Thanks for this summary. I listened to this yesterday & browsed through the SH subreddit discussion, and I’m surprised that this hasn’t received much discussion on here. Perhaps the EA community is talked out about this subject, which, fair enough. But as far as I can tell, it’s one of Will’s first at-length public remarks on SBF, so it feels discussion-worthy to me.
I agree that the discussion was oddly vague given all the actual evidence we have. I don’t feel like going into much detail but a few things I noticed:
It seems that Will is still somewhat in denial that SBF was a fraud. I guess this is a perfectly valid opinion, Will knows SBF, but I can’t help but feel that this is naive (or measured, if we’re to be charitable). We can quibble over his reasoning, but fraud is fraud, and SBF committed a lot of it, repeatedly and at scale. He doesn’t have to be good at fraud to be one.
They barely touch on the dangers of a “maximalist” EA. If Will doesn’t believe SBF was fraudulent for regular greedy reasons, then EA may have played a part, and that’s worth considering. No need to be overly dramatic here, the average EA is well-intentioned and not going to do anything like this… but as long as EA is centralized and reliant on large donors, it’s something we need to further think through.
The podcast is a reminder of how difficult it is to understand motivations, and how difficult it is for “good” people to understand what motivates “bad” actions (adding “” to acknowledge the big vast gray areas here). Given that there are a lot of neuro-atypical EAs, the community seems desensitized to potential red flags like claiming not to feel love. This is my hobbyhorse—like any community, EA has smart capable people that I wouldn’t ever want to have power. It sounds like there were people who felt this way about SBF, including a cofounder. It’s a bit shocking to me that EA leadership didn’t see SBF as much of a liability.
Thanks for this summary. I listened to this yesterday & browsed through the SH subreddit discussion, and I’m surprised that this hasn’t received much discussion on here. Perhaps the EA community is talked out about this subject, which, fair enough. But as far as I can tell, it’s one of Will’s first at-length public remarks on SBF, so it feels discussion-worthy to me.
I agree that the discussion was oddly vague given all the actual evidence we have. I don’t feel like going into much detail but a few things I noticed:
It seems that Will is still somewhat in denial that SBF was a fraud. I guess this is a perfectly valid opinion, Will knows SBF, but I can’t help but feel that this is naive (or measured, if we’re to be charitable). We can quibble over his reasoning, but fraud is fraud, and SBF committed a lot of it, repeatedly and at scale. He doesn’t have to be good at fraud to be one.
They barely touch on the dangers of a “maximalist” EA. If Will doesn’t believe SBF was fraudulent for regular greedy reasons, then EA may have played a part, and that’s worth considering. No need to be overly dramatic here, the average EA is well-intentioned and not going to do anything like this… but as long as EA is centralized and reliant on large donors, it’s something we need to further think through.
The podcast is a reminder of how difficult it is to understand motivations, and how difficult it is for “good” people to understand what motivates “bad” actions (adding “” to acknowledge the big vast gray areas here). Given that there are a lot of neuro-atypical EAs, the community seems desensitized to potential red flags like claiming not to feel love. This is my hobbyhorse—like any community, EA has smart capable people that I wouldn’t ever want to have power. It sounds like there were people who felt this way about SBF, including a cofounder. It’s a bit shocking to me that EA leadership didn’t see SBF as much of a liability.