Look at me, I'm a philantropist! I non-bindingly pledge to probably promise that if possible and convenient, I can be considered to essentially intend to effectively donate up to half of my arguable net worth to a cause one might consider charitable.

Oh and a legal defence fund for unfairly maligned non-sex offender friends of Jeffrey Epstein counts as a charity, by the way.

Have we considered that we're wrong for criminalizing the smartest and most philanthropic people on the planet?

Often, things become crimes that get prosecuted when they are done by the wealthy vs. normal people. To be clear, the reason for this is that governments/prosecutors want money and there is a lot of money in going after Kjell Inge Røkke for an illegal boating license but there isn't for a father letting his 15-year old child drive in a parking lot. There's a lot of money going after a billionaire for tax evasion but not in someone having a side hustle where they make money under the table selling $50k worth of widgets per year.

lmao

I suppose I recommend people think something like "ok, how bad was this really" when they look at billionaire crimes.

double lmao. triple, even

The rates do seem subjectively very high. Way fewer than 10% of people I know have been convicted of financial crimes! But I wonder if founders and CEOs are being blamed for financial crimes that their companies commit, and approximately all successful companies commit financial crimes, defined broadly.

so... close...

Shot, in the post:

Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.

Chaser, from the comments:

Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection

Summary point 5 is fun.

I conclude that the rate of criminal behavior amongst major philanthropists is high

Great!

which means that we should not expect altruism to substantially lower the risks compared to that of the general population,

Ok, not super clear what “the risks” are here. One interpretation is that they are saying “just because someone donates money doesn’t mean they aren’t a criminal”, which is correct. But it’s not clear! Anyway.

and that negative impacts to EA’s public perception may occur independently of whether our donors actually commit crimes (e.g. because even noncriminal billionaires have a negative public image).

So close! Why do “noncriminal” billionaires have a negative public image? It’s almost as if legality isn’t the decider of morality!

Perhaps one day EAs will gain class consciousness and a sense of morality beyond an uncritical elision of ethics via utilitarianism; we aren’t there yet.