Sam Bankman-Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the May 2022 Oregon Congressional Election, you gave 12 million dollars to Carrick Flynn, whose campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. How have you updated your beliefs about the efficacy of political giving in the aftermath? It was the first time that I gave on that scale in a race. And I did it because he was, of all the candidates in the cycle, the most outspoken on the need for more pandemic preparedness and prevention. He lost—such is life. In the end, there are some updates on the efficacy of various things. But, I never thought that the odds were extremely high that he was going to win. It was always going to be an uncertain close race. There's a limit to how much you can update from a one-time occurrence. If you thought the odds were 50-50, and it turns out to be close in one direction or another, there's a maximum of a factor-of-two update that you have on that. There were a bunch of sort of micro-updates on specific factors of the race, but on a high level, it didn’t change my perspective on policy that much. But does it make you think there are diminishing or possibly negative marginal returns from one donor giving to a candidate? Because of the negative PR?…

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