To be honest, classical utilitarian or not, I find it hard for one to be confident about the sign of illegal and dishonest actions when these could potentially have both high downside and high upside.
For shortish AI timelines, super low chance of fraud being detected, only super wealthy people losing money, and the fraudulent people having little connection to EA, I can see fraud being positive ex ante. I can also see it being quite negative, e.g. if the likelihood of fraud being detected was 50 %, the people harmed were just ordinary citizens (harming the median US citizen is much worse in terms of reputation risks than quietly stealing money from billonaires), and the fraudulent people were strongly connected to EA.
For the specific case of FTX, I am not confident at all, but lean towards it being positive (I could easily see my sign change with only 30 min of research).
To be honest, classical utilitarian or not, I find it hard for one to be confident about the sign of illegal and dishonest actions when these could potentially have both high downside and high upside.
For shortish AI timelines, super low chance of fraud being detected, only super wealthy people losing money, and the fraudulent people having little connection to EA, I can see fraud being positive ex ante. I can also see it being quite negative, e.g. if the likelihood of fraud being detected was 50 %, the people harmed were just ordinary citizens (harming the median US citizen is much worse in terms of reputation risks than quietly stealing money from billonaires), and the fraudulent people were strongly connected to EA.
For the specific case of FTX, I am not confident at all, but lean towards it being positive (I could easily see my sign change with only 30 min of research).