A simple back-casting or systems-mapping exercise (foresight/systems-theoretical techniques) would easily have revealed EA’s significant exposure and vulnerability (disaster risk concepts) to a potential FTX crash. The overall level of x-risk is presumably tied to how much research it gets, and the FTX crash clearly reduced the amount of research that will get done on x-risk any time soon.
This is not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment and I don’t really understand it. If SBF had planned more carefully, if he’d been less risk-neutral, things could have been better. But it sounds like you think other people in EA should have somehow reduced EA’s exposure to FTX. In hindsight, that would have been good, for normative deontological reasons, but I don’t see how it would have preserved the amount of x-risk research EA can do. If EA didn’t get FTX money, it would simply have had no FTX money ever, instead of having FTX money for a very short time.
This is not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment and I don’t really understand it. If SBF had planned more carefully, if he’d been less risk-neutral, things could have been better. But it sounds like you think other people in EA should have somehow reduced EA’s exposure to FTX. In hindsight, that would have been good, for normative deontological reasons, but I don’t see how it would have preserved the amount of x-risk research EA can do. If EA didn’t get FTX money, it would simply have had no FTX money ever, instead of having FTX money for a very short time.