But your recommendation of defense-in-depth would I think have made this situation substantially worse. I think the best saving throws we had in this situation was people scrutinizing Sam and his activities, not trying to hide his involvement with stuff.
I think we had a bunch of good shots of spotting what was going on at FTX before the rest of the world, and I think downplaying Sam’s actual involvement in the community would have harmed that.
I also think that CEA would have very likely approved any request by Sam to be affiliated with the movement, so your safeguard would have I think just differentially made it harder for the higher-integrity people (who CEA sadly tends to want to be associated less with, due to them by necessity also having more controversial beliefs) to actually be affiliated with EA, without helping much with the Sam/FTX case.
I think we had a bunch of good shots of spotting what was going on at FTX before the rest of the world, and I think downplaying Sam’s actual involvement in the community would have harmed that.
I could see this going the other way as well. Maybe EAs would’ve felt more free to criticize FTX if they didn’t see it as associated with EA in the public mind. Also, insofar as FTX was part of the “EA ingroup”, people might’ve been reluctant to criticize them due to tribalism.
I also think that CEA would have very likely approved any request by Sam to be affiliated with the movement, so your safeguard would have I think just differentially made it harder for the higher-integrity people (who CEA sadly tends to want to be associated less with, due to them by necessity also having more controversial beliefs) to actually be affiliated with EA, without helping much with the Sam/FTX case.
Re: controversial beliefs, I think Sam was unusually willing to bite bullets in public even by EA standards—see here.
Presumably any CEA approval process from here on would account for lessons learned from Sam. And any approval process would hopefully get better over time as data comes in about bad actors.
In any case, I expect that paying for audits (or criticism contests, or whatever) is generally a better way to achieve scrutiny of one’s organization than using EA in one’s marketing.
But your recommendation of defense-in-depth would I think have made this situation substantially worse. I think the best saving throws we had in this situation was people scrutinizing Sam and his activities, not trying to hide his involvement with stuff.
I think we had a bunch of good shots of spotting what was going on at FTX before the rest of the world, and I think downplaying Sam’s actual involvement in the community would have harmed that.
I also think that CEA would have very likely approved any request by Sam to be affiliated with the movement, so your safeguard would have I think just differentially made it harder for the higher-integrity people (who CEA sadly tends to want to be associated less with, due to them by necessity also having more controversial beliefs) to actually be affiliated with EA, without helping much with the Sam/FTX case.
Interesting points.
I could see this going the other way as well. Maybe EAs would’ve felt more free to criticize FTX if they didn’t see it as associated with EA in the public mind. Also, insofar as FTX was part of the “EA ingroup”, people might’ve been reluctant to criticize them due to tribalism.
Re: controversial beliefs, I think Sam was unusually willing to bite bullets in public even by EA standards—see here.
Presumably any CEA approval process from here on would account for lessons learned from Sam. And any approval process would hopefully get better over time as data comes in about bad actors.
In any case, I expect that paying for audits (or criticism contests, or whatever) is generally a better way to achieve scrutiny of one’s organization than using EA in one’s marketing.