When the downside is limited and the upside is not, variance is your friend. When the downside is possibly very negative, it is not.

Published on June 6, 2026 6:37 PM GMT I used an LLM to help review this post and it likely contains some AI-generated re-formulations. The ideas are not fundametally new and inspired by Nassim Taleb and trading lore. In effective giving, it makes sense to be close to risk-neutral and focus on high expected utility per dollar. However, in practice, organisations and people are risk-averse for good reasons. It can add value to take more risk as an individual donor to generate higher expected utili