Sharing some quick personal thoughts, all views based on EA forum posts:
there are very few EA organizations, in the legal sense
Only if you have a very strict definition of what counts as an EA org. There are probably dozens related to the EA brand and at least hundreds doing EA in practice
The king umbrella is Effective Ventures Foundation, which hosts CEA, 80k, Longview, EA Funds, Giving What We Can, Asterisk magazine, Centre for Governance of AI, Forethought Foundation, Non-Trivial, and BlueDot Impact. Posts on the castle also describe it as an EVF project, although it’s not listed on the website.
The easiest thing to do is just take fewer risks. Don’t buy retreat centers that could be described as lavish.
Arguably, being less risk seeking is a good thing, that many people have been intensely advocating for after FTX, if the risks involve the EA project as a whole. And often they do, regardless of the legal status, see e.g. Nonlinear. See also all the recent posts about the need for “more governance”.
They gave me a new, more complicated story. Maybe it was good they never published those comments, because they were coming from an angry place.
This seems likely, given the asymmetry of the negative and positive consequences of posting angry comments, it makes me update in favor of more governance being a good thing.
Will MacAskill has written up reflections on the SBF debacle, but EVF told him not to publish.
This could be seen as censorship, but also as preventing MacAskill from deciding the narrative or influencing witnesses before the investigation is concluded. On priors, I think we should assume that there’s a reasonable chance that the board had good reason to prevent this, and they’re not just being evil. It’s not obvious that more governance was bad in this case, compared to MacAskill doing what he thought was best (as a general process, even if you absolutely trust MacAskill in particular).
it didn’t raise any alarm bells for me when my first check from “the FTX Future Fund (regrantor program)” came via CEA, and the second used the name North Dimensions.
When someone accepts money from an ethically and legally dubious entity like a cryptocurrency exchange, I would be extremely surprised if the reaction would be different because they have interacted with fiscally sponsored projects in the past. If the money came from Binance instead of FTX, would an account from a random American company be suspicious? What kind of alarm bells would it raise, that they use different legal entities to make small transactions since the main business is not licensed in the US?
I find it really weird to blame the practice of fiscal sponsorship for having accepted FTX money given the base rates of fraud in crypto.
training people to accept misdirection creates cover for malfeasance
All EV projects and all RP projects seem very clearly labeled as such, what do you think is the misdirection?
EA should grapple with the risk creation and risk aversion caused by fiscal sponsorship, especially umbrella orgs, and how those trade-off against the benefits.
I would expect most people to agree with you that sponsorship is very good for small projects but has downsides for large projects, but some to disagree on the trade-offs and what counts as “large”
Sharing some quick personal thoughts, all views based on EA forum posts:
Only if you have a very strict definition of what counts as an EA org. There are probably dozens related to the EA brand and at least hundreds doing EA in practice
https://www.wythamabbey.org/ confirms that “Wytham Abbey is a project of the Effective Ventures group”.
Arguably, being less risk seeking is a good thing, that many people have been intensely advocating for after FTX, if the risks involve the EA project as a whole. And often they do, regardless of the legal status, see e.g. Nonlinear. See also all the recent posts about the need for “more governance”.
This seems likely, given the asymmetry of the negative and positive consequences of posting angry comments, it makes me update in favor of more governance being a good thing.
This could be seen as censorship, but also as preventing MacAskill from deciding the narrative or influencing witnesses before the investigation is concluded. On priors, I think we should assume that there’s a reasonable chance that the board had good reason to prevent this, and they’re not just being evil. It’s not obvious that more governance was bad in this case, compared to MacAskill doing what he thought was best (as a general process, even if you absolutely trust MacAskill in particular).
When someone accepts money from an ethically and legally dubious entity like a cryptocurrency exchange, I would be extremely surprised if the reaction would be different because they have interacted with fiscally sponsored projects in the past. If the money came from Binance instead of FTX, would an account from a random American company be suspicious? What kind of alarm bells would it raise, that they use different legal entities to make small transactions since the main business is not licensed in the US?
I find it really weird to blame the practice of fiscal sponsorship for having accepted FTX money given the base rates of fraud in crypto.
All EV projects and all RP projects seem very clearly labeled as such, what do you think is the misdirection?
Definitely strongly agree with this, see e.g. QURI asking for more fiscal sponsorship (and mentioning not getting a sponsorship in their mistakes page) and the other 13 forum posts tagged “fiscal sponsorship” including this post arguing for More Centralisation.
I would expect most people to agree with you that sponsorship is very good for small projects but has downsides for large projects, but some to disagree on the trade-offs and what counts as “large”