EAs should probably focus on recruiting the ultra-wealthy

In spite of, you know…

I am an Effective Altruist. I think it is good to help people in the most efficient way we can. I believe quite firmly in “shut-up and multiply” — that is, we cannot lose sight of magnitudes. If a positive and a negative are of wildly different weights, then we should go with the one which is much larger than the other, not simply say that there are positives and negatives. 

In the past couple years, EA was hurt by the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s network of companies. This has led to skepticism around becoming too closely associated with any one figure. We want to be independent, and to be seen as independent. 

But I think this is hooey. We need to consistently shut up and multiple! SBF donated about $190 million to charity. The scale of this is perhaps hard to grasp. Let’s say that the reputational damage stopped some people from donating to effective charities. Let’s also say that these people would have donated $5,000 each (about what is needed to save one life from malaria). The reputational damage from SBF would have to have stopped 38,000 people from donating, for it to turn into a net negative. Is that plausible?

A billion dollars is a lot of money. It’s a stupefying amount of money, truly. The gain from convincing one billionaire to donate one billion, is greater than encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to chip in a few thousand. As such, EA should explicitly focus on recruiting the rich, or the to be rich. Effective Altruism MIT seems extremely cost-effective! Surely this is something worth investing relatively trivial resources in.