Sam Bankman-Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me ask you a few questions about effective altruism, a movement where you’ve been a leader and major supporter. Thanks to people like you and also Open Philanthropy, effective altruism seems to be moving away from being funding-constrained to now being talent-constrained or people- or organization-constrained. (A) Is that true, and (B) if it’s true, what does that mean for strategy? Yeah, I think it’s sort of true, but I think it’s true a lot less than most people think it’s true. That is the meme right now. That is what most people will say, that effective altruism is now not funding-constrained because of myself, because of Dustin Moskowitz with Open Philanthropy, and a few other things. That’s been a pretty big update. There certainly is a lot more funding than there was before, but saying it’s not funding-constrained — I think people go too far in that, and to some extent that’s a symptom of not thinking hard enough about great ways to spend money. I think that there needs to be more innovation in ways to spend money before there’s going to be the capacity to spend the amount of money that effective altruism is going to have, but I also think that innovation is happening. It will happen, and so, I just think there’s billions a year that I can see spent extremely effectively. That’s one thing I’ll say, but to the extent that it is funding-constrained — and it certainly is more so now than it was before — I think a big piece of that is that basically, the biggest thing that’s missing is a weird . . . If it’s not funding-constrained, then it has to be something-else-constrained. That’s the basic question: What is the limiting factor on growth of the movement? And I think people will say “people.” You could talk a lot about effective altruists who aren’t sure what they should do with their life, which makes you wonder what “people” means exactly. It’s not that there aren’t people anywhere. But those people are maybe not project drivers. They would be an okay number 17 in an organization, but they’re not going to make things happen. They’re not the Sam Bankman-Fried arbitrageurs of the world. That is scarce. You must think it’s scarce, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.