(This account is negative toward your aims but positive of you personally. It seems good to state things like this when using anonymous accounts).
I think this is a crucial time to be open, and to stop playing dumb PR games that are, in my current tentative assessment of the situation, one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place.
I don’t want to cooperate with a lot of the PR-focused storytelling...We will not figure out a new direction for EA behind closed doors.
Explore with us what wrong things happened. Figure out how we should change and what lessons we should learn.
We can address this by object-level discussion. You said this.
I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all unconfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.
I think it is very unlikely that you knew of the level of outright theft of customer funds or observed actual criminality.
My guess is that you probably observed:
Accounts of the chaotic organization and operational structure
Accounts by Tara and others who left SBF on terrible terms in the past
Accounts of dubious or predatory projects in cryptocurrency (SRM, MAPS), liquidation protected trading accounts, self dealing between Alameda and FTX
Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?
Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?
I think the above is a good chunk of the information, though I think there is more than that.
For example, I remember someone mentioning the Alameda “ZERO RISK” flier that they handed out back in 2018, when I think they and I were quite confident that Alameda was very much not zero risk, and there was always a substantial chance it would blow up all the investor money when crypto goes down. I also heard some other similar concerns for which I am still upholding confidentiality. I think this is one step more severe into the “I assign substantial probability they lied to investors about their books and accounting” direction, than just the points you listed above, and I think constitutes more straightforwardly criminal activity.
I was also quite confident, mostly based on contradictory information that I heard from people around Sam, that Sam’s opinions on actual regulators and crypto-regulation were extremely cynical (in line with the Kelsey Piper interview), in contrast to the things he testified before congress, and the things he maintained publicly on Twitter and in various news articles.
That said, absolutely did not expect or consider that the whole thing would blow up this badly. I mean, I might have predicted with >10% probability that Sam’s net-worth becomes negative or zero, but I would not have predicted the business to be predicated on remotely as much fraud as it seems to have been.
Also, the whole situation with Sam and his propensity for dishonesty had already left a very bad taste in my mouth and had already been a major reason for why I had started disengaging from the EA community substantially more (together with the OpenAI situation which I think shares most of the same pathologies) before it all exploded. And like, I think it’s pretty plausible I just got lucky in this specific take (not too hard given that I think I have a somewhat low opinion of multiple parts of the EA ecosystem), but I think at the moment I do want to at least explore the hypothesis pretty strongly .
I think tension and anxiety is very high high now.
I want to reply to your comment. I believe that most paths in the consequent discussion contain ideas and content that would probably reduce tension a lot.
However, I need to take a pause for unrelated reasons. I don’t want this pause to extend tension (so I declare the above).
I also want to leave this TikTok here for everyone to enjoy:
(for the record, I do not know why this comment is downvoted. I upvoted it. I think people should feel comfortable taking a break from commenting any time, and I think cute TikTok videos are fine)
(This account is negative toward your aims but positive of you personally. It seems good to state things like this when using anonymous accounts).
We can address this by object-level discussion. You said this.
I think it is very unlikely that you knew of the level of outright theft of customer funds or observed actual criminality.
My guess is that you probably observed:
Accounts of the chaotic organization and operational structure
Accounts by Tara and others who left SBF on terrible terms in the past
Accounts of dubious or predatory projects in cryptocurrency (SRM, MAPS), liquidation protected trading accounts, self dealing between Alameda and FTX
Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?
I think the above is a good chunk of the information, though I think there is more than that.
For example, I remember someone mentioning the Alameda “ZERO RISK” flier that they handed out back in 2018, when I think they and I were quite confident that Alameda was very much not zero risk, and there was always a substantial chance it would blow up all the investor money when crypto goes down. I also heard some other similar concerns for which I am still upholding confidentiality. I think this is one step more severe into the “I assign substantial probability they lied to investors about their books and accounting” direction, than just the points you listed above, and I think constitutes more straightforwardly criminal activity.
I was also quite confident, mostly based on contradictory information that I heard from people around Sam, that Sam’s opinions on actual regulators and crypto-regulation were extremely cynical (in line with the Kelsey Piper interview), in contrast to the things he testified before congress, and the things he maintained publicly on Twitter and in various news articles.
That said, absolutely did not expect or consider that the whole thing would blow up this badly. I mean, I might have predicted with >10% probability that Sam’s net-worth becomes negative or zero, but I would not have predicted the business to be predicated on remotely as much fraud as it seems to have been.
Also, the whole situation with Sam and his propensity for dishonesty had already left a very bad taste in my mouth and had already been a major reason for why I had started disengaging from the EA community substantially more (together with the OpenAI situation which I think shares most of the same pathologies) before it all exploded. And like, I think it’s pretty plausible I just got lucky in this specific take (not too hard given that I think I have a somewhat low opinion of multiple parts of the EA ecosystem), but I think at the moment I do want to at least explore the hypothesis pretty strongly .
I appreciate your reply very much.
I think tension and anxiety is very high high now.
I want to reply to your comment. I believe that most paths in the consequent discussion contain ideas and content that would probably reduce tension a lot.
However, I need to take a pause for unrelated reasons. I don’t want this pause to extend tension (so I declare the above).
I also want to leave this TikTok here for everyone to enjoy:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fatimashalash/video/7098523079541935403
(for the record, I do not know why this comment is downvoted. I upvoted it. I think people should feel comfortable taking a break from commenting any time, and I think cute TikTok videos are fine)