Thread by @vgr

When people are bad at spending money it accumulates with people who are good at collecting it. Most people are very bad at spending money beyond the relatively low limit of personal hedonism. By about $4m, most people are out of ideas.

Almost everybody confuses categories of spending for spending ideas. Categories of spending ideas are nearly worthless. All creativity in spending lies in the specificity.

Imo average spending ideas are commodity instances of categories. “Artist collective” is a category of idea. “Artist collective in Austin” is an actual idea.

Good spending ideas are specific and “pop” from parent category.

Great spending ideas are sui generis.

In general, if you have to spend money and you do so by giving it to someone more creative, or to someone whose marginal needs are still within "personal spending competence" scale, it's a bit of a copout.

Since people suck at spending more than about $4m, giving money to anyone who has less than $4m is a way to burn optionality for creativity.

Hypothesis: If you can make a clear spending plan for a billion dollars, one that's specific rather than categorical, and either pops from parent category or is sui generis, and is clearly socially situated, someone will immediately give you a couple of million to get started

By socially situated, I mean something that almost everybody will have a clear opinion on as good or bad and want to stop it or get behind it. This is why categories fail. Many people vaguely approve or disapprove of general categories like "fund green energy."

But to actually socially situate it is to turn that vague approval/disapproval into clear versions. Like for eg. propose paving the Sahara with solar panels. Everybody will have very clear opinions on that, and it won't necessarily match their categorical opinions.

The instinct to fund people who are smarter/more creative than you is a really dangerous one. Unless you're giving money to people who are clearly *less* creative/dumber than you in some key way (but more so in a different way), you're not really doing any work. It's dumb money.

"Spotting and investing in smart and creative people" is not a kind of smartness or creativity. Investing that way is not smart money.

Money is only smart money if it is smart in some way that is *not* purely social judgment.

This is kinda self-evident. How are you competent to judge people smarter or more creative than you in unqualified ways? That's basically like saying "invest in god" ... a kind of trusting prayer.

I've never had enough money to invest, but to the extent I've invested time/attention in people, it's nearly always in a way that exploits a vector where tbf I think I'm better than them 🤣

Of course they need to be better than me in some way too, but that's less critical