But on mainstream EA assumptions about x-risk, the failure of the Future Fund materially increased existential risk to humanity. You’d need to find a similar event that materially changed the risk of catastrophic climate change for the analogy to potentially hold—the death of a single researcher or the loss of a non-critical funding source for climate-mitigation efforts doesn’t work for me.
More generally, I think it’s probably reasonable to downgrade for missing FTX on “general competence” and “ability to predict and manage risk” as well. I think both of those attributes are correlated with “ability to predict and manage existential risk,” the latter more so than the former. Given that existential-risk expertise is a difficult attribute to measure, it’s reasonable to downgrade when downgrading one’s assessment of more measureable attributes. Although that effect would also apply to the climate-mitigation movement if it suffered an FTX-level setback event involving insiders, the justification for listening to climate scientists isn’t nearly as heavily loaded on “ability to predict and manage existential risk.” It’s primarily loaded on domain-specific expertise in climate science, and missing FTX wouldn’t make me think materially less of the relevant people as scientists.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing the narrative that EA is near-useless on x-risk because it missed FTX. My own assumption is that people recognized a risk that FTX funding wouldn’t come through, and that the leaders recognized a risk that SBF was doing shady stuff (cf. the leaked leader chat) although perhaps not a Madoff 2.0. I think those risks were likely underestimated, which leads me to a downgrade but not a massive one.
But on mainstream EA assumptions about x-risk, the failure of the Future Fund materially increased existential risk to humanity. You’d need to find a similar event that materially changed the risk of catastrophic climate change for the analogy to potentially hold—the death of a single researcher or the loss of a non-critical funding source for climate-mitigation efforts doesn’t work for me.
More generally, I think it’s probably reasonable to downgrade for missing FTX on “general competence” and “ability to predict and manage risk” as well. I think both of those attributes are correlated with “ability to predict and manage existential risk,” the latter more so than the former. Given that existential-risk expertise is a difficult attribute to measure, it’s reasonable to downgrade when downgrading one’s assessment of more measureable attributes. Although that effect would also apply to the climate-mitigation movement if it suffered an FTX-level setback event involving insiders, the justification for listening to climate scientists isn’t nearly as heavily loaded on “ability to predict and manage existential risk.” It’s primarily loaded on domain-specific expertise in climate science, and missing FTX wouldn’t make me think materially less of the relevant people as scientists.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing the narrative that EA is near-useless on x-risk because it missed FTX. My own assumption is that people recognized a risk that FTX funding wouldn’t come through, and that the leaders recognized a risk that SBF was doing shady stuff (cf. the leaked leader chat) although perhaps not a Madoff 2.0. I think those risks were likely underestimated, which leads me to a downgrade but not a massive one.