Sometimes the high impact game feels weird, get over it.
I have been in lots of conversations recently where people expressed their discomfort in the longtermist communities spending (particularly at events).
I think that my general take here is "yeah I can see why you think this but get over it". Playing on the high impact game board when you have $40B in your bank account and only a few years to use it involves acting like you are not limited financially. If top AI safety researchers want sports cars because it will help them relax and therefore be more 0.01% mroe productive (and I trust their judgment and value alignment) they are welcome to my money. Giving them my money is winning and as far as I am concerned it's a far better use of money than basically anything else I could do. To be clear, I know that there are optics issues, community health issues etc. but sometimes we can spend money without worrying about these things (e.g. retreats for people already familiar with LT).
Yes this would feel weird, but am I really going to let my own feelings of weirdness stop me helping billions of people in expectation. That feels much more weird.
I want to be clear that I am endorsing not only the sentiment but the drastic framing. At the end of the day, a few 100k here and there is literally a rounding error on what matters and I would much rather top researchers were spending this money of weird things that might help them slightly than we had a few more mediocre researchers who are working on things that don't really matter.
I certainly wouldn't say this about any researcher, if they could work in constellation/lightcone they have a 30% chance of hitting my bar. I am much more excited about this for the obvious top people at constellation/lightcone.
I don't really like this, presumably if impact is extremely heavy tailed we can get a lot of value from finding these actvities and a general aversion to this bcause it might waste mere money seems very bad. Things like optics are more of a reason to be careful but idk, maybe we should just make anonymous forum accounts to discuss these things and then actually take our ideas seriously.