I worry that people who hold the contrary viewpoint, that it’s fine to just Lawful Neutrally trade utilons for money and undercharge to the extent you’re Good, will feel inhibited and afraid from presenting this viewpoint if they hold it; and when that happens, in EA, I often do suspect that nobody else will dare to speak the contrary viewpoint, if not me.
I tried to here and here, but I very much appreciate someone with much more eloquence and clout saying it too.
Strong upvoted for all these other excellent points though IMO:
You can try to do a little good in the world, or even sell a little good into the world, without signing up to be the martyr who gets all the blame for not being better when something goes wrong.
and:
If Sequoia Capital can get fooled—presumably after more due diligence and apparent access to books than you could possibly have gotten while dealing with the charitable arm of FTX FF that was itself almost certainly in the dark—then there is no reasonable way you could have known.
and something I’d been starting to think is more likely:
My current guess is more that it’ll turn out Alameda made a Big Mistake in mid-2022. And instead of letting Alameda go under and keeping the valuable FTX exchange as a source of philanthropic money, there was an impulse to pride, to not lose the appearance of invincibility, to not be so embarrassed and humbled, to not swallow the loss, to proceed within the less painful illusion of normality and hope the reckoning could be put off forever. It’s a thing that happens a whole lot in finance! And not with utilitarians either! So we don’t need to attribute causality here to a cold utilitarian calculation that it was better to gamble literally everything, because to keep growing Alameda+FTX was so much more valuable to Earth than keeping FTX at a slower growth rate. It seems to me to appear on the surface of things, if the best-current-guess stories I’m hearing are true, that FTX blew up in a way classically associated with financial orgs being emotional and selfish, not with doing first-order naive utilitarian calculations.
and, finally, this:
I do think that EA needs more of the spirit of people who say: “Yeah, you pay me, and I’ll get the job done that I said I’ll do, and then it’s my money and I’ll use it to make myself happy; and that I’m a good person shows in how I’m undercharging for this and maybe went and accumulated professional expertise in a field where I’d be underpaid, but I still own myself and what I’m paid is still mine.”
[Edit: And this! “though the real criticism cares much less about what you actually do and much more about what they just wildly-guess / satisfyingly-imagine you’re doing”]
I tried to here and here, but I very much appreciate someone with much more eloquence and clout saying it too.
Strong upvoted for all these other excellent points though IMO:
and:
and something I’d been starting to think is more likely:
and, finally, this:
[Edit: And this! “though the real criticism cares much less about what you actually do and much more about what they just wildly-guess / satisfyingly-imagine you’re doing”]