“[W]hy was MacAskill trying to ingratiate himself with Elon Musk so that SBF could put several billion dollars (not even his in the first place) towards buying Twitter? Contributing towards Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the best EA use of several billion dollars? That was going to save more lives than any other philanthropic opportunity? Based on what analysis?”
Sam was interested in investing in Twitter because he thought it would be a good investment; it would be a way of making more money for him to give away, rather than a way of “spending” money. Even prior to Musk being interested in acquiring Twitter, Sam mentioned he thought that Twitter was under-monetised; my impression was that that view was pretty widely-held in the tech world. Sam also thought that the blockchain could address the content moderation problem. He wrote about this here, and talked about it here, in spring and summer of 2022. If the idea worked, it could make Twitter somewhat better for the world, too.
I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.
On “ingratiating”: Musk has pledged to give away at least half his wealth; given his net worth in 2022, that would amount to over $100B. There was a period of time when it looked like he was going to get serious about that commitment, and ramp up his giving significantly. Whether that money was donated well or poorly would be of enormous importance to the world, and that’s why I was in touch with him.
Sam also thought that the blockchain could address the content moderation problem. He wrote about this here, and talked about it here, in spring and summer of 2022. If the idea worked, it could make Twitter somewhat better for the world, too.
I think this is an indication that the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype. I don’t think this this is a good sign now we’re dealing with AI companies who are also motivated to hype and spin.
The linked idea is very obviously unworkable. I am unsurprised that Elon rejected it and that no similar thing has taken off. First, as usual, it could be done cheaper and easier without a blockchain. second, twitter would be giving people a second place to see their content where they don’t see twitters ads, thereby shooting themselves in the foot financially for no reason. Third, while facebook and twitter could maybe cooperate here, there is no point in an interchange between other sites like tiktok and twitter as they are fundamentally different formats. Fourth, there’s already a way for people to share tweets on other social media sites: it’s called “hyperlinks” and “screenshots”. Fifth, how do you delete your bad tweets that are ruining your life is they remain permanently on the blockchain?
For what it’s worth SBF put this idea to me in an interview I did with him and I thought it sounded daft at the time, for the reasons you give among others.
He also suggested putting private messages on the blockchain which seemed even stranger and much less motivated.
That said, at the time I regarded SBF as much more of an expert on blockchain technology than I was, which made me reluctant to entirely dismiss it out of hand, and I endorse that habit of mind.
As it turns out people are now doing a Twitter clone on a blockchain and it has some momentum behind it: https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
So my skepticism may yet be wrong — the world is full of wonders that work even though they seem like they shouldn’t. Though how a project like that out-competes Twitter given the network effects holding people onto the platform I don’t know.
As a data point, I remember reading that Twitter thread and thinking it didn’t make a lot of technical sense (I remember also being worried about the lack of forward secrecy since he wanted to store DMs encrypted on the blockchain).
But the goal was to make a lot of money, not to make a better product, and seeing that DogeCoin and NFTs (which also don’t make any technical sense) reached a market cap of tens of billions, it didn’t seem completely absurd that shoehorning a blockchain in Twitter made business sense.
My understanding was that crypto should often be thought of as a social technology that enables people to be excited about things that have been possible since the early 2000s. At least that’s how I explain to myself how I missed out on BTC and NFTs.
In any case, at the time I thought his main goal must have been to increase the value of FTX (or of Solana), which didn’t raise any extra red flags in the reference class of crypto.
Re:
that the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype
I think it’s important to keep in mind that people could have made at least tens of millions by predicting FTX’s collapse, this failure of prediction was really not unique to the EA community, and many in the EA community mentioned plenty of times that the value of FTX could go to 0.
I agree it’s probably a pretty bad idea but I don’t think this supports your conclusion that “the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype”
I disagree with that quote but I do think the fact that Will is reporting this story now with a straight face is a bad sign.
My steelman would be “look if you think two people would have a positive-sum interaction and it’s cheap to facilitate that, doing so is a good default”. It’s not obvious to me that Will spent more than 30 seconds on this. But the defense is “it was cheap and I didn’t think about it very hard”, not “Sam had ideas for improving twitter”.
Your steelman doesn’t seem very different from “I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.”
I think if all he’d said was “My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there”, I’d have found that a satisfactory answer. It’s also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn’t looked into it very much. I’m inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important.
Elon Musk
Stuart Buck asks:
“[W]hy was MacAskill trying to ingratiate himself with Elon Musk so that SBF could put several billion dollars (not even his in the first place) towards buying Twitter? Contributing towards Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the best EA use of several billion dollars? That was going to save more lives than any other philanthropic opportunity? Based on what analysis?”
Sam was interested in investing in Twitter because he thought it would be a good investment; it would be a way of making more money for him to give away, rather than a way of “spending” money. Even prior to Musk being interested in acquiring Twitter, Sam mentioned he thought that Twitter was under-monetised; my impression was that that view was pretty widely-held in the tech world. Sam also thought that the blockchain could address the content moderation problem. He wrote about this here, and talked about it here, in spring and summer of 2022. If the idea worked, it could make Twitter somewhat better for the world, too.
I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.
On “ingratiating”: Musk has pledged to give away at least half his wealth; given his net worth in 2022, that would amount to over $100B. There was a period of time when it looked like he was going to get serious about that commitment, and ramp up his giving significantly. Whether that money was donated well or poorly would be of enormous importance to the world, and that’s why I was in touch with him.
I think this is an indication that the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype. I don’t think this this is a good sign now we’re dealing with AI companies who are also motivated to hype and spin.
The linked idea is very obviously unworkable. I am unsurprised that Elon rejected it and that no similar thing has taken off. First, as usual, it could be done cheaper and easier without a blockchain. second, twitter would be giving people a second place to see their content where they don’t see twitters ads, thereby shooting themselves in the foot financially for no reason. Third, while facebook and twitter could maybe cooperate here, there is no point in an interchange between other sites like tiktok and twitter as they are fundamentally different formats. Fourth, there’s already a way for people to share tweets on other social media sites: it’s called “hyperlinks” and “screenshots”. Fifth, how do you delete your bad tweets that are ruining your life is they remain permanently on the blockchain?
For what it’s worth SBF put this idea to me in an interview I did with him and I thought it sounded daft at the time, for the reasons you give among others.
He also suggested putting private messages on the blockchain which seemed even stranger and much less motivated.
That said, at the time I regarded SBF as much more of an expert on blockchain technology than I was, which made me reluctant to entirely dismiss it out of hand, and I endorse that habit of mind.
As it turns out people are now doing a Twitter clone on a blockchain and it has some momentum behind it: https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
So my skepticism may yet be wrong — the world is full of wonders that work even though they seem like they shouldn’t. Though how a project like that out-competes Twitter given the network effects holding people onto the platform I don’t know.
As a data point, I remember reading that Twitter thread and thinking it didn’t make a lot of technical sense (I remember also being worried about the lack of forward secrecy since he wanted to store DMs encrypted on the blockchain).
But the goal was to make a lot of money, not to make a better product, and seeing that DogeCoin and NFTs (which also don’t make any technical sense) reached a market cap of tens of billions, it didn’t seem completely absurd that shoehorning a blockchain in Twitter made business sense.
My understanding was that crypto should often be thought of as a social technology that enables people to be excited about things that have been possible since the early 2000s. At least that’s how I explain to myself how I missed out on BTC and NFTs.
In any case, at the time I thought his main goal must have been to increase the value of FTX (or of Solana), which didn’t raise any extra red flags in the reference class of crypto.
Re:
I think it’s important to keep in mind that people could have made at least tens of millions by predicting FTX’s collapse, this failure of prediction was really not unique to the EA community, and many in the EA community mentioned plenty of times that the value of FTX could go to 0.
I agree it’s probably a pretty bad idea but I don’t think this supports your conclusion that “the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype”
I disagree with that quote but I do think the fact that Will is reporting this story now with a straight face is a bad sign.
My steelman would be “look if you think two people would have a positive-sum interaction and it’s cheap to facilitate that, doing so is a good default”. It’s not obvious to me that Will spent more than 30 seconds on this. But the defense is “it was cheap and I didn’t think about it very hard”, not “Sam had ideas for improving twitter”.
Your steelman doesn’t seem very different from “I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.”
I think if all he’d said was “My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there”, I’d have found that a satisfactory answer. It’s also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn’t looked into it very much. I’m inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important.