Comment by human_person
5 days ago
"I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchange, so that I can use my vast wealth in the most effective way."
Has always really bothered me because it assumes that there are no negative impacts of the work you did to get the money. If you do a million dollars worth of damage to the world and earn 100k (or a billion dollars worth of damage to earn a million dollars), even if you spend all of the money you earned on making the world a better place, you arent even going to fix 10% of the damage you caused (and thats ignoring the fact that its usually easier/cheaper to break things than to fix them).
> If you do a million dollars worth of damage to the world and earn 100k (or a billion dollars worth of damage to earn a million dollars), even if you spend all of the money you earned on making the world a better place, you arent even going to fix 10% of the damage you caused (and thats ignoring the fact that its usually easier/cheaper to break things than to fix them).
You kinda summed up a lot of the world post industrial revolution there, at least as far as stuff like toxic waste (Superfund, anyone?) and stuff like climate change, I mean for goodness sake let's just think about TEL and how they knew Ethanol could work but it just wasn't 'patentable'. [0] Or the "We don't even know the dollar amount because we don't have a workable solution" problem of PFAS.
[0] - I still find it shameful that a university is named after the man who enabled this to happen.
And not just that, but the very fact that someone considers it valid to try to accumulate billions of dollars so they can have an outsized influence on the direction of society, seems somewhat questionable.
Even with 'good' intentions, there is the implied statement that your ideas are better than everyone else's and so should be pushed like that. The whole thing is a self-satisfied ego-trip.
Well, it's easy to do good. Or, its easy to plan on doing good, once your multi-decade plan to become a billionaire comes to fruition.
There's a hidden (or not so hidden) assumption in the EA's "calculations" that capitalism is great and climate change isn't a big deal. (You pretty much have to believe the latter to believe the former).