You would need a mechanism to extract that value- i.e. the ability to strip the company apart for parts. Buying a non-controlling portion of shares doesn't give you that ability.
Indeed. The decision-making apparatus is sometimes so starkly separated from the stakeholders that there's no reason to believe that the balance sheet and the stock price are likely to be correlated at all in the future. If the company doesn't pay dividends, and can't be sold off for its assets, then what is the function of equity?
I find Wall St. baffling for all the usual reasons, but this one is too rarely discussed.
The company may survive but there are still thousands of layoffs. I just wrote in another comment that in 1999 I was getting 5 recruiter calls a week. In all of 2001 I got zero.
In my opinion, BPP (one of the major topics of the book) is such a weird complexity class. It seems both an easy and hard class.
Roughly it accepts inputs that have at least 2/3rds of witnesses accepting and rejects inputs that have no more than 1/3 of witnesses accepting. Witness means additional input (usually considered random input). The super nicety is the huge gap between 1/3 and 2/3.
One can simulate a BPP recognizer to a high degree of fidelity. Just try a bunch of random witnesses.
However, we don't yet know how to efficiently perfectly implement a perfect recognizer. Until we have sampled a lot of witnesses we really don't know what fraction the of overall population we are drawing from is accepting.
However (as the book points out) we know the strategy for perfect solution. We can decide BPP perfectly and efficiently if and only if certain very strong efficient pseudo random number generators exist. And the existence of such is very much tied to if certain problems are hard (require large circuits to solve) or not.
Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody."
The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.
> The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor
Is that an actual EA argument?
The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable.
But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
> I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
it could be though, if by first centralizing those billions, you could donate more effectively than the previous holders of that money could. the fraud victims may have never donated in the first place, or have donated to the wrong thing, or not enough to make the right difference.
When you work for something that directly contradicts peaceful civil society you are basically saying the mass murder of today is ok because it allows you to assuage your guilt by giving to your local charity - its only effective if altruism is not your goal.
A janitor at the CIA in the 1960s is certainly working at an organization that is disrupting the peaceful Iranian society and turning it into a "death to America" one. But I would not agree that they're doing a net-negative for society because the janitor's marginal contribution towards that objective is 0.
It might not be the best thing the janitor could do to society (as compared to running a soup kitchen).
you missed this part: "The arguments always feel to me too similar"
> The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
That isn't what OP was engaging with though, they aren't asking for you to answer the question 'what could Carnegie have done better' they are saying 'the philosophy seems to be arguing this particular thing'.
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