Yeah, I think you are pointing towards something real here.
Like, I do think a thing that drove my reaction to this was a perspective in which it was obvious that most people in EA didn’t literally actively participate in the FTX fraud. I have encountered very extreme and obviously wrong opinions about this in the public (the comment section of the WaPo article provides many examples of this), and there is some value in engaging with that.
But I do think that is engaging with a position that is extremely shallow, and the mechanism of it seems like its trying to attack shallowness with more shallowness, which I don’t think is necessarily a strategy to rule out, but one that I am glad EA has avoided so far.
The way I would like Zack to have done it would have been to make a well-scoped statement that is honest and says “we might still be substantially responsible for SBF, but if so, we were because of indirect effects, not because we directly helped with the fraud. We really didn’t know how bad the fraud was, and we did not directly participate in it, and here is an investigation that shows that”
I’d be interested if you wanted to elaborate on the view that it makes it harder for the public to tell what’s going on inside EA.
I mean, as I mentioned as a concrete example, Will was told by CEA board members and leadership to not write anything detailed publicly about his FTX experiences due to the ongoing investigation. This seems like it has been extremely costly in terms of my ability and others ability to understand what happened, and I don’t see the corresponding payoff in the investigation results. To quote from Will 9 months ago:
The independent investigation commissioned by EV is still ongoing, and the firm running it strongly preferred me not to publish posts on backwards-looking topics around FTX while the investigation is still in-progress. I don’t know when it’ll be finished, or what the situation will be like for communicating on these topics even after it’s done.
Will publishing backwards-looking posts on FTX seems like the obvious and most central thing that should happen as part of FTX reform. We have clear documentation that the investigation prevented that from happening (and as far as I can tell the reflections are still not published, so it seems like the investigations completely prevented this kind of information from entering the public record).
Yeah, I think you are pointing towards something real here.
Like, I do think a thing that drove my reaction to this was a perspective in which it was obvious that most people in EA didn’t literally actively participate in the FTX fraud. I have encountered very extreme and obviously wrong opinions about this in the public (the comment section of the WaPo article provides many examples of this), and there is some value in engaging with that.
But I do think that is engaging with a position that is extremely shallow, and the mechanism of it seems like its trying to attack shallowness with more shallowness, which I don’t think is necessarily a strategy to rule out, but one that I am glad EA has avoided so far.
The way I would like Zack to have done it would have been to make a well-scoped statement that is honest and says “we might still be substantially responsible for SBF, but if so, we were because of indirect effects, not because we directly helped with the fraud. We really didn’t know how bad the fraud was, and we did not directly participate in it, and here is an investigation that shows that”
I mean, as I mentioned as a concrete example, Will was told by CEA board members and leadership to not write anything detailed publicly about his FTX experiences due to the ongoing investigation. This seems like it has been extremely costly in terms of my ability and others ability to understand what happened, and I don’t see the corresponding payoff in the investigation results. To quote from Will 9 months ago:
Will publishing backwards-looking posts on FTX seems like the obvious and most central thing that should happen as part of FTX reform. We have clear documentation that the investigation prevented that from happening (and as far as I can tell the reflections are still not published, so it seems like the investigations completely prevented this kind of information from entering the public record).