As Matthew Barnett states below, we can use billionaires as a class to get to a lot more orders of magnitude, and they still seem to only donate around ~6℅ of their wealth. This is despite the fact that many billionaires expect to die in a few decades or less and cannot effectively use their fortunes to extend their lifespans.
I agree on the billionare reference class being a good one to look at. (Though there are a few effects that make me feel considerably more optimistic than this reference class would imply overall.)
This is despite the fact that many billionaires expect to die in a few decades or less and cannot effectively use their fortunes to extend their lifespans.
I don’t think this effect matters much unless you think that people will want to live for more than 10^30 total (parallel) years.
Also, under some level of self-modification, diversification, and parallelism, this could return back to being pretty effective from an altruistic perspective.
The core argument in this post extrapolates from around 1 or 2 orders of magnitude of wealth to perhaps 40 orders of magnitude.
As Matthew Barnett states below, we can use billionaires as a class to get to a lot more orders of magnitude, and they still seem to only donate around ~6℅ of their wealth. This is despite the fact that many billionaires expect to die in a few decades or less and cannot effectively use their fortunes to extend their lifespans.
I agree on the billionare reference class being a good one to look at. (Though there are a few effects that make me feel considerably more optimistic than this reference class would imply overall.)
I don’t think this effect matters much unless you think that people will want to live for more than 10^30 total (parallel) years.
Also, under some level of self-modification, diversification, and parallelism, this could return back to being pretty effective from an altruistic perspective.