Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis’s book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA,[1] but several people have recently asked me about if they should prepare anything, so I wanted to quickly record my thoughts.
The Forum feels like it’s in a better place to me than when FTX declared bankruptcy: the moderation team at the time was Lizka, Lorenzo, and myself, but it is now six people, and they’ve put in a number of processes to make it easier to deal with a sudden growth in the number of heated discussions. We have also made a number of design changes, notably to the community section.
CEA has also improved our communications and legal processes so we can be more responsive to news, if we need to (though some of the constraints mentioned here are still applicable).
Nonetheless, I think there’s a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want to preemptively create a plan for engaging with that in a healthy way.
This market is thinly traded but is currently predicting that Lewis’s book will not explicitly assert that Sam misused customer funds because of “ends justify the means” reasoning
My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA
I’d be surprised [p<0.1] if EA was not a significant focus of the Michael Lewis book – but agree that it’s unlikely to be the major topic. Many leaders at FTX and Alameda Research are closely linked to EA. SBF often, and publically, said that effective altruism was a big reason for his actions. His connection to EA is interesting both for understanding his motivation and as a story-telling element. There are Manifold prediction markets on whether the book would mention 80′000h (74%), Open Philanthropy (74%), and Give Well (80%), but these markets aren’t traded a lot and are not very informative.[1]
This video titled The Fake Genius: A $30 BILLION Fraud (2.8 million views, posted 3 weeks ago) might give a glimpse of how EA could be handled. The video touches on EA but isn’t centred on it. It discusses the role EAs played in motivating SBF to do earning to give, and in starting Alameda Research and FTX. It also points out that, after the fallout at Alameda Research, ‘higher-ups’ at CEA were warned about SBF but supposedly ignored the warnings. Overall, the video is mainly interested in the mechanisms of how the suspected fraud happened, where EA is only one piece of the puzzle. One can equally get a sense of “EA led SBF to do fraud” as “SBF used EA as a front to do fraud”.
ETA: The book description[2] “mentions “philanthropy”, makes it clear that it’s mainly about SBF and not FTX as a firm, and describes the book as partly a psychological portrait.
“In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.”
Yeah, unfortunately I suspect that “he claimed to be an altruist doing good! As part of this weird framework/community!” is going to be substantial part of what makes this an interesting story for writers/media, and what makes it more interesting than “he was doing criminal things in crypto” (which I suspect is just not that interesting on its own at this point, even at such a large scale).
The Panorama episode briefly mentioned EA. Peter Singer spoke for a couple of minutes and EA was mainly viewed as charity that would be missing out on money. There seemed to be a lot more interest on the internal discussions within FTX, crypto drama, the politicians, celebrities etc.
Maybe Panorama is an outlier but potentially EA is not that interesting to most people or seemingly too complicated to explain if you only have an hour.
Yeah I was interviewed for a podcast by a canadian station on this topic (cos a canadian hedge fund was very involved). iirc they had 6 episodes but dropped the EA angle because it was too complex.
Agree with this and also with the point below that the EA angle is kind of too complicated to be super compelling for a broad audience. I thought this New Yorker piece’s discussion (which involved EA a decent amount in a way I thought was quite fair—https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/inside-sam-bankman-frieds-family-bubble) might give a sense of magnitude (though the NYer audience is going to be more interested in these sort of nuances than most.
The other factors I think are: 1. to what extent there are vivid new tidbits or revelations in Lewis’s book that relate to EA and 2. the drama around Caroline Ellison and other witnesses at trial and the extent to which that is connected to EA; my guess is the drama around the cooperating witnesses will seem very interesting on a human level, though I don’t necessarily think that will point towards the effective altruism community specifically.
Yeah, “touches on EA but isn’t centred on it” is my modal prediction for how major stories will go. I expect that more minor stories (e.g. the daily “here’s what happened on day n of the trial” story) will usually not mention EA. But obviously it’s hard to predict these things with much confidence.
The Forum feels like it’s in a better place to me than when FTX declared bankruptcy: the moderation team at the time was Lizka, Lorenzo, and myself, but it is now six people, and they’ve put in a number of processes to make it easier to deal with a sudden growth in the number of heated discussions. We have also made a number of design changes, notably to the community section.
This is a huge relief to hear. I noticed some big positive differences, but I couldn’t tell where from. Thank you.
Accordingly, the defendant is precluded from referring to any alleged prior good acts by the defendant, including any charity or philanthropy, as indicative of his character or his guilt or innocence.
I guess technically the prosecution could still bring it up.
(I forgot to tell JP and Lizka in at EAG in NY a few weeks ago, but now’s as good a time as any):
Can my profile karma total be two numbers, one for community and one for other stuff? I don’t want a reader to think my actual work is valuable to people in proportion to my EA Forum karma, as far as I can tell I think 3-5x my karma is community sourced compared to my object-level posts. People should look at my profile as “this guy procrastinates through PVP on social media like everyone else, he should work harder on things that matter”.
Yeah, I kind of agree that we should do something here; maybe the two-dimensional thing you mentioned, or maybe community karma should count less/not at all.
Could see a number of potentially good solutions here, but think the “not at all” is possibly not the greatest idea. Creating a separate community karma could lead to a sort of system of social clout that may not be desirable, but I also think having no way to signal who has and has not in the past been a major contributor to the community as a topic would be more of a failure mode because I often use it to get a deeper sense of how to think about the claims in a given comment/post.
There would be some UX ways to make community clout feel lower status than the other clout, I agree with you that having community clout means more investment / should be preferred over a new account which for all you know is a driveby dunk/sneer after wandering in on twitter.
I’ll cc this to my feature request in the proper thread.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis’s book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA,[1] but several people have recently asked me about if they should prepare anything, so I wanted to quickly record my thoughts.
The Forum feels like it’s in a better place to me than when FTX declared bankruptcy: the moderation team at the time was Lizka, Lorenzo, and myself, but it is now six people, and they’ve put in a number of processes to make it easier to deal with a sudden growth in the number of heated discussions. We have also made a number of design changes, notably to the community section.
CEA has also improved our communications and legal processes so we can be more responsive to news, if we need to (though some of the constraints mentioned here are still applicable).
Nonetheless, I think there’s a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want to preemptively create a plan for engaging with that in a healthy way.
This market is thinly traded but is currently predicting that Lewis’s book will not explicitly assert that Sam misused customer funds because of “ends justify the means” reasoning
I’d be surprised [p<0.1] if EA was not a significant focus of the Michael Lewis book – but agree that it’s unlikely to be the major topic. Many leaders at FTX and Alameda Research are closely linked to EA. SBF often, and publically, said that effective altruism was a big reason for his actions. His connection to EA is interesting both for understanding his motivation and as a story-telling element. There are Manifold prediction markets on whether the book would mention 80′000h (74%), Open Philanthropy (74%), and Give Well (80%), but these markets aren’t traded a lot and are not very informative.[1]
This video titled The Fake Genius: A $30 BILLION Fraud (2.8 million views, posted 3 weeks ago) might give a glimpse of how EA could be handled. The video touches on EA but isn’t centred on it. It discusses the role EAs played in motivating SBF to do earning to give, and in starting Alameda Research and FTX. It also points out that, after the fallout at Alameda Research, ‘higher-ups’ at CEA were warned about SBF but supposedly ignored the warnings. Overall, the video is mainly interested in the mechanisms of how the suspected fraud happened, where EA is only one piece of the puzzle. One can equally get a sense of “EA led SBF to do fraud” as “SBF used EA as a front to do fraud”.
ETA:
The book description[2] “mentions “philanthropy”, makes it clear that it’s mainly about SBF and not FTX as a firm, and describes the book as partly a psychological portrait.
I also created a similar market for CEA, but with 2 mentions as the resolving criteria. One mention is very likely as SBF worked briefly for them.
“In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.”
Yeah, unfortunately I suspect that “he claimed to be an altruist doing good! As part of this weird framework/community!” is going to be substantial part of what makes this an interesting story for writers/media, and what makes it more interesting than “he was doing criminal things in crypto” (which I suspect is just not that interesting on its own at this point, even at such a large scale).
The Panorama episode briefly mentioned EA. Peter Singer spoke for a couple of minutes and EA was mainly viewed as charity that would be missing out on money. There seemed to be a lot more interest on the internal discussions within FTX, crypto drama, the politicians, celebrities etc.
Maybe Panorama is an outlier but potentially EA is not that interesting to most people or seemingly too complicated to explain if you only have an hour.
Yeah I was interviewed for a podcast by a canadian station on this topic (cos a canadian hedge fund was very involved). iirc they had 6 episodes but dropped the EA angle because it was too complex.
Good to know, thank you.
Agree with this and also with the point below that the EA angle is kind of too complicated to be super compelling for a broad audience. I thought this New Yorker piece’s discussion (which involved EA a decent amount in a way I thought was quite fair—https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/inside-sam-bankman-frieds-family-bubble) might give a sense of magnitude (though the NYer audience is going to be more interested in these sort of nuances than most.
The other factors I think are: 1. to what extent there are vivid new tidbits or revelations in Lewis’s book that relate to EA and 2. the drama around Caroline Ellison and other witnesses at trial and the extent to which that is connected to EA; my guess is the drama around the cooperating witnesses will seem very interesting on a human level, though I don’t necessarily think that will point towards the effective altruism community specifically.
Michael Lewis wouldn’t do it as a gotcha/sneer, but this is a reason I’ll be upset if Adam McKay ends up with the movie.
Update: the court ruled SBF can’t make reference to his philanthropy
Yeah, “touches on EA but isn’t centred on it” is my modal prediction for how major stories will go. I expect that more minor stories (e.g. the daily “here’s what happened on day n of the trial” story) will usually not mention EA. But obviously it’s hard to predict these things with much confidence.
This is a huge relief to hear. I noticed some big positive differences, but I couldn’t tell where from. Thank you.
If I understand this correctly, maybe not in the trial itself:
I guess technically the prosecution could still bring it up.
I hadn’t realized that, thanks for sharing
(I forgot to tell JP and Lizka in at EAG in NY a few weeks ago, but now’s as good a time as any):
Can my profile karma total be two numbers, one for community and one for other stuff? I don’t want a reader to think my actual work is valuable to people in proportion to my EA Forum karma, as far as I can tell I think 3-5x my karma is community sourced compared to my object-level posts. People should look at my profile as “this guy procrastinates through PVP on social media like everyone else, he should work harder on things that matter”.
Yeah, I kind of agree that we should do something here; maybe the two-dimensional thing you mentioned, or maybe community karma should count less/not at all.
Could you add a comment here?
Could see a number of potentially good solutions here, but think the “not at all” is possibly not the greatest idea. Creating a separate community karma could lead to a sort of system of social clout that may not be desirable, but I also think having no way to signal who has and has not in the past been a major contributor to the community as a topic would be more of a failure mode because I often use it to get a deeper sense of how to think about the claims in a given comment/post.
There would be some UX ways to make community clout feel lower status than the other clout, I agree with you that having community clout means more investment / should be preferred over a new account which for all you know is a driveby dunk/sneer after wandering in on twitter.
I’ll cc this to my feature request in the proper thread.
Thank you for the prompt.