I’m unsure as to why people downvoted this post, the court filings do exist and have been covered by Forbes already, and are worth discussion.
I think this idea, from what we know of it, is incredibly bad. A few reasons why:
Nauru is an independent sovereign nation. There is no mechanism in place for an individual or corporation to “buy” an entire sovereign nation, so the idea is probably impossible anyway.
Nauru has a population of ten thousand and a democratically elected government. What exactly happens to the people who live there if the nation is “purchased”? If the population of the island disagrees with what the “owners” do, do their democratic decisions get overridden?
Why exactly would you need to buy an entire island nation in order to build a bunker? It seems obvious that it would be cheaper to do so within land that is owned by existing nations.
Giving preferential treatment to EA’s introduces perverse incentives, where people join EA purely to get bunker access rather than for the goal of doing good.
Since this project was doomed from the start anyway, proposing it has no upside and has substantial downside in making EA look incredibly bad.
I’ll also note that I am personally not supportive of human genetic enhancement, but it’s a bigger subject that I don’t want to dive into here.
If I could save a few thousand people from a 99.99% death rate event to rebuild a new civilization, I wouldn’t fill that doomsday bunker with mostly FTX/Alameda employees and EAs either. Monocultures are generally bad, genetic and other diversity is generally good, and I doubt that population would have the right skill/aptitude mix to recover from a near-extinction mix anyway. Whatever one thinks of doomsday bunkers as a means of reducing existential risk, this particular bunker proposal gave me uncomfortable vibes.
To add even more reasons why this is a bad idea, Nauru has very poor soil as a result of phosphate mining, so on-land agriculture is extremely limited, and most food is currently imported, leading to an obesity epidemic. Similarly, there are no lakes or rivers on the island, so water is either imported or collected from rainfall.
Also the Australian government is currently operating a controversial detention centre for asylum seekers on the island, and presumably would stand in the way of any purchase.
Really, it’s hard to overstate how much of an obviously bad idea this was.
None of that would detract from its “value” as a regulation-free zone for crypto enterprises though!
(At least where a plan has significant problems, and a co-conspirator or member of SBF’s family was involved in the plan somehow, I think it’s fair game to point out how the plan could have had significant advantages for SBF’s own personal interests.)
People initially downvoted the post because “Eugenics-Adjacent” is Émile Torres’ account, and they typically don’t engage in an intellectually honest way. Sure enough, Émile tweeted a screenshot of this post and highlighted that the byline was scandalously named “Eugenics-Adjacent” even though Émile is the one who gave it that name: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1682449905363701774
There’s nothing wrong with the content of the original post, except that Émile refers to “us,” as if Eugenics-Adjacentis an EA who is concerned about negative public perception of EA rather than someone who is in fact banking their career on a negative public perception of EA.
Do you have additional evidence that this was specifically Torres, and not someone else who dislikes EA?
I was initially skeptical of the claim, thinking it was one of Torres followers, but looking at the timestamps, it seems that the OP here was posted 20 minutes before Torres tweeted about the article. And I know Torres has used sock-puppets before, so it at least seems plausible that it’s another one.
However, It could have also been that Torres saw the post here and decided to tweet about it, or that eugenics-adjacent is a different person who posted here and then tipped off Torres about the article, or they both by chance saw the article at around the same time. I don’t think there is enough information to make a confident accusation here.
If “Eugenics-Adjacent” is not Torres but tipped off Torres about the article, that also seems like a good reason for downvoting the post, since it indicates that the username was chosen to cause damage to EA rather than to stimulate an honest discussion.
I’m concerned about downvoting posts containing news information solely on a belief that they were posted by a sockpuppet. It was appropriate for there to be a post on this news development, and downvoting based on a belief about the poster’s identity has the unintended effect of burying the adverse news story (and the appearance of doing so).
Conditional on this being Torres, all those downvotes just played into their hands. If this post were truly objectionable, someone should have put the news information in a separate post so that sockpuppet defense doesn’t imperil visibility of news information.
I thought it was pretty obvious that “Eugenics-Adjacent” would likely be a critic.
I thought it was pretty obvious that “Eugenics-Adjacent” would likely be a critic.
Torres’ tweet and commentators don’t appear to think so, but I often have trouble teasing apart the difference between performative outrage and genuine ignorance, especially from strangers.
It has now a score of 23 with 9 votes (and also had a positive score when I first saw it before you wrote this comment), why do you think people downvoted it?
I’m unsure as to why people downvoted this post, the court filings do exist and have been covered by Forbes already, and are worth discussion.
I think this idea, from what we know of it, is incredibly bad. A few reasons why:
Nauru is an independent sovereign nation. There is no mechanism in place for an individual or corporation to “buy” an entire sovereign nation, so the idea is probably impossible anyway.
Nauru has a population of ten thousand and a democratically elected government. What exactly happens to the people who live there if the nation is “purchased”? If the population of the island disagrees with what the “owners” do, do their democratic decisions get overridden?
Why exactly would you need to buy an entire island nation in order to build a bunker? It seems obvious that it would be cheaper to do so within land that is owned by existing nations.
Giving preferential treatment to EA’s introduces perverse incentives, where people join EA purely to get bunker access rather than for the goal of doing good.
Since this project was doomed from the start anyway, proposing it has no upside and has substantial downside in making EA look incredibly bad.
I’ll also note that I am personally not supportive of human genetic enhancement, but it’s a bigger subject that I don’t want to dive into here.
If I could save a few thousand people from a 99.99% death rate event to rebuild a new civilization, I wouldn’t fill that doomsday bunker with mostly FTX/Alameda employees and EAs either. Monocultures are generally bad, genetic and other diversity is generally good, and I doubt that population would have the right skill/aptitude mix to recover from a near-extinction mix anyway. Whatever one thinks of doomsday bunkers as a means of reducing existential risk, this particular bunker proposal gave me uncomfortable vibes.
To add even more reasons why this is a bad idea, Nauru has very poor soil as a result of phosphate mining, so on-land agriculture is extremely limited, and most food is currently imported, leading to an obesity epidemic. Similarly, there are no lakes or rivers on the island, so water is either imported or collected from rainfall.
Also the Australian government is currently operating a controversial detention centre for asylum seekers on the island, and presumably would stand in the way of any purchase.
Really, it’s hard to overstate how much of an obviously bad idea this was.
None of that would detract from its “value” as a regulation-free zone for crypto enterprises though!
(At least where a plan has significant problems, and a co-conspirator or member of SBF’s family was involved in the plan somehow, I think it’s fair game to point out how the plan could have had significant advantages for SBF’s own personal interests.)
People initially downvoted the post because “Eugenics-Adjacent” is Émile Torres’ account, and they typically don’t engage in an intellectually honest way. Sure enough, Émile tweeted a screenshot of this post and highlighted that the byline was scandalously named “Eugenics-Adjacent” even though Émile is the one who gave it that name: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1682449905363701774
There’s nothing wrong with the content of the original post, except that Émile refers to “us,” as if Eugenics-Adjacent is an EA who is concerned about negative public perception of EA rather than someone who is in fact banking their career on a negative public perception of EA.
Do you have additional evidence that this was specifically Torres, and not someone else who dislikes EA?
I was initially skeptical of the claim, thinking it was one of Torres followers, but looking at the timestamps, it seems that the OP here was posted 20 minutes before Torres tweeted about the article. And I know Torres has used sock-puppets before, so it at least seems plausible that it’s another one.
However, It could have also been that Torres saw the post here and decided to tweet about it, or that eugenics-adjacent is a different person who posted here and then tipped off Torres about the article, or they both by chance saw the article at around the same time. I don’t think there is enough information to make a confident accusation here.
If “Eugenics-Adjacent” is not Torres but tipped off Torres about the article, that also seems like a good reason for downvoting the post, since it indicates that the username was chosen to cause damage to EA rather than to stimulate an honest discussion.
I’m concerned about downvoting posts containing news information solely on a belief that they were posted by a sockpuppet. It was appropriate for there to be a post on this news development, and downvoting based on a belief about the poster’s identity has the unintended effect of burying the adverse news story (and the appearance of doing so).
Conditional on this being Torres, all those downvotes just played into their hands. If this post were truly objectionable, someone should have put the news information in a separate post so that sockpuppet defense doesn’t imperil visibility of news information.
I thought it was pretty obvious that “Eugenics-Adjacent” would likely be a critic.
Torres’ tweet and commentators don’t appear to think so, but I often have trouble teasing apart the difference between performative outrage and genuine ignorance, especially from strangers.
It has now a score of 23 with 9 votes (and also had a positive score when I first saw it before you wrote this comment), why do you think people downvoted it?