I think all the points still stand albeit the numbers in the example look dated now! Anything you think should be changed?

Surely it’s not a case of either-or. EA exists because we all found that existing charity was not up to scratch, hence we do want EA to take different approaches. However, I think it’s important to also have people from outside EA (but with good value alignment) to provide diversity of thought and make sure there are no blindspots.

Doesn’t CEA know any?

Do you get 1 karma just for posting this comment? 😂

Estonia doesn’t surprise me. It’s very tech-heavy and EA skews heavily to tech people

What were the conditions of the grant? What follow-up was there after the grant was made? Was there a staged payment schedule based on intermediate outputs? If this grant went to a for-profit and no output was produced, can the money be clawed back?

Thanks for the great analysis!

The lack of interest in GHD by the Leaders Forum is often communicated as if GHD should be deprioritised, but I think a fair amount of causation goes the other way. Historically, people promoting GHD have not been invited to the Leaders Forum.

I think it’s similar with engagement. Highly engaged EAs are less likely to support GHD, but that ignores the fact that engagement is defined primarily based on direct work not E2G or careers outside EA, hence people interested in GHD are naturally classified as less engaged even if they are just as committed.

Sure, the claim hides a lot of uncertainties. At a high level the article says “A implies X, Y and Z”, but you can’t possibly derive all of that information from the single number A. Really what’s the article should say is “X, Y and Z are consistent with the value of A”, which is a very different claim.

i don’t specifically disagree with X, Y and Z.

I do think you should hedge more given the tower of assumptions underneath.

The title of the post is simultaneously very confident ("the market implies" and "but not more"), but also somewhat imprecise ("trillions" and "value"). It was not clear to me that the point you were trying to make was that the number was high.

Your use of "but not more" implies you were also trying to assert the point that it was not that high, but I agree with your point above that the market could be even bigger. If you believe it could be much bigger, that seems inconsistent with the title.

I also think "value" and "revenue" are not equivalent for 2 reasons:

1. Value should factor in the consumer surplus
2. Even if you only look at the producer surplus, then you should look at profit not revenue

Your claim is very strong that “the market implies X”, when I think what you mean is that “the share price is consistent with X”.

There are a lot of assumptions stacked up:

• The share price represents the point at which the marginal buyer and marginal seller transact. If you assume both are rational and fundamental, then this represents the NPV of future cash flows for the marginal buyer / seller. Note this is not the same as the median / mean expectation.
• You can use some other market expectations for discount rates etc. to translate that into some possible forecast of cash flow. If you are of the view that AI will fundamentally change the market economy, this assumption seems flawed.
• The market does not tell you anything about the profile of those cash flows (i.e. all in the short-term vs. spread out over the long-term), so you need to make your own assumption on growth and maturity to get to a cash flow forecast.
• You can use assumptions around financing, taxes, capex, etc. to convert from cash flows into pre-tax profit.
• Then an assumption of margin to convert from pre-tax profit to revenue. This seems very difficult to forecast. Arguably, margin is at least as important as revenue in determining profit.