(The above phrasing moves the conversation into a different topic from the message chain. That’s ok, but I want us to be clear about what we’re claiming.)

> If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don’t start a business.

Oh? And what is unambiguously good? This seems like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t. Try to answer it.

## Ethics

It can be quite hard to know what is unambiguously good, depending on your ethics.

- If you are a consequentialist, you’d have to pick a time frame, and even then you won’t really know until that time comes.

- Other moral philosophies might focus only on intentions, but these are not plausible, because good intentions are easily derailed by ignorance.

- I don’t have a clear answer for myself, so I can be confident that some particular idea of “unambiguous good” will not hold water for N > 1.

## Opportunity Cost

Next topic… even if we agree on an act being “unambiguously good”, that isn’t enough. Even the most “obvious” selfless acts might not be the best considering the other options available. To phrase it as a question: considering your opportunity cost, is a small scale good action really worth it?

## Life has Tradeoffs

The phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is apropos here.

If you want to solve a particular disease with high likelihood, you could well find it demands collaboration with flawed pharmaceutical companies.

Is it worth it? Weigh it.

But to dismiss such an idea solely because it is “impure” —- without some meaningful metric that trades off pros and cons —- is foolish and unmoored from
reality.

Hello over-the-top idealist, meet entropy. Time to talk about acceptance. Do what you can with what is available. Are you trying to make change or are you more interested in trying to look like a saint?

## Organizational Structure

Practically, if your desired good thing is attainable without using a for-profit business structure, great, consider that. It can work.

Personal actions matter. By all means, give smiles, encouragement, constructive criticism, love, advice, and so on.
Beware: not all kindness (such as advice) will be taken as you intended! (Whoops. Maybe not unambiguously good anymore.)

Community organizing matters. Volunteers can go a long way. (But they aren’t perfect!)

When you want to scale up your impact, you have to accept real world tradeoffs. Not all are clear at the outset.

For-profit or not, you want a plan. Often that plan demands longevity and thus some kind of sustainability. Even if you are happy to spend your capital without an eye towards building an endowment, you’ll want to think about effectiveness.

Even if you are a charity, you might face some trade-offs about what donors you want to let in your tent. Very little money comes without any kind of expectation. The expectations might be clear and totally fair such as: transparency as to how your organization spends the money. Other expectations might less savory: donors wanting to prop up their image.

## A Footgun Named Naïveté

All in all, the comment above strikes me as naive to the point of undermining one’s own goals.

## Efficiency, Corruption, Impact

It is my view that:

- maximizing impact is hard to do without trading off some efficiency

- reducing corruption is non-linear. Rooting out the big offenders is essential to keeping an organization’s mission intact. From there, fighting corruption will be beneficial but often with diminishing returns.

- At some point, trust and acceptance of human weakness may actually be more cost effective than fighting the lingering forms of corruption; e.g. personal networks having some influence over a process that is supposed to be completely blind

- In many cases, people breaking the rules based on good information and intentions isn’t corruption at all. Sometimes the system is flawed and people work around it. Figuring out which is which costs time and resources.