If the community is paying back, I think it makes more sense for this to become primarily the responsibility of major funders instead of individual grantees, for practical reasons. I donât think individual EAs need to take on hardship to pay it back, and we can consider large funders paying on their behalf to be community support work or grants that they would have made anyway. Also, having major funders pay is more efficient than having individual grantees each worry about this.
Still, it might make more sense for this to come from cause-specific budgets, so that longtermist funding from FTX and associates is paid back from the longtermist EA budget, and global health and development funding from FTX and associates is paid back from the GHD EA budget, and so on. You shouldnât be able to shift EA funding between causes by committing fraud.
Ehhh, maybe? I feel like giving money back to people EAs took advantage of isnât part of the âlongtermist causeâ; itâs part of the âdo right by people who EAs harmedâ cause.
I donât particularly mind if that money comes from the longtermist budget, but I wouldnât want to delay the âdoing rightâ part on that account.
Like, you could claim that itâs only longtermists who are responsible, because SBF was a longtermist. But you could also claim that itâs only a narrower group thatâs responsible, because SBF had lots of specific views that arenât universal among longtermists. I donât want to go too far down that road, because carving things up too finely eventually means that no one in EA takes responsibility, since we can all claim to have different views from SBF on some dimension.
I think the main (only?) reason for doing it by cause would be to deter such future harms in the name of specific views, not about righting wrongs to others or attributing responsibility to specific views or groups. Otherwise EAs are more likely to think the expected benefits of unethical behaviour outweigh the expected costs, because they get to shift the expected costs onto other causes they care less about.
I donât think there needs to be delay here. If Open Phil primarily takes this on, they could pay first and then rebudget later. OTOH, if other longtermist funders take some of this on, itâll be more clear to the public that longtermists are contributing specifically to paying off their âdebtsâ (even if funding is pretty fungible and this shouldnât really matter). I agree that carving things up can be pretty complicated, in principle. I guess I donât expect this to matter too much, but I could see others disagreeing, since Iâm less familiar with the disagreements within longtermism. Also, itâs not about attributing responsibility to specific views, but tracking benefits. We know who got grants from FTX and associates, and we want to simulate them paying it back.
(I made some edits to this comment within the first 18 minutes of posting this comment, in case you were already reading or replying.)
EDIT: I guess we know less about where those benefits would have gone otherwise if not for FTX, which is still a problem, and can depend on differences in views within longtermism. This also applies to grantees paying back instead of funders.
Also, I guess another reason is that itâs just more fair to other causes that benefited less that they should pay less.
Not sure why someone decided to (strong) downvote (and not just disagreevote) your comment here. Iâve upvoted your comment, since I think it has useful considerations, and neither agree nor disagree overall, since I donât actually have a strong enough opinion here.
I guess itâs more complicated than this, because FTX entering as a funder and disproportionately funding longtermism may have freed up funding for other cause areas. Still, Iâd guess the counterfactual was disproportionately to the benefit of longtermism. We could try to simulate what would have happened without FTX and check where the extra money went. If only direct beneficiaries pay up, this is unfair to them, and indirect beneficies get away without paying.
Someone raised the point that if EAs try to offset the harm SBF caused, this creates a moral hazard of the form âpeople may be more willing to cause harm in the name of EA in the future, expecting other EAs to offset that harmâ.
I think thatâs a stronger objection to âoffset all of SBFâs harmsâ (which I donât endorse anyway) than to âcollectively (at the community level, not the individual org level) give back the amount EA receivedâ, but maybe it will shift my view once Iâve chewed on it a bit more. At a glance, I donât think Iâd expect this concern to be a dominant factor?
Our offsetting their harms out of the budget for things they care most about should be bad by their own lights, though, unless theyâre naive consequentialists (which they may disproportionately be). They should care more about the harms this way, since itâs clear itâs counterproductive by their own lights, whereas itâs easy to discount harms to FTX customers relative to longtermist (or generally EA) donations.
Agreed, though I think the primary reason the EA community should collectively give back money that was stolen and given to us is âitâs the right thing to doâ.
This is related to incentives, and there are complicated ways in which being a high-integrity, broadly honorable community finds a lot of its justification in game-theoretic LDT-ish arguments, but I think EAs empirically are better at reasoning about âwhatâs the right thing to do?â than at explicitly reasoning about LDT.
I think thatâs fair, but even when we consider the âright thing to doâ, thereâs still a question of on whom this burden is supposed to fall and how to do this in a fair way. Even for cross-cause funders, if they model themselves as multiple cause-specific agents or representing sections of the EA community, thereâs still an issue of being fair to those agents or community sections. I think tracking the counterfactual without FTX/âAlameda (or just their bad actions) would be the most accurate way to capture this + maybe some more pooled EA community fund thing.
One way to think about it is to ask who benefited counterfactually, whether directly and indirectly (through counterfactually shifting budgets) from FTX funds, and treat those individuals as owing debt equal to the counterfactual funding received. Some individuals who actually received FTX funding might not have even benefited counterfactually. Then funders can decide which debts to take on, which might happen by cause or worldview, e.g. global health people might not feel like they should take on the debts of longtermists, although they might anyway towards a community pool.
(Also, I donât think LDT really needs to come into it specifically. Are the different decision theories going to disagree dramatically here? Or, at least, I think they should all recognize some deterence value here, but maybe give it different relative weight.)
If the community is paying back, I think it makes more sense for this to become primarily the responsibility of major funders instead of individual grantees, for practical reasons. I donât think individual EAs need to take on hardship to pay it back, and we can consider large funders paying on their behalf to be community support work or grants that they would have made anyway. Also, having major funders pay is more efficient than having individual grantees each worry about this.
Still, it might make more sense for this to come from cause-specific budgets, so that longtermist funding from FTX and associates is paid back from the longtermist EA budget, and global health and development funding from FTX and associates is paid back from the GHD EA budget, and so on. You shouldnât be able to shift EA funding between causes by committing fraud.
Ehhh, maybe? I feel like giving money back to people EAs took advantage of isnât part of the âlongtermist causeâ; itâs part of the âdo right by people who EAs harmedâ cause.
I donât particularly mind if that money comes from the longtermist budget, but I wouldnât want to delay the âdoing rightâ part on that account.
Like, you could claim that itâs only longtermists who are responsible, because SBF was a longtermist. But you could also claim that itâs only a narrower group thatâs responsible, because SBF had lots of specific views that arenât universal among longtermists. I donât want to go too far down that road, because carving things up too finely eventually means that no one in EA takes responsibility, since we can all claim to have different views from SBF on some dimension.
I think the main (only?) reason for doing it by cause would be to deter such future harms in the name of specific views, not about righting wrongs to others or attributing responsibility to specific views or groups. Otherwise EAs are more likely to think the expected benefits of unethical behaviour outweigh the expected costs, because they get to shift the expected costs onto other causes they care less about.
I donât think there needs to be delay here. If Open Phil primarily takes this on, they could pay first and then rebudget later. OTOH, if other longtermist funders take some of this on, itâll be more clear to the public that longtermists are contributing specifically to paying off their âdebtsâ (even if funding is pretty fungible and this shouldnât really matter). I agree that carving things up can be pretty complicated, in principle. I guess I donât expect this to matter too much, but I could see others disagreeing, since Iâm less familiar with the disagreements within longtermism. Also, itâs not about attributing responsibility to specific views, but tracking benefits. We know who got grants from FTX and associates, and we want to simulate them paying it back.
(I made some edits to this comment within the first 18 minutes of posting this comment, in case you were already reading or replying.)
EDIT: I guess we know less about where those benefits would have gone otherwise if not for FTX, which is still a problem, and can depend on differences in views within longtermism. This also applies to grantees paying back instead of funders.
Also, I guess another reason is that itâs just more fair to other causes that benefited less that they should pay less.
Not sure why someone decided to (strong) downvote (and not just disagreevote) your comment here. Iâve upvoted your comment, since I think it has useful considerations, and neither agree nor disagree overall, since I donât actually have a strong enough opinion here.
I guess itâs more complicated than this, because FTX entering as a funder and disproportionately funding longtermism may have freed up funding for other cause areas. Still, Iâd guess the counterfactual was disproportionately to the benefit of longtermism. We could try to simulate what would have happened without FTX and check where the extra money went. If only direct beneficiaries pay up, this is unfair to them, and indirect beneficies get away without paying.
Agreed.
I argued for major funders doing this (at least if some conditions hold) here, and argued against the grant recipients doing this here.
Someone raised the point that if EAs try to offset the harm SBF caused, this creates a moral hazard of the form âpeople may be more willing to cause harm in the name of EA in the future, expecting other EAs to offset that harmâ.
I think thatâs a stronger objection to âoffset all of SBFâs harmsâ (which I donât endorse anyway) than to âcollectively (at the community level, not the individual org level) give back the amount EA receivedâ, but maybe it will shift my view once Iâve chewed on it a bit more. At a glance, I donât think Iâd expect this concern to be a dominant factor?
Our offsetting their harms out of the budget for things they care most about should be bad by their own lights, though, unless theyâre naive consequentialists (which they may disproportionately be). They should care more about the harms this way, since itâs clear itâs counterproductive by their own lights, whereas itâs easy to discount harms to FTX customers relative to longtermist (or generally EA) donations.
Agreed, though I think the primary reason the EA community should collectively give back money that was stolen and given to us is âitâs the right thing to doâ.
This is related to incentives, and there are complicated ways in which being a high-integrity, broadly honorable community finds a lot of its justification in game-theoretic LDT-ish arguments, but I think EAs empirically are better at reasoning about âwhatâs the right thing to do?â than at explicitly reasoning about LDT.
I think thatâs fair, but even when we consider the âright thing to doâ, thereâs still a question of on whom this burden is supposed to fall and how to do this in a fair way. Even for cross-cause funders, if they model themselves as multiple cause-specific agents or representing sections of the EA community, thereâs still an issue of being fair to those agents or community sections. I think tracking the counterfactual without FTX/âAlameda (or just their bad actions) would be the most accurate way to capture this + maybe some more pooled EA community fund thing.
One way to think about it is to ask who benefited counterfactually, whether directly and indirectly (through counterfactually shifting budgets) from FTX funds, and treat those individuals as owing debt equal to the counterfactual funding received. Some individuals who actually received FTX funding might not have even benefited counterfactually. Then funders can decide which debts to take on, which might happen by cause or worldview, e.g. global health people might not feel like they should take on the debts of longtermists, although they might anyway towards a community pool.
(Also, I donât think LDT really needs to come into it specifically. Are the different decision theories going to disagree dramatically here? Or, at least, I think they should all recognize some deterence value here, but maybe give it different relative weight.)