This seems likely to be incorrect to me, at least sometimes. In particular I disagree with the suggestion that the improvement on the margin is likely to be only on the order of 5%.

Let's take someone who moves from donating to global health causes to donating to help animals. It's very plausible that they may think the difference in effectiveness there is by a factor of 10, or even more.

They may also think that non-EA dollars are more easily persuaded to donate to global health initiatives than animal welfare ones. In this case, if a non-EA dollar is 80% likely to go to global health, and 20% to animal welfare, then by their own lights the change in use of their dollar was more than 3x as important as the introduction of the extra non-EA dollar.

I think if there were proven methods to persuade such people to give away the excess, the world would look very different.

I hope you find success in persuading those around you to give, but I don't think the process of giving to neighbours and polling resources rather than going directly to supporting specific causes where they could have a lot of impact makes much sense.

Just had another glance at this and I think the delta vs implied vol piece is consistent with something other than a normal/log normal distribution. Consider: the price is $13 for the put, and the delta is 5. This implies something like - the option is expected to pay off a nonzero amount 5% of the time, but the average payoff when it does is $260 (despite the max payoff definitionally being 450). So it looks like this is really being priced as crash insurance, and the distribution is very non normal (i.e. circumstances where NVDA falls to that price means something weird has happened)

Generally I just wouldn't trust numbers from Yahoo and think that's the Occam's Razor explanation here.

Delta is the value I would use before anything else since the link to models of reality is so straightforward (stock moves $1 => option moves $0.05 => clearly that's equivalent to making an extra dollar 5% of the time)

Right now the IV of June 2025 450 calls is 53.7, and of puts 50.9, per Bloomberg. I've no idea where your numbers are coming from, but someone is getting the calculation wrong or the input is garbage.

The spread in the above numbers is likely to do with illiquidity and bid ask spreads more than anything profound.

The IV for puts and calls at a given strike and expiry date will be identical, because one can trivially construct a put or a call from the other by trading stock, and the only frictions are the cost of carry.

The best proxy for probability an option will expire in the money is the delta of the option.

"Nvidia’s implied volatility is about 60%, which means – even assuming efficient markets – it has about a 15% chance of falling more than 50% in a year.

And more speculatively, booms and busts seem more likely for stocks that have gone up a ton, and when new technologies are being introduced."

Do you think the people trading the options setting that implied volatility are unaware of this?

Seems like a rather vague collection of barely connected anecdotes haphazardly strung together.

I am not particularly concerned as I don't see this persuading anybody.

Thanks for posting this - on a quick read it looks pretty accurate to me and I'll be glad to have this as a resource to point people to when they seem not to understand exactly why what FTX did was so bad.

I don't understand why you think this is the case. If you think of the "distribution of grants given" as a sum of multiple different distributions (e.g. upskilling, events, and funding programmes) of significantly varying importance across cause areas, then more or less dropping the first two would give your overall distribution a very different shape.