundation for Herbert’s debut novel, Dune.”

From the archive

Since promising to give away her entire $35.1 billion fortune in 2019, novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has announced a string of donations on Medium. In late 2022, Scott gave $1,990,800,000 to 343 organizations supporting people from underserved communities. Earlier that year, Scott announced $3,863,125,000 in donations to 465 nonprofit organizations. What’s notable here is not just the amount of money given, but Scott’s insightful writing about why she chose to give her money to these people in this way. As Scott writes, “Communities with a habit of removing obstacles for different subsets of people tend to get better for everyone.”

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Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Jon Gluck, Scott Lamb, & Carly Rose Gillis

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