I think this is very hard to predict, and I just feel uncertain. Public perception seems to be really fickle, and I could imagine each show being either:

1. Negative towards SBF/Caroline and negative towards EA (it's all tech bros feeling superior, e.g. here)
2. Negative towards SBF/Caroline and positive towards EA (they used ethics as "mostly a front" and only cared about winning)
3. Positive towards SBF/Caroline, and negative towards EA (they started as idealistic altruists and got corrupted by the toxic EA ideology)
4. Positive towards SBF/Caroline, and positive towards EA (e.g. making John J. Ray III and Sullivan and Cromwell the villains)

And for each of these 4, it's not clear what the impact on EA would be, e.g. I think "The Wolf of Wall Street" probably got many people excited about working in finance.

I predict the documentaries will be negative towards EA, as was the vast majority of media on EA in 2023 and 2024, and I think documentaries tend to be mostly negative about their subject, but I'm much more unsure about the fiction series

Besides the selection bias mentioned in the post and other comments, I'm also unsure about how much to update on people's assessment of the mental health effects of their actions. I expect most people overestimate the positive mental health effects of any activity they choose to do.

As an extreme example, I expect that most smokers think that smoking is neutral or positive for their mental health, despite probably being net negative.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   I don't know what the research says about this, but LLMs seem to agree:
   
   ChatGPT Deep Research

   

   
   Gemini Deep Research

   

    

   Claude Research

   

    

    

   
   Smoking is an extreme comparison, but the same happens with e.g. veganism
   
   ChatGPT

   

    

   Claude

   

    

   Gemini didn't only consider perceived effects, so it's less relevant

   

According to the Guardian there is also one movie, another series, and several documentaries potentially in the works

The series is one of several projects in the works on the high-profile financial saga. It was announced in November that Girls creator Lena Dunham will write a movie based on Michael Lewis’s 2023 bestseller Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon for Apple and A24. Amazon Prime Video has a limited series in the works from Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo and writer David Weil.

There are also multiple competing nonfiction projects: one from Vice Media and the Information on effective altruism, and another from studio XTR and director David Darg that promises “unprecedented access to key players at FTX and the cryptocurrency community” in Bankman-Fried’s home base of the Bahamas.

A third documentary from Fortune and Mark Wahlberg’s company Unrealistic Ideas will focus on the relationship between Bankman-Fried and one of his most vocal critics, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. Bloomberg has already aired a nonfiction special on the debacle, titled Ruin: Money, Ego & Deception at FTX.

Thanks for sharing!

I don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate the portfolios, but I would be curious to know what you usually recommend to the people you advise. Is it closer to all-stocks, 3-fund, or something else? Or is it highly dependent on the specific individual financial situation?

From 1973 to 2013, a portfolio like this returned

Anytime someone picks a seemingly pointless and random date range like that they are biasing the results.

Just want to quickly note that that article was written in 2015, so looking at 1973-2013 doesn't seem that random.

There gets to be a point when the marginal gain for a different asset mix isn't worth the extra hassle and cost of rebalancing.

I definitely agree with this, but I'm skeptical that 100% US equities is already at the point where adding some diversification is too costly.
 

If you're selling to rebalance in a taxable account, then the capital gains tax is going to eat away at your investment gains.

If I understand correctly, donating stocks can be a way to partially offset this that might be useful to keep in mind for EA investors.

That said, I'm really not knowledgeable in this, and it seems plausible that the best way to diversify doesn't include bonds

I'm surprised to read this. Interactive Brokers (as an example) is available in many countries, has low fees, and there are many similar country-specific services. Can't people just buy VWCE/VWRP/IWDA?

All my friends in Europe and UAE don't seem to find it hard to invest

Thank you for sharing this.

What do you think of this old article from 80,000 hours that argues against investing everything in US equities?

Especially after the recent market volatility, I'm wondering if it makes sense to recommend people invest part of their wealth in bonds and commodities

From the article above:

Many people I’ve spoken to are almost fully invested in US equities. I think the rationale for this is that equities have been the best returning asset historically, so there’s no reason to own anything else. Another rationale is that since you can’t beat the market, you should put everything into equities.

But US stocks do not equal “the market”. If you try to tally up all global financial assets, you get something like this:

• 18% US stocks
• 13% Foreign developed stocks
• 5% Foreign emerging stocks
• 20% Global corporate bonds
• 14% 30 year bonds
• 14% 10 year foreign bonds
• 2% TIPs
• 5% REITs
• 5% commodities
• 5% gold

This represents the truly agnostic portfolio. If you think you have no ability the beat the market, then this is the portfolio with the best risk-return. 100% US equities is a huge bet on just one asset.

From 1973 to 2013, a portfolio like this returned 9.9% per year. In comparison, stocks returned 10.2%. So you only gave up a tiny 0.3% to switch to this portfolio.

In return, you had far lower risk. The volatility of the 100% equity portfolio was 15.6%, whereas this diversified portfolio had a volatility of only 8%. The maximum drawdown was also only -27% compared to -51% with equities. The wide diversification also makes you less vulnerable to unforeseen tail risks.

The much lower volatility means you could have levered up 2x and ended up with the same amount of volatility and same drawdowns as equities, but returns that were twice as high, at 20% per year.

(It also had slightly higher returns than a 60/40 equity/bond portfolio (9.9% vs. 9.6%) but with volatility of 8% rather 10.5%. The returns and risk are also similar to the risk parity portfolio Ray Dalio recently recommended to Tony Robbins. And if you lever 1.4x, you get something that historically looks very similar to the true Bridgewater ‘All Weather’ portfolio).

(Source: Meb Faber’s book “Global Asset Allocation”)

Going forward can we expect a similar result? If US equities do unusually well compared to other assets, then the diversified portfolio is going to perform worse than 100% equities (as has happened in the last few years). But due to the far greater diversification, and so long as you have no strong reason to believe you can pick which assets will outperform, we should expect the global market portfolio to deliver the best ratio of risk to return. [...]

I think many people can/should apply, but of course I expect only few will get in.

I also don't know if "paid internship" is a good description, I think it's probably closer to Ambitious Impact programs than to a typical internship (the "founding to give" program is made in collaboration with AIM)

I think for most people applying to their fellowships would be the best way to collaborate with SMA to do good (as he mentions in the video)

There's also this article from Giving What We Can with some examples^[1], which claims

Our research team believes that many of us can easily 100x our impact by giving to charities that achieve more per dollar spent.

Personally, having looked at some average charities, I think both articles downplay the difference in practice

Some quick reasons why I think so:

1. If I remember correctly, the 80k article compares the mean of the top 2.5% interventions with the mean of all interventions. This artificially caps the maximum possible difference at 50x. I think that GiveWell-recommended charities are in the top ~0.1% of charities, and so can have a much higher relative difference.
2. Training a guide dog costs at least €25,000^[2] in Italy, and it's not clear how much of it funges with public funds for the same program. A guide dog typically works for 6-8 years, so with €3.5k you can maybe cause a blind person to have a guide dog for one extra year. If you compare it to what the same donation to a GiveWell top charity achieves with the same amount, the difference is (at least to me) clearly much more than 10x. You could argue that these are different "cause areas", but to me they are both "human health and wellbeing"
3. Personal anecdote: my parents are going to a concert for charity next week, and invited a friend of theirs. We looked up what the funds are going to, and it turns out they are raising €40,000 to purchase "two devices useful for preventing alopecia induced by chemotherapy". Their friend is bald and was disappointed after knowing that, but none of them would have checked, and I imagine they would have assumed to be funding something within an order of magnitude of cost-effectiveness as any other donation to charity.
   I think this is representative of what the "average charity" in a wealthy country looks like, and I'm confident that an extra €40,000 to Remote Health Centers In Uganda would buy something that's significantly more than 10x as useful as those alopecia-prevention devices.
4. According to Forbes, the biggest charity by revenue in the US is Feeding America at $5B/year. 6 of the top 10 also serve domestic needs. There are many reasons to believe that your dollar goes much further overseas. Taimaka claims that its average cost per malnutrition treatment is $100 per child. There is a lot of evidence to think that a marginal donation to Taimaka is much more than 10x more cost-effective than a marginal donation Feeding America for preventing hunger.

1. ^{^}

   I write software at GWWC, but I didn't contribute to this article in any way

2. ^{^}

   About $28,000. For the rest of the comment you can approximate €1 ~ $1