“Good Ventures is now among the top 20 largest foundations in the country, close on the heels of another storied philanthropy from another century, the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Moskovitz and Tuna also offer a powerful philanthropic example to other entrants on the billionaires list, not to mention legions of other young but not-quite-so-fortunate tech entrepreneurs.”
Recent estimates found that philanthropic grantmakers from 157,064 foundations in 23 countries disbursed over $150 billion in funding annually. Much of this giving is based on personal commitments to specific issues and geographies. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Emily Oehlsen outlines Open Philanthropy’s different approach to prioritising causes – to help others as much as possible with the resources available to it, without any precommitments to particular issues or geographic areas.
“Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re making progress at a 10% faster rate than we normally would have. Over time, that aggregates up, and maybe after 10 years, we’re a year ahead of where we would have been if we hadn’t done this kind of stuff.
“Now, suppose in 10 years we’re going to discover a cheap new genetic engineering technology that anyone can use in the world if they order the right parts off of Amazon. That could be great, but could also allow bad actors to genetically engineer pandemics and basically try to do terrible things with this technology. And if we’ve brought that forward, and that happens at year nine instead of year 10 because of some of these interventions we did, now we start to think that if that’s really bad, if these people using this technology causes huge problems for humanity, it begins to sort of wash out the benefits of getting the science a little bit faster.”
“The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, ‘Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.'”
“One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people’s homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that’s the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. It happens in larger cities too, in this part of the world.”
“I think a lot of the case for planning things out in advance — trying to tell stories of what might happen, trying to figure out what kind of regime we’re going to want and put the pieces in place today, trying to figure out what kind of research challenges are going to be hard and do them today — I think a lot of the case for that stuff being so important does rely on this theory that things could move a lot faster than anyone is expecting.”