“What is missing to me is an explanation of exactly how your suggestions would prevent a future SBF situation.”
1. The community is unhealthy in various ways. 2. You’re suggesting centralizing around high trust, without a mechanism to build that trust.
I don’t think that the EA community could have stopped SBF, but they absolutely could have been independent of him in ways that mean EA as a community didn’t expect a random person most of us had never heard of before this to automatically be a trusted member of the community. Calling people out is far harder when they are a member of your trusted community, and the people who said they had concerns didn’t say it loudly because they feared community censure. That’s a big problem.
It’s also hard to call people out when a lot of you are applying to him/them for funding, and are mostly focused on trying to explain how great and deserving your project is.
One good principle here is “be picky about your funders”. Smaller amounts from steady, responsible, principled and competent funders, who both do and submit to due diligence, are better than large amounts from others.
This doesn’t mean you HAVE to agree with their politics or everything they say in public—it’s more about having proper governance in place, and funders being separate from boards and boards being separate from executive, so that undue influence and conflicts of interest don’t arise, and decisions are made objectively, for the good of the project and the stated goals, not to please an individual funder or get kudos from EAs.
I’ve written more about donor due diligence in the main thread, with links.
“What is missing to me is an explanation of exactly how your suggestions would prevent a future SBF situation.”
1. The community is unhealthy in various ways.
2. You’re suggesting centralizing around high trust, without a mechanism to build that trust.
I don’t think that the EA community could have stopped SBF, but they absolutely could have been independent of him in ways that mean EA as a community didn’t expect a random person most of us had never heard of before this to automatically be a trusted member of the community. Calling people out is far harder when they are a member of your trusted community, and the people who said they had concerns didn’t say it loudly because they feared community censure. That’s a big problem.
It’s also hard to call people out when a lot of you are applying to him/them for funding, and are mostly focused on trying to explain how great and deserving your project is.
One good principle here is “be picky about your funders”. Smaller amounts from steady, responsible, principled and competent funders, who both do and submit to due diligence, are better than large amounts from others.
This doesn’t mean you HAVE to agree with their politics or everything they say in public—it’s more about having proper governance in place, and funders being separate from boards and boards being separate from executive, so that undue influence and conflicts of interest don’t arise, and decisions are made objectively, for the good of the project and the stated goals, not to please an individual funder or get kudos from EAs.
I’ve written more about donor due diligence in the main thread, with links.