Ollie has the highest false positive rate I’ve ever seen.
What are the false positives? Some of the big things I recall Ollie critiquing in the past are Leverage Research and “mainstream EA playing fast and loose with honesty”; those critiques seem to have aged well.
No one in the Alameda exodus expected fraud. They just thought Sam was terrible on other dimensions, they’ve said as much.
The claim isn’t “lots of people predicted fraud, therefore we should do a postmortem on why EA’s FTX boosters didn’t predict it”. Rather, the claim is that SBF had a bunch of red flags that plausibly would have sufficed for at least engaging with SBF with a lot more caution, as opposed to whole-heartedly embracing him in the way that a lot of EA did.
It might also have increased the probability of more of FTX’s shady and shoddy business practices coming to light, but I agree that this is more uncertain. The main question is just whether there were process or norm failures in terms of how we reacted to lesser warning signs. Lesser warning signs won’t always let you catch disasters in advance, but it does matter how we react to those signs—in expectation, whether or not it would have helped in this case.
What are the false positives? Some of the big things I recall Ollie critiquing in the past are Leverage Research and “mainstream EA playing fast and loose with honesty”; those critiques seem to have aged well.
The claim isn’t “lots of people predicted fraud, therefore we should do a postmortem on why EA’s FTX boosters didn’t predict it”. Rather, the claim is that SBF had a bunch of red flags that plausibly would have sufficed for at least engaging with SBF with a lot more caution, as opposed to whole-heartedly embracing him in the way that a lot of EA did.
It might also have increased the probability of more of FTX’s shady and shoddy business practices coming to light, but I agree that this is more uncertain. The main question is just whether there were process or norm failures in terms of how we reacted to lesser warning signs. Lesser warning signs won’t always let you catch disasters in advance, but it does matter how we react to those signs—in expectation, whether or not it would have helped in this case.