I feel like this argument fails to engage with the fact that a reasonable fraction of extremely wealthy people have commited high fractions of their money to charity. Even if this is mostly for signaling reasons, it’s plausible that similar situations will cause good things to happen in the future.
Billionaires don’t seem very altruistic to me, on average. From a Forbes article
The members of the 2023 Forbes 400 list have collectively given more than $250 billion to charity, by our count—less than 6% of their combined net worth.
This figure seems consistent with the idea that billionaires, like most people, are mostly selfish and don’t become considerably less selfish after becoming several orders of magnitude wealthier.
Of course the raw data here might also be misleading because many billionaires commit to donate most of their wealth after death, but this doesn’t seem like much evidence of altruism to me, given that there’s no realistic selfish alternative after you’re dead (except perhaps holding the money in a trust fund while you are cryonically frozen).
Agreed. I’m partially responding to lines in the post like:
Despite this, spontaneous strategic altruism towards strangers is extremely rare. The median American directs exactly 0$ to global poverty interventions
And
So in keeping with this long tradition of human selfishness, it sounds likely that if we succeed at aligning AI, the vast, vast majority of its output will get directed toward satisfying the preferences and values of the people controlling it (or possessing leverage over its continued operation) - not the “CEV of all humans”
It feels to me like the naive guess from billionaires is more like 10% (in keeping with the numbers you provided, thanks) rather than 0.1%. (I’m more optimistic than this naive guess overall for a few reasons.)
I feel like this argument fails to engage with the fact that a reasonable fraction of extremely wealthy people have commited high fractions of their money to charity. Even if this is mostly for signaling reasons, it’s plausible that similar situations will cause good things to happen in the future.
Billionaires don’t seem very altruistic to me, on average. From a Forbes article
This figure seems consistent with the idea that billionaires, like most people, are mostly selfish and don’t become considerably less selfish after becoming several orders of magnitude wealthier.
Of course the raw data here might also be misleading because many billionaires commit to donate most of their wealth after death, but this doesn’t seem like much evidence of altruism to me, given that there’s no realistic selfish alternative after you’re dead (except perhaps holding the money in a trust fund while you are cryonically frozen).
Agreed. I’m partially responding to lines in the post like:
And
It feels to me like the naive guess from billionaires is more like 10% (in keeping with the numbers you provided, thanks) rather than 0.1%. (I’m more optimistic than this naive guess overall for a few reasons.)