FWIW, buying Twitter still seems plausibly like a good idea to me. It sure seems to be the single place that is most shaping public opinion on a large number of topics I care a lot about (like AI x-risk attitudes), and making that go better seems worth a lot.
I’m struggling to draw the line between owning (a minority stake in) Twitter and having public opinion on certain topics meaningfully flow in a desired direction or path.
Yeah, I think this would only make sense if you would somehow end up majorly shaping the algorithms and structure of Twitter. I don’t think just being a shareholder really does much here.
I could imagine making that case, but what’s the point of all the Givewell-style analysis of evidence, or all the detailed attempts to predict and value the future, if in the end, what would have been the single biggest allocation of EA funds for all time was being proposed based on vibes?
Like with Wytham Abbey, I’m really surprised by people in this thread confusing investments with donations.
If SBF had invested some billions in Twitter, the money wouldn’t be burned, see e.g. what happened with Anthropic.
From his (and most people’s) perspective, SBF was running FTX with ~1% the employees of comparable platforms, so it seemed plausible he could buy Twitter, cut 90% of the workforce like Musk did, and make money while at the same time steering it to be more scout-mindset and truth-seeking oriented.
I’ve never seen a good business case for valuing Twitter at anywhere near the $44B it took to acquire. SBF didn’t have nearly that much available, so he’d still be looking at Musk as the majority owner....and it was 100 percent foreseeable that Musk had his own ideological axes to grind. That SBF ran FTX lean seems weak evidence that he could cut 90 percent of Twitter staff without serious difficulties, and the train wreck caused by Musk’s cuts suggest that never was realistic.
Finally, the idea that SBF could somehow make Twitter significantly “more scout-mindset and truth-seeking oriented” has never been fleshed out AFAIK. Also, it would be a surprising and suspicious convergence that the way to run Twitter profitably would also have been the way to run it altruistically.
I think that even if you buy that, Will’s behavior is still alarming, just in a different way. Why exactly should we, as a community, think of ourselves as being fitted to steer public opinion? Weren’t we just meant to be experts on charity, rather than everything under the sun? (Not to mention that Musk is not the person I would choose to collaborate with on that, but that’s for another day.) Will complains about Sam’s hubris, but what could be more hubristic than that?
I remember feeling nervous when I first started working in EA that (otherwise very sober seeming) people were taking it as read that we were somehow important to the future of the whole world. That just seemed crazy and ominous to me. (And quite different from when I first became a GWWC member in 2012, where it was all just “give to good charities, be humble epistemically”; which to be clear was compatible with taking weird ideas seriously and I think people were doing that; I recall long conversations about Pascal’s Wager, people already talking about AI risk etc.).
Trying to steer opinion in this way also just seems very manipulative to me. (I probably have unusually strong feelings about this because I’m autistic, but I think the autistic attitude is just better on average here.) In line with Will talking internally about “controlling the narrative” around EA and FTX https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1712282768091042029 Some people will probably just shrug and say this is just PR, and I get that there is massive hindsight bias here, but reading this made me genuinely cringe.
Yeah, I think just buying Twitter to steer the narrative seems quite bad. But like, I have spent a large fraction of my career trying to think of mechanism design for discussion and social media platforms and so my relation to Twitter is I think a pretty healthy “I think I see lots of ways in which you could make this platform much more sanity-promoting” in a way that isn’t about just spreading my memes and ideologies.
Will has somewhat less of that background, and I think would have less justified confidence in his ability to actually make the platform better from a general sanity perspective, though still seems pretty plausible to me he saw or sees genuine ways to make the platform better for humanity.
I must say that, given that I know from prior discussion on here that you are not Will’s biggest fan, your attempt to be fair here is quite admirable. There should maybe be an “integrity” react button?
FWIW, buying Twitter still seems plausibly like a good idea to me. It sure seems to be the single place that is most shaping public opinion on a large number of topics I care a lot about (like AI x-risk attitudes), and making that go better seems worth a lot.
I’m struggling to draw the line between owning (a minority stake in) Twitter and having public opinion on certain topics meaningfully flow in a desired direction or path.
Yeah, I think this would only make sense if you would somehow end up majorly shaping the algorithms and structure of Twitter. I don’t think just being a shareholder really does much here.
I could imagine making that case, but what’s the point of all the Givewell-style analysis of evidence, or all the detailed attempts to predict and value the future, if in the end, what would have been the single biggest allocation of EA funds for all time was being proposed based on vibes?
Like with Wytham Abbey, I’m really surprised by people in this thread confusing investments with donations.
If SBF had invested some billions in Twitter, the money wouldn’t be burned, see e.g. what happened with Anthropic.
From his (and most people’s) perspective, SBF was running FTX with ~1% the employees of comparable platforms, so it seemed plausible he could buy Twitter, cut 90% of the workforce like Musk did, and make money while at the same time steering it to be more scout-mindset and truth-seeking oriented.
I’ve never seen a good business case for valuing Twitter at anywhere near the $44B it took to acquire. SBF didn’t have nearly that much available, so he’d still be looking at Musk as the majority owner....and it was 100 percent foreseeable that Musk had his own ideological axes to grind. That SBF ran FTX lean seems weak evidence that he could cut 90 percent of Twitter staff without serious difficulties, and the train wreck caused by Musk’s cuts suggest that never was realistic.
Finally, the idea that SBF could somehow make Twitter significantly “more scout-mindset and truth-seeking oriented” has never been fleshed out AFAIK. Also, it would be a surprising and suspicious convergence that the way to run Twitter profitably would also have been the way to run it altruistically.
Is the consensus currently that the investment in Twitter has paid off or is ever likely to do so?
No, but in expectation it wasn’t very far from the stock market valuation. It’s very possible that it was positive EV even if it didn’t work out
I think that even if you buy that, Will’s behavior is still alarming, just in a different way. Why exactly should we, as a community, think of ourselves as being fitted to steer public opinion? Weren’t we just meant to be experts on charity, rather than everything under the sun? (Not to mention that Musk is not the person I would choose to collaborate with on that, but that’s for another day.) Will complains about Sam’s hubris, but what could be more hubristic than that?
I remember feeling nervous when I first started working in EA that (otherwise very sober seeming) people were taking it as read that we were somehow important to the future of the whole world. That just seemed crazy and ominous to me. (And quite different from when I first became a GWWC member in 2012, where it was all just “give to good charities, be humble epistemically”; which to be clear was compatible with taking weird ideas seriously and I think people were doing that; I recall long conversations about Pascal’s Wager, people already talking about AI risk etc.).
Trying to steer opinion in this way also just seems very manipulative to me. (I probably have unusually strong feelings about this because I’m autistic, but I think the autistic attitude is just better on average here.) In line with Will talking internally about “controlling the narrative” around EA and FTX https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1712282768091042029 Some people will probably just shrug and say this is just PR, and I get that there is massive hindsight bias here, but reading this made me genuinely cringe.
Yeah, I think just buying Twitter to steer the narrative seems quite bad. But like, I have spent a large fraction of my career trying to think of mechanism design for discussion and social media platforms and so my relation to Twitter is I think a pretty healthy “I think I see lots of ways in which you could make this platform much more sanity-promoting” in a way that isn’t about just spreading my memes and ideologies.
Will has somewhat less of that background, and I think would have less justified confidence in his ability to actually make the platform better from a general sanity perspective, though still seems pretty plausible to me he saw or sees genuine ways to make the platform better for humanity.
I must say that, given that I know from prior discussion on here that you are not Will’s biggest fan, your attempt to be fair here is quite admirable. There should maybe be an “integrity” react button?