This seems directionally right to me. My current view is that an investigation should stick to objective questions rather than normative stuff about, for example, whether the EA movement is in principle OK taking funding from the crypto industry (or some other potentially destructive industry). I think my thinking here is that a person who isn’t involved in EA should think about those objective questions, and then folks in the EA movement itself should make arguments for and decide on the future direction in response. I trust a lawyer specialised in independent investigations to do the fact-finding work and the ‘what went wrong’ work, but not to make principled judgements about what EA should think or do more broadly.
It’s definitely true that there are more philosophical questions that a lawyerly investigation wouldn’t be well-positioned to answer. But it seems likely that there were plenty of legal and financial risk-management mistakes that EA orgs made in the pst year that an independent investigator or other outside risk management consultant would be well-positioned to opine on.
This seems directionally right to me. My current view is that an investigation should stick to objective questions rather than normative stuff about, for example, whether the EA movement is in principle OK taking funding from the crypto industry (or some other potentially destructive industry). I think my thinking here is that a person who isn’t involved in EA should think about those objective questions, and then folks in the EA movement itself should make arguments for and decide on the future direction in response. I trust a lawyer specialised in independent investigations to do the fact-finding work and the ‘what went wrong’ work, but not to make principled judgements about what EA should think or do more broadly.
It’s definitely true that there are more philosophical questions that a lawyerly investigation wouldn’t be well-positioned to answer. But it seems likely that there were plenty of legal and financial risk-management mistakes that EA orgs made in the pst year that an independent investigator or other outside risk management consultant would be well-positioned to opine on.