In defence of Will MacAskill and Nick Beckstead staying on the board of EVF
While I’ve publicly said that on priors they should be removed unless we hear arguments otherwise, I was kind of expecting someone to make those arguments. If noone will, I will.
MacAskill
MacAskill is very clever, personally kind, is a superlative networker and communicator. Imo he oversold SBF, but I guess I’d do much worse in his place. It seems to me that we should want people who have made mistakes and learned from them. Seems many EA orgs would be glad to have someone like him on the board. If anything, the question is if we don’t want too many people duplicated across EA orgs (do we want this?) which board is it most valuable to have MacAskill on? I guess EVF?
Beckstead
Beckstead is, I sense, extremely clever (generally I find OpenPhil people to be powerhouses), personally kind. I guess I think that he dropped the ball on running FTXFF well—feels like had they hired more people to manage OPS they might have queried why money was going from strange accounts, but again I don’t know the particulars (though I want to give the benefit of the doubt here). But again, it was a complicated project and I guess he sensed that speed of ramp up was the proirity. In many world’s he’d have been right.
I guess perhaps the two of them seem to have pretty similar blindspots (kind intelligent academicish EAs who scaled things really fast) so perhaps it is worth only having one on the board. Maybe it’s worth having someone who can say “hmm that seems likely too odd or shifty to be worth us doing it”. But this isn’t as much of a knockdown argument.
In defence of Will MacAskill and Nick Beckstead staying on the board of EVF
While I’ve publicly said that on priors they should be removed unless we hear arguments otherwise, I was kind of expecting someone to make those arguments. If noone will, I will.
MacAskill
MacAskill is very clever, personally kind, is a superlative networker and communicator. Imo he oversold SBF, but I guess I’d do much worse in his place. It seems to me that we should want people who have made mistakes and learned from them. Seems many EA orgs would be glad to have someone like him on the board. If anything, the question is if we don’t want too many people duplicated across EA orgs (do we want this?) which board is it most valuable to have MacAskill on? I guess EVF?
Beckstead
Beckstead is, I sense, extremely clever (generally I find OpenPhil people to be powerhouses), personally kind. I guess I think that he dropped the ball on running FTXFF well—feels like had they hired more people to manage OPS they might have queried why money was going from strange accounts, but again I don’t know the particulars (though I want to give the benefit of the doubt here). But again, it was a complicated project and I guess he sensed that speed of ramp up was the proirity. In many world’s he’d have been right.
I guess perhaps the two of them seem to have pretty similar blindspots (kind intelligent academicish EAs who scaled things really fast) so perhaps it is worth only having one on the board. Maybe it’s worth having someone who can say “hmm that seems likely too odd or shifty to be worth us doing it”. But this isn’t as much of a knockdown argument.