Sam Bankman-Fried on impacting the lives of trillions of people not born yet

Ultimately, this scale of impact that you can have on the world is just really, really large.  I think the fact is you can impact way more people through your philanthropy, through how you give back, than you do in your everyday life.  That's what really sets it apart.  You can think about the thousands of people who you can help who are dying of diseases that no one should be dying of today.  There are millions of them, but a single person can potentially save thousands of their lives over the course of your career.  And that's a lot of lives to save.  And I think when you start thinking about the trillions of people who haven't been born yet, who are going to inherit this earth from us, the things that we do that sort of impact what it is exactly that we're passing down to them are just incredibly important and magnified way beyond the scope of almost anything else that we do.

~ Sam Bankman-Fried, "Effective Altruism: Education, Empowerment & Environment with Gisele & SBF," Crypto Bahamas, 3:20 mark

Sequoia Capital on how William MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried met

MacAskill was visiting MIT in search of volunteers willing to sign on to his earn-to-give program.  At a café table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MacAskill laid out his idea as if it were a business plan: a strategic investment with a return measured in human lives.  The opportunity was big, MacAskill argued, because, in the developing world, life was still unconscionably cheap.  Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death. 

MacAskill couldn’t have hoped for a better recruit.  Not only was SBF raised in the Bay Area as a utilitarian, but he’d already been inspired by Peter Singer to take moral action.  During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming.  As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life. And MacAskill—Singer’s philosophical heir—had the answer: The best way for him to maximize good in the world would be to maximize his wealth. 

SBF listened, nodding, as MacAskill made his pitch.  The earn-to-give logic was airtight.  It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism.  Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, “Yep. That makes sense.”  But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.  All the rest was merely execution risk.

~ "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex - And Maybe You Should Too," Sequoia Capital, September 22, 2022

(The account is based on an article by journalist Adam Fisher, commissioned by Sequoia.  The article, published last September, was posted on the firm's website under "We help the daring build legendary companies.”  It has since been removed.)

Naina Bajekal on William MacAskill's work on effective altruism

The greater good has been the focus of his work for more than a decade, since he helped start the effective altruism (EA) movement, which aims to use evidence and reason to find the best ways of helping others, and to put those findings into practice.  EA holds that we should value all lives equally and act on that basis.  It is the antithesis of the old do-gooder’s credo “Think global, act local.” 

His new book, What We Owe the Future, argues we should expand the moral circle even further: if we care about people thousands of miles away, we should care about people thousands or even millions of years in the future.  The book, which has been praised by the likes of Stephen Fry and Elon Musk, makes the case for “longtermism,” the view that positively influencing the long-term future—not just this generation or the next, but the potentially trillions of people still to come—is a key moral priority of our time.  Through analyzing the risks of climate change, man-made pathogens, nuclear weapons, and advanced artificial intelligence, MacAskill has come to believe we’re living at a pivotal moment in human history, one where the fate of the world depends significantly on the choices we make in our lifetimes.

~ Naina Bajekal, "Want To Do More Good? This Movement Might Have the Answer," Time, August 10, 2022

Jeffrey Tucker on Sam Bankman-Fried and effective altruism

Will Cain: It reminds me of a company that was founded well over a decade ago and people might remember: Vice.  And Vice had a very charismatic leader who had a flashy lifestyle and said he understood Gen Z, or Gen X, or millennials, or whatever it may have been.  And because of that, he attracted investment from legacy media organizations, hundreds of millions of dollars in increasing rounds of capital raise that continued to push up the valuation of Vice.  And I hear what you're describing now with SBF is he did something similar, although instead of Lamborghinis the way that he got - I think he got - Silicon Valley to give him a ton of money to investing in FTX, or to buy FTT [FTX's token] was through the flashy mechanism of virtue signaling.  That I'm going to give it all away, that I'm altruistic.  And so that sucked in the sophisticated investor?

Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah, that was his value-added to the ongoing cons in this space, and there are many.  But his particular sort of spin on it was to be the innovator of effective altruism, which he describes as a religious conversion.  He realized it was wrong just to make a lot of money, but rather you should make a lot of money and then give it all away.  So just a nice bit of flim flam perfectly constructed for 2019 and 2020.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "FTX cryptocurrency scandal is just the beginning," Will Cain Podcast, 12:40 mark, November 15, 2022