The FTX and Alameda estates have filed an adversary complaint against the FTX Foundation, SBF, Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Nick Beckstead, and some biosciences firms, available here. I should emphasize that anyone can sue over anything, and allege anything in a complaint (although I take complaints signed by Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys significantly more seriously than I take the median complaint). I would caution against drawing any adverse inferences from a defendant’s silence in response to the complaint.
The complaint concerns a $3.25MM “philantrophic gift” made to a biosciences firm (PLS), and almost $70MM in non-donation payments (investments, advance royalties, etc.) -- most of which were also to PLS. The only count against Beckstead relates to the donation. The non-donation payments were associated with Latona, which according to the complaint “purports to be a non-profit, limited liability company organized under the laws of the Bahamas[,] incorporated in May 2022 for the purported purpose of investing in life sciences companies [which] held itself out as being part of the FTX Foundation.”
The complaint does not allege that either Beckstead or Rheingans-Yoo knew of the fraud at the core of FTX and Alameda.
It does, however, allege (para. 46) that the “transfers were nominally made on behalf of the FTX Foundation and Latona, but actually were made for the benefit of Bankman-Fried.” This is a weak spot in the complaint for me. There’s a quote from SBF about needing to do some biosecurity work for PR and political reasons (para. 47), but corporations do charitable stuff for PR and political reasons all the time. There are quotations about wanting to de-emphasize the profit motive / potential in public communications (para. 49-50), but if the profits flowed to a non-profit it’s unclear how that would personally enrich SBF.
Quoting Beckstead, the complaint alleges that the investments were “ill-advised and not well-evaluated” (para. 51). It further alleges that there was no, or very little due dilligence (para. 51), such as a lack of any valuation analysis and in most cases lack of access to a data room. As a result, Latona “often paid far more than fair or reasonably equivalent value for the investments” (para. 52). As for the $3.25MM gift, it was “was made in a similarly slapdash fashion” as the Foundation agreed to it without even knowing whether the recipient was a non-profit (para. 53). There are also allegations about how that gift came to be (para. 53-64).
Paragraph 68 is troubling in terms of Latona’s lack of internal controls:
On May 23, 2022, Rheingans-Yoo sent a Slack message to the Head of Operations for FTX Ventures, asking her to wire $50 million to PLS on behalf of Latona, because “Latona doesn’t have a bank account yet, and we’d like to move these funds as soon as possible.” After the Head of Operations inquired why they were wiring $50 million when the SAFE agreement was only for $35 million, Rheingans-Yoo said there was a “separate purchase agreement [that] had a $15mln cash advance.” When the Head of Operations asked for the purchase agreement for $15 million, Rheingans-Yoo replied, “I have an email, no formal agreement,” but “if that’s not sufficient, we can send the 35 first and get the purchase more formally papered.
There apparently wasn’t an attempt to formally paper the $15MM until September, and that paper was woefully vague and inadequate if the complaint is credible (para. 70). Likewise, Rheingans-Yoo allegedly offered to send over $3MM to another firm, Lumen, “on a handshake basis” without any paperwork “while we hammer out the full details” (para. 75). However, the funding was not actually sent until an agreement was signed (para. 78-79). A third investment was made on Rheingans-Yoo’s recommendation despite Beckstead describing it as “unattractive” for various reasons (para. 82-84).
The “donate, then invest” approach seemed to also be in play with a fourth firm called Riboscience. Paragraph 93 doesn’t sound great: “On June 29, 2022, Glenn emailed Rheingans-Yoo that “sufficient time ha[d] passed since the (most generous) donation to the Glenn Labs, that we can now proceed with your desired investment in Riboscience.”
Counts One to Five are similar to what I would expect most clawback complaints would look like. Note that they do not allege any misconduct by the recipients as part of the cause of action, as no such misconduct is necessary for a fraudulent conveyance action. You can also see the bankruptcy power to reach beyond the initial transferee to subsequent transferees under 11 USC 550 at play here. Most of the prefactory material is doubtless there in an attempt to cut off a defense from the defendant biosciences firms that they gave something of reasonably equivalent value in exchange for the investments.
In Count Eleven, the complaint alleges that “Rheingans-Yoo knew that the transactions with the Lifesciences Defendants did not provide and had virtually no prospect of providing Alameda with reasonably equivalent value, and that Bankman-Fried personally benefited from the transactions. Rheingans-Yoo thus knowingly assisted in and/or failed to prevent Bankman-Fried’s breaches of fiduciary duty to Alameda.” (para. 169). This allegedly harmed Alameda to the tune of $68.3MM. Elsewhere, the complaint alleges that ” [u]pon information and belief, Bankman-Fried and Rheingans-Yoo intended to benefit personally from any profits generated by any of these companies if they turned out to be successful and/or developed a successful product.” (para. 5). However, “upon information and belief” is lawyer-speak for “we’re speculating, or at least don’t have a clear factual basis for this allegation yet.”
In Count Twelve, the complaint alleges that “Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo knew that the transfer to PLS funded by FTX did not provide and had virtually no prospect of providing FTX with reasonably equivalent value, and that Bankman-Fried personally benefited from the transaction. Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo thus aided and abetted Bankman-Fried’s breaches of fiduciary duty to FTX.” (para. 174). This allegedly harmed FTX to the tune of $3.25MM.
In the end, the complaint doesn’t exactly make me think highly of anyone involved with FTX or the FTX Foundation. However, from my non-specialist eyes, I’m not seeing a slam dunk case for critical assertions about Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo’s knowledge in paras. 169 and 174.
Just want to say I appreciate your commentary over the past 9 months. Having someone with legal expertise and (what seems to me) a pretty even-handed and sensible perspective is a really valuable contribution.
Thanks for sharing this; I was originally confused by the complaint because I didn’t understand why a nonprofit making unprofitable investments would be cause for concern, but it sounds like your speculation is that the stuff about these being bad investments is included just to prevent the life sciences companies from claiming that the equity Latona received was of reasonably equivalent value and therefore they don’t have to give the money back?
That’s the main purpose of those allegations on my read.
A possible secondary purpose could be to imply something like: these ‘investments’ and ‘donations’ made so little sense that it’s implausible that they were motivated by legitimate charitable purposes. Therefore, the individual defendants must have known (or clearly should have known) there was something nefarious afoot like personally benefitting SBF.
That could be enough to get past a motion to dismiss, where the bar is fairly low (at that stage, the court basically has to accept all factual allegations as pled, and draw all plausible inferences in the plaintiff’s favor) and haul the defendants in for depositions under oath. As I mentioned, I found the complaint to be not particularly convincing in its characterization of the individual defendants’ knowledge—but to be fair to Sullivan & Cromwell, it’s not reasonable to expect a particularly strong case on alleged improper purpose before conducting depositions.
Do you have a take on whether we should read things into them not alleging that Beckstead/RY knew about FTX’s improper use of customer funds?
On the one hand: I assume that if they did have evidence here it would make their case much much stronger, and based on your comments about “upon information and belief” it sounds like they don’t need a very high evidentiary standard to make such an allegation. But on the other: maybe there’s some complex legal strategy I don’t understand which would make them not include this allegation even if they did have evidence.
The complaint only needs to be strong enough to get past a motion to dismiss for now, and it is fairly easy to amend a complaint if need be. There is some benefit to putting your best foot forward, but there are a number of plausible reasons one might not allege knowledge of fraud against depositors despite some evidence. Those reasons follow.
I should note that I personally thought—and still think—it very unlikely that any FTXFF staff knew about the customer fraud. Keeping one’s conspiracy information on a strict need-to-know basis is Being a Fraudster 101, and I can think of no reason why SBF and his co-conspirators would have concluded anyone at FTXFF had a need to know.
Unless they are much richer than charitable foundation officials tend to be, Beckstead and RY are very likely not the primary targets here. There are much bigger fish in this lawsuit and in the pond as a whole. Moreover, as a practical matter, I doubt the recovery against Beckstead and RY would be appreciably higher as a result of proving knowledge about the misuse of customer funds than “merely” proving an allegation that they aided and abetted SBF fleecing FTX (and for RY, Alameda). So the upside of making an allegation of customer-fraud knowledge seems more limited to me than might first appear.
Alleging that someone was basically in on the customer fraud[1]makes that the main story of the complaint and could take the narrative focus away from your primary targets—the biotech firms that actually have (or had) the money.
Judges are human. If one were going to allege that specific individuals were in on the fraud (when the judge knows that allegation wasn’t necessary to make in the complaint), they had best be fairly confident they are going to be able to connect on that allegation. Failure to do so would risk one’s credibility with a judge who will decide billions of dollars worth of other disputes in your case.
My guess is that this complaint has received priority because startups can burn money fast (and may be particularly incentivized to burn fast if they know a clawback suit, which they cannot withstand without some big risks paying off, is coming soon). It’s unlikely that fully investigating Beckstead and RY has been much of a priority.
If substantial evidence existed that a particular person at FTX or FTXFF knew about the fraud, that person would presumably be a significant criminal target. I believe FTX is cooperating with DOJ, and its lawyers would know even without DOJ telling them they should not unnecessarily disclose information that suggests someone is a criminal target. The judge knows the unstated rules too, and wouldn’t hold it against FTX’s lawyers for slow-playing information to avoid compromising a criminal investigation (but would probably be at least annoyed if they compromised one).
This is a weird case in which the plaintiffs probably have much more access to Beckstead and RY’s records than an average plaintiff would have at this stage, maybe more access than Beckstead and RY themselves have! They will need to turn over those records in discovery. However, I could see an argument for not giving defendants a roadmap as to what the plaintiffs already know, in order to potentially preserve some traps for the discovery process. Giving the defendants a roadmap could help them prepare for their interrogatories and depositions.
The government’s sentencing memorandum for SBF is here; it is seeking a sentence of 40-50 years.
As typical for DOJ in high-profile cases, it is well-written and well-done. I’m not just saying that because it makes many of the same points I identified in my earlier writeup of SBF’s memorandum. E.g., p. 8 (“doubling down” rather than walking away from the fraud); p. 43 (“paid in full” claim is highly misleading) [page cites to numbers at bottom of page, not to PDF page #].
EA-adjacent material: There’s a snarky reference to SBF’s charitable donations “(for which he still takes credit)” (p. 2) in the intro, and the expected hammering of SBF’s memo for taking credit for attempting to take credit for donations paid with customer money (p. 95). There’s a reference to SBF’s “idiosyncratic . . . beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value” (pp. 88-89). This leads to the one surprise theme (for me): the need to incapacitate SBF from committing additional crimes (pp. 87, 90). Per the feds, “the defendant believed and appears still to believe that it is rational and necessary for him to take great risks including imposing those risks on others, if he determines that it will serve what he personally deems a worthy project or goal,” which contributes to his future dangerousness (p. 89).
For predictors: Looking at sentences where the loss was > $100MM and the method was Ponzi/misappropriation/embezzlement, there’s a 20-year, two 30-years, a bunch of 40-years, three 50-years, and three 100+-years (pp. 96-97).
Interesting item: The government has gotten about $3.45MM back from political orgs, and the estate has gotten back ~$280K (pp. 108-09). The proposed forfeiture order lists recipients, and seems to tell us which ones returned monies to the government (Proposed Forfeiture Order, pp. 24-43).
Life Pro Tip: If you are arrested by the feds, do not subsequently write things in Google Docs that you don’t want the feds to bring up at your sentencing. Jotting down the idea that “SBF died for our sins” as some sort of PR idea (p. 88; source here) is particularly ill-advised.
My Take: In Judge Kaplan’s shoes, I would probably sentence at the high end of the government’s proposed range. Where the actual loss will likely be several billion, and the loss would have been even greater under many circumstances, I don’t think a consequence of less than two decades’ actual time in prison would provide adequate general deterrence—even where the balance of other factors was significantly mitigating. That would imply a sentence of ~25 years after a prompt guilty plea. Backsolving, that gets us a sentence of ~35 years without credit for a guilty plea.
But the balance of other factors is aggravating, not mitigating. Stealing from lots of ordinary people is worse than stealing from sophisticated investors. Outright stealing by someone in a fiduciary role is worse than accounting fraud to manipulate stock prices. We also need to adjust upward for SBF’s post-arrest conduct, including trying to hide money from the bankruptcy process, multiple attempts at witness tampering, and perjury on the stand. Stacking those factors would probably take me over 50 years, but like the government I don’t think a likely-death-in-prison sentence is necessary here.
I’d look at pp. 5-12 of the linked sentencing memo for customers, pp. 15-18 for investors/lenders for the government’s statement of the offense conduct. The jury merely utters guilty / not guilty on each count, it does not provide detailed findings of fact. Judge Kaplan heard all the evidence as he presided at trial, and can rely on his own factual findings at sentencing under a more-likely-than-not standard. Of course, that is just a summary; Ellison alone testified for ~3 days.
Basically, SBF & FTX falsely represented that the customer assets were segregated from FTX’s own assets and would not be used by FTX. Yet Alameda regularly took large sums of money out of accounts holding FTX customer funds, and the “allow negative” feature allowed it to borrow ~unlimited money as well. This was not limited to funds made available to customers through the margin lending program.
At various points discussed on pp. 9-11, SBF directed Alameda to “borrow” more money from FTX despite knowing it was underwater at the time. For instance, at one point SBF directed Ellison “to use FTX customer funds to repay loans” (her words), despite knowing that Alameda was $11B in the hole and was already “borrowing” $13B in customer funds (p. 11). About $4.5B more in customer funds was used to pay Alameda’s lenders as a result (p. 11). In short, I don’t think the narrative presented in the linked post is backed up by the trial evidence.
Judge Kaplan heard all the evidence as he presided at trial, and can rely on his own factual findings at sentencing under a more-likely-than-not standard
The document is written by the prosecution though, right? Not the judge.
Or are you saying that, since the judge ended up more or less agreeing with the prosecution, we can just trust the prosecution’s arguments?
Yes, that’s in the quick take. It was still (and may still be), in my view, the best source reasonably available. The jury doesn’t say anything other than guilty / not guilty to each count—where a conviction could be based on multiple theories, it doesn’t even tell us which one the jury bought. The sentencing judge would make factual findings at sentencing (then a future event) but only as necessary to sentence. Anything written by the defense would almost certainly be inconsistent with the jury’s verdict, so that leaves the prosecution.
Given that the USAO is a long-term player, knows that Judge Kaplan presided over the trial and the pre-trial motions, and knows that SBF could file a reply, it’s very unlikely it would puff the facts to more than a moderate extent. Probably the trial transcripts provide a more authoritative resource, but are too long to recommend to much of anyone.
Cool, I fully acknowledge that this is my naivete, but for what it’s worth I assumed that “The government’s sentencing memorandum” was a memo explaining the judge’s sentencing decision, not what the prosecution was requesting the judge to decide.
Good to know! This may be one of those interpretations that becomes more plausible due to an intervening event. (The quick take was posted well before the judge decided the sentence.)
I can’t think of any circumstances like this in which “the government” would mean the court rather than the government-as-a-party-before-the-court. But that could only be obvious to me because of professional background.
Pretty much everyone in the system agrees that the Guidelines tend to be too harsh for economic offenses, especially as the loss amount (as computed under the Guidelines) becomes the main driver of the Guidelines figure.
As for the rest, I haven’t seen a transcript of Judge Kaplan’s sentencing remarks. The federal system gives very broad discretion to the sentencing judge (unless there is a mandatory minimum, which there wasn’t here). So while we can conclude that Judge Kaplan believed a 25-year sentence was “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to achieve the purposes of sentencing, I don’t know why he believed that.
On the first page of the intro, we get some quotes about SBF’s philanthropy. On the next, we are told he “lived a very modest life” and that any reports of extravagance are fabrications. [N.B.: All page citations are to the typed numbers at the bottom, not to the PDF page number.]
For the forecasters: based on Guidelines calculations in the pre-sentence report (PSR) by Probation, the Guidelines range is 110 years (would be life, but is capped at the statutory max). Probation recommended 100 years. PSRs are sealed, so we’ll never see the full rationale on that. The average fraud defendant with a maxed-out offense level, no criminal history, and no special cooperation credit receives a sentence of 283 months.
The first part of the memo is about the (now advisory) Sentencing Guidelines used in federal court. The major argument is that there should be no upward adjustment for loss because everyone is probably getting all their money back. Courts have traditionally looked at the greater of actual or “intended” loss, but the memo argues that isn’t correct after a recent Supreme Court decision.
As a factual matter, I’m skeptical that the actual loss is $0, especially where much of the improvement is due to increases in the crypto market that customers would have otherwise benefitted from directly. Plus everyone getting money back (including investors who were defrauded) is far from a certain outcome, the appellate courts have been deferential to best-guess loss calculations, and the final Guidelines range would not materially change if the loss amount were (say) $25MM. If I’m the district judge here, I’d probably include some specific statements and findings in my sentencing monologue in an attempt to insulate this issue from appeal. Such as: I’d impose the same sentence no matter what the Guidelines said, because $0 dramatically understates the offense severity and $10B overstates it.
There are a few places in which the argument ventures into tone-deaf waters. The argument that SBF wasn’t in a position of public or private trust (p. 25-26) seems awfully weak and ill-advised to my eyes. The discussion of possible equity-holder losses (pp. 20-21) also strikes me as dismissive at points. No, equity holders don’t get a money-back guarantee, but they are entitled to not be lied to when deciding where to invest.
The second half involves a discussion of the so-called 3553 factors that a court must consider in determining a sentence that is sufficient, but not greater than necessary. Pages 41-42 discuss Peter Singer and earning to give, while pages 46-50 continue on about SBF’s philanthropy (including a specific reference to GWWC and link to the pledger list on page 46).
Throughout the memo, the defense asserts that FTX was different from various other schemes that were fraudulent from day one (e.g., p. 56). My understanding is that the misuse of customer funds started pretty early in FTX’s history, so I don’t give this much weight. The memo asserts that SBF was less culpable than various comparators, ranging from Madoff himself (150 years) to Elizabeth Holmes (135 months) (pp. 73-80). The bottom-line request is for a sentence of 63-78 months, which is the Guidelines range if one accepts the loss amount as $0 (p. 89).
[Caution: The remainder of this post contains more opinion-laden commentary than what has preceded it!]
I generally find the 3553 discussion unpersuasive. The section on “remorse” (pp. 55-56) rings hollow to me, although this is an unavoidable consequence of SBF’s trial litigation choices. There is “remorse” that people were injured and impliedly that SBF made various errors in judgment, but there isn’t any acknowledgment of wrongdoing. One sentence of note to this audience: “Sam is simply devastated that the advice, mentorship, and funding that he has given to the animal welfare, global poverty, and pandemic prevention movements does not begin to counteract the damage done to them by virtue of their association with him.” (p. 55).
I find the discussion of the FTX Foundation to be jarring, such as “Ultimately, the FTX Foundation donated roughly $150 million to charities working on issues such as pandemic prevention, animal welfare, and funding anti-malarial mosquito netting in Africa.” (p. 57). Attempting to take credit for sending some of the money you took from customers to charity takes a lot of nerve!
Although the memo asserts that SBF’s neurodiversity makes him “uniquely vulnerable” in prison (p. 58), the unfortunate truth is that many convicted criminals have characteristics that make successfully adapting to prison life more difficult than for the average person (e.g., severe mental illness, unusually low intelligence). So I’m not convinced by the memo that he would face an atypical burden that would warrant serious consideration in sentencing.
Although I certainly can’t fault counsel for pointing to SBF’s positive characteristics, I’m sure Judge Kaplan knows that many of his opportunities to legibly display these characteristics have been enabled by privilege that most people being sentenced in federal court do not have.
I’m also not generally convinced by the arguments about general deterrence. In abbreviated form, the argument is that running SBF through the ringer and exposing him to public disgrace is strong enough that a lower sentence (and the inevitable lifetime public stigma) suffices to deter other would-be fraudsters. See pp. 66-67. And there’s good evidence that severity of punishment is relatively less important in deterrence.
However, if a tough sentence is otherwise just, I don’t think we need a high probability of deterrent effect for an extremely serious offense for extended incarceration to be worth it. Crypto scams are common, and as a practical matter it is difficult to increase certainty and speed of punishment because so much of the problematic conduct happens outside the U.S. So severity is the lever the government has. Moreover, discounts for offenders who have a lot to lose (because they are wealthy already) and/or are seen as having more future productive value seem backward as far as moral desert.
Finally, I think there’s potentially value in severity deterrence of someone already committing fraud; if the punishment level is basically maxed out at the $500M customer money you’ve already put at risk, there is no reason (other than an increased risk of detection) not to put $5B at risk. As the saying goes, “might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” as the penalty for ovine theft was death either way.
Defense recommendations on sentencing are generally unrealistic in cases without specific types of plea deal. This one is no different. Also, the sentencing discussion will sound extremely harsh to at least non-US readers . . . but that’s the situation in the US and especially in the federal system.
I’d note that SBF’s post-arrest decisions will likely have triggered a substantial portion of his sentence. Much has been written about the US “trial penalty,” and it is often a problem. However, I don’t think a discount of ~25-33% for a prompt guilty plea, as implied by the Guidelines for most offenses (also by the guidelines used in England and Wales) is penologically unjustified or coercive. Instead of that, SBF’s sentence is likely to be higher because of multiple attempts at witness tampering and evasive, incredible testimony on the stand. So he could be looking at ~double the sentence he would be facing if he had pled guilty.
He likely could not have gotten the kind of credit for cooperation his co-conspirators received (a “5K.1”) because there was no other big fish to rat out. Providing 5K.1 cooperation often reduces sentences by a lot, in my opinion often too much. Given the 5K.1 cooperation and the lesser role, one must exercise caution in using co-conspirator sentences to estimate what SBF would have received if he had promptly accepted responsibility.
Finally, I’d view any sentence over ~60 years as de facto life and chosen more for symbolic purposes than to actually increase punishment. Currently, one can receive a ~15% discount for decent behavior in prison, and can potentially serve ~25-33% of the sentence in a halfway house or the like for participating in programs under the First Step Act. It’s hard to predict what the next few decades will bring as far as sentencing policy, but the recent trend has been toward expanding the possibilities for early release. So I’d estimate that SBF will actually serve ~75% of his sentence, and probably some portion of it outside of a prison.
The Met (a major art museum in NYC) is returning $550K in FTX-linked donations; article below includes link to the court filing. 100% return, donations were outside of 90 days. This is the first court filing of this nature I’m aware of, although I haven’t been watching comprehensively.
A smart move for the Met, I think. I doubt it had any viable defenses, it clearly has $550K to return without causing any hardship, that’s enough money for the FTX estate to litigate over, and it avoids bad PR by agreeing to turn 100% of the money over without litigation. Perhaps it could have negotiated a small discount, but saving $50K or whatever just wouldn’t have been worth it in light of PR/optics concerns. (Plus, I think the Met was very likely obliged to return the whole $550K from an ethical perspective anyway . . . . { edit: perhaps with a small deduction for its legal expenses })
I would prefer that the next topic move away from financial allocation between cause areas, so maybe something like:
There are 100 young, smart, flexible recent university graduates who are open to ~any kind of work. What is the optimal allocation of those graduates between object-level work, meta work, earning to give, or something else?
Two advantages of these sorts of topics, vis-a-vis a financial cause-prio debate:
A. I think these kinds of issues are generally more likely to be action-relevant for Forum users. Even I won a billion-dollar lottery prize and established a trust to give $50MM to effective animal welfare charities, the net effect on cause prio might be far less than $50MM because OP might reduce its spend by almost that amount. While there are niches in which this effect is absent or less pronounced, structuring a debate week with broad participation around them may be challenging.
B. These kinds of issues should be more accessible to those from a variety of cause perspectives. For various reasons, the last Debate Week was set up to have a predominant focus on a single cause area (AW). Cf.this discussion. That’s not a bad thing, but I don’t think all or most Weeks should be set up like that. Other questions may not have this effect—for instance, I expect that the answers to questions 1 & 2 would differ substantially due to cause prio. So there’s value in authoring discussion of these questions from a GH perspective, from an AW perspective, from a GCR perspective, and so on.[2]
More generally, it might be helpful to plan a Debate Season well in advance—a “season” of (e.g.) one week each on a topic that is either specifically within a major cause area or for which it is expected to predominate, plus one or more cause prio questions, plus one or more cross-cutting questions that are not explicitly cause prio questions.
From a voting perspective, this could be facilitated by optionally allowing the voter to color their dot if their answer was based primarily on a consideration of a specific cause area, allowing a visual representation of how cause prio is a crux on these issues.
Thanks for thinking about this Jason! Lots of good ideas here.
FWIW financial allocation was an attempt to get a more precise debate after several users reported the “more of a priority” framing of the AI Welfare debate as being a bit confusing.
I think it’s generally nice to be tracking something relatively unified along the X axis, but that could just be strength of agreement, as long as users agree on the meaning of the debate statement.
The season idea is cool, though I’d probably prefer to do a more spaced out season, with the debates at very least a few weeks apart. Some authors might want to contribute to multiple debates, and writing a post a week is a bit of a large ask. It’d be great to have the topics published in advance though, so that people can start thinking earlier.
Yeah, I definitely see the appeal to financial-allocation framings. I think some of my reaction is that I read the AI Welfare question as substantially about financial allocation as well. So I am more about moving away from a perceived trendline rather than objecting to financial allocation as part of a mix of topic types.
I also agree with a spaced-out season; week after week of Debates in a row would be exhausting! The season concept is more a recognition that—like matchup pairs in a sports league—individual Debate Weeks are very hard to balance. Zooming out to the season level helps with that—the NFL can balance out (to some extent) who gets the good matchups, the primetime TV slots, the more competent referees,[1] etc. It can also try to balance the demands on each team—for instance, if it schedules a team to play in London, it usually balances that by giving them the next week off. So picking the right order could minimize the odds that a particular person would want to write major posts for successive Weeks.
If we are committed to desktop-only voting anyway, I wonder if a 2-D response grid system (as opposed to points on a line) would allow tracking responses on two dimensions and thus a bit more complexity in posed questions. I initially conceived question 1 as ~ “more people should do EtG” and it could move back toward those roots if needed. Relatedly, I am undecided on how tightly I think the poll question has to cover the scope of the Debate Week vs. focusing on a portion of the Debate Week topic for operationalization purposes.
For the two specific topics you recommended, people’s answers could be pretty specific to the cause area. That might be fine, but worth flagging. Could be best for people to specify the cause they’re speaking for, or make the debate week cause-specific.
A second interim report has been filed by the FTX debtor-in-possession here, with some potentially relevant information. The report explains how FTX used accounts into which customers deposited money, as well as other accounts with commingled funds, to conduct various activities. The report is very much a birds-eye view, so only describes examples:
The FTX Foundation grants were funded via transfers from a variety of bank accounts, including North Dimension-8738 and Alameda-4456 (Primary Deposit Accounts), as well as Alameda-4464 and FTX Trading-9018, all of which contained commingled customer and corporate funds. The FTX Foundation used these funds to make grants to individuals and nonprofits.
In addition to receiving transfers of commingled funds, the FTX Foundation also regularly directed the payment of “grants” directly from FTX Group bank accounts that held commingled customer and corporate funds. For example, on May 19, 2022, the FTX Foundation authorized a $300,000 grant to an individual to “[w]rite a book about how to figure out what humans’ utility function is (are),” and transferred the funds to this individual from North Dimension-8738, a Primary Deposit Account. On June 30, 2022, the FTX Foundation funded a $400,000 grant to an entity that posted animated videos on YouTube related to “rationalist and [Effective Altruism] material,” again causing the funds to be wired directly from North Dimension-8738, a Primary Deposit Account.
This was an identical twin study in which one twin went vegan for eight weeks, and the other didn’t. Nice results on some cardiometabolic lab values (e.g., LDL-C) even though the non-vegan twin was also upping their game nutritionally. I don’t think the fact that vegan diets generally improve cardiometabolic health is exactly fresh news, but I find the study design to be unusually legible for nutritional research.
I had written up what I learned as a Manifund micrograntor a few months ago, but have never gotten around to polishing that for publication. Still, I think those reactions could be useful for people in the EA Community Choice program now. You’ve got the same basic pattern of a bunch of inexperienced grantmakers with a few hundred bucks to spend each and ~40-50 projects to look at quickly. I’m going to post those without much editing, since the program is fairly short. A few points are specific to the types of proposals that were in the microgranting experiment (which came from the ACX program).
General Feedback for Grant Applicants [from ACX Microgrants Experience]
Caution: This feedback is based on a single micrograntor’s experience. It may be much less applicable to other contexts—e.g., those involving larger grantors, grantors who do not need to evaluate a large number of proposals in a limited amount of time, or grantors who are in a position to fund a significant percentage of grants reviewed. I had pre-committed to myself that I would look at every single proposal unless the title convinced me that it was way too technical for me to understand. This probably affected my experience, and was done more for educational / information value reasons than anything else.
If you have a longer proposal, please start with an executive summary, limited to ~ 300 words. You may get only 2-3 minutes on an initial screen, maybe even less.
After getting a sense of the basic contours of the proposal, I found myself with a decent sense of where the weaker points probably were and wanted to see if these were clear dealbreakers in an efficient manner. Please be sure to red-team your proposal and address the weak points!
Use shorter paragraphs with titles or other clear, skimmable signals. As per above, I need to be able to quickly find your discussion on specific points.
One recurrent weakness involved an unclear theory of impact that I had to infer from the proposal. It is usually helpful to explicitly lay out what the theory of impact is. In particular, there were several proposals with a theory of impact of ~ “I publish something, then impact somehow.” This does work sometimes, but most academic publications end up with ~0 impact. I found myself wanting more specific information about why there’s a reasonable chance that won’t happen to the applicant’s publication.
I would not assume that I know the importance of various signals of quality in your field. For example, if Professor Smith is highly regarded (such that his invitation to work with you is a good signal), how can you succinctly show—rather than just tell—me that?
I would like to see a CV, resume, 1-2 page bio, etc. linked for most applicants. An organizational/project website helps too, if you have one.
Please be realistic when projecting the likelihood of success on various outcomes. If I think they are unrealistic, I would generally assume you are biting off more than you think you are and/or are overselling the project. I recall one project with a 1-2% chance of its high-level impact; I took that as a positive signal because it was realistic.
If there is some real thought and/or data behind an estimate that may look optimistic, I’d suggest showing it (e.g., linking to a Google doc to avoid cluttering up the main proposal page).
In some cases, I’d want to hear about success or lack thereof with other funders—this was more common in biomedical research or projects that seemed potentially commercializable. Given that decent funding exists in those areas, I’d rather you get it if possible and leave the open / unrestricted charitable funding for projects with no good alternative. If you can’t get it, then I have to consider whether I have a good enough reason to override the judgment of people who know a whole lot more about the subject area than I do. I’m open to the possibility that I should, but I’ll need convincing. This is doubly true if your theory of impact requires non-EA/non-Manifund funding shortly after the seed stage. In those cases, I need some indication of how likely you are to get that funding even if your seed stage goes well.
One challenge of fundraising on Manifund is that you don’t know how much you will be offered. In many cases, reading about the $50K version of the project gives me very little information about what would happen with the minimum amount specified to proceed (which was often 10% or less than the target). In several cases, I thought the project was clearly not viable at or near the stated minimum—and I ruled out the possibility of making a small signalling offer because I didn’t want to fund the project at a low level.
I tended to value “sweat equity” or “skin in the game” in which the person seeking the grant could show prior investment of their own time and/or resources into earlier stages of the project. I recognize that this is not exactly fair to certain applicants, but I find it a costly and thus valuable signal of the prospective grantee’s commitment to and valuation of the proposed work. In addition, the presence of the applicant’s volunteer time and/or resources can create a multiplier effect by which the grant unlocks the value of that time and/or those resources. So to the extent that an applicant can show these factors, I think they are worth mentioning,
Hyperlinks are your friend—you can link to a deeper discussion of something if I’m interested in reading more without bogging the proposal down in details if I’m not.
After all the text I went through in rapid fashion, I would have welcomed a good infographic or two.
Dang, I wish I’d read this before I put in my Manifund application—and before I chucked in some money towards other Manifund proposals. This is very insightful. I hope to participate in more Manifund funding efforts, and hope to take your advice to heart going forward.
FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I’ve seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).
I’m personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But—although I haven’t dug under the hood too much—FarmKind’s calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.
Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering).
In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind’s for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much “credit” to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I’ve put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind’s work than my personal musings about offsets.
Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that’s fine! But in an offset situation, I don’t think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that will cost other consumers $10, and then claim all the impact myself for offset purposes. I would have just pushed most of the costs of offsetting my actions onto other people. Treating financial costs to other consumers as collateral damage doesn’t strike me as consistent with impartiality where I am also participating in the system as a consumer. (I will make an exception for financial costs imposed on Big Ag that it cannot effectively pass on to consumers.)
There’s also a tendency to give all (or at least too much) of the moral credit to the donor, as if donating money were the only input to successful action. It seems that some of the credit should go to people who work at animal-welfare organizations, even non-EA ones. Frankly, corporate campaigns wouldn’t work too well if the public didn’t care at all and wouldn’t punish corporations that refused to make welfare commitments. As with third-party financial costs, I think there is a difference in how we should think about these things when deciding whether to donate and when thinking about how much offset credit we can take.
Some orgs have limited room for more funding compared to the number of omnivorous consumers out there. I’d be uneasy with publishing an offset estimate that would be woefully inadequate if more than a tiny number of people chose to offset. There’s likely to always be a limit on the number of individuals who can effectively offset, but adding orgs with room for more funding (e.g., those in the cultured meat space) should significantly increase that number.
In addition to philosophical concerns about offsetting in general, I sense two practical concerns flowing more specifically from low figures:
The idea that an omnivore’s involvement in the factory-farming system can be offset for (e.g.) a nickel a day risks trivializing the magnitude of the harm. Something that can be fixed for that amount doesn’t feel like a big problem.
It is unvirtuous to derive net benefit from the factory-farming system. If you’re saving $25/month on your food spend due to factory farming’s existence, and then kicking back $1 to offset, you are still retaining 96% of the financial benefit of the system. I don’t think the net benefit has to be calculated as the difference between what non-negative-welfare products would cost today and what one’s actual spend is. I would be somewhat more lenient and characterize it as the difference between what one spends today and what one would need to spend for the same consumption in a world where non-negative-welfare products were the norm.
I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but was a bit surprised to find zero EA organizations registered with the Combined Federal Campaign, the US federal government employee charitable donation drive. I think the federal HR office (“OPM”) is exaggerating a bit when it calls the CFC “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign,” but it is true that there are several million federal employees out there. Admittedly, CFC numbers are down over the last few years, but there are still about 80K donors a year.
There are some user fees, red tape, and overhead costs, meaning the CFC is not a great way to move a lot of money. But it might be worthwhile for certain organizations with potentially broader appeal (e.g., AMF, GiveWell) to experiment with an application as a form of low-cost advertising and see if they get (m)any bites. I’m less confident in that after seeing the decline in CFC participation over the last six years. And maybe perhaps some orgs have done so in past years and found out it wasn’t effective enough for the investment.
I see that IPA (which is on the EA organization list) is registered. Maybe organizations considering going through this process should ask IPA how it’s worked out so far.
Is it normal for nonprofits to initiate this? Rather than employees of the Federal gov’t who are invested? Most employee giving programs I’m aware of have primarily employee-initiated ways of adding charities.
I started donations today to two smaller EA nonprofits, but noticed that both had seemed to set up donation platforms in a more expensive way than necessary. I wrote both organizations (which I won’t name) and will complete donations to both. But I thought it was worth noting that optimizing fees could be low-hanging fruit. In addition to saving a few percent of donations, donors really don’t like the idea that a non-trivial chunk of their donations will be consumed by credit card companies and platforms.
Some options to consider in the US for organizations with 501(c)(3) status:
Meta doesn’t charge platform fees or credit card fees for donations made in Facebook fundraisers or through Meta Pay, whatever that is. I believe those route through the Network for Good DAF. A small nonprofit I advise (which is not part of the EA community) keeps a link to a current Facebook fundraiser on its homepage for exactly this reason.
Paypal doesn’t charge platform or card fees for donations made to its DAF through its Giving Fund, which routes funds through a DAF into the charity’s coffers. TLYCS is set up with them, for instance. My understanding is that, even if you don’t want to go that route, Paypal rates are somewhat lower for charities than the default rates if you get that set up.
I am less confident in—and haven’t recently researched—the best solution for donors who don’t want to go through Meta or Paypal. Donorbox is generally 2.3% for ACH transactions, 3.7% for cards, so that is worth checking as a benchmark against whatever an organization is using.
Although I’m sure various platforms offer various advantages to organizations and donors, my guess is that many EAs will be drawn to methods that reduce/eliminate fees if those do not involve any additional marginal work for the organization. My own reaction as a donor is to be impressed/pleased when an organization displays awareness about how to minimize transaction costs. (I am aware that I should be considering any extra cost to the organization, e.g., from handling paper checks, but it’s not obvious to me that there would be any from the three options listed above.)
So even if an organization decides to use a more expensive platform on its website for features or other reasons, it may still make sense to sign up for something more efficient as a secondary pathway and promote that where appropriate (e.g., on this forum during giving season).
Strong upvoted mainly to incentivise accompanying the pointing out of a potential problem with i) acknowledgement of counter-considerations and ideally ii) some contribution to the solution.
Much to my surprise, the SBF trial went ahead—and on time!
I’ve been mostly absent the last few months due to a personal/family situation, but one general reflection:
Much has been said about the importance of evaluating character in the wake of the FTX collapse. I’d also point out the importance of evaluating consistency of good judgment. From the outside perspective (but as a lawyer), SBF’s choices as a criminal defendant appear to reflect quite poor judgment.[1] I’d characterize it as well below average for college-educated defendants who are represented by counsel with enough resources to do a good job. I am less confident that this trend toward making a number of bad judgments could have been detected earlier, but I’d suggest that many people who make really bad decisions have a detectable history of making bad decisions in the past.
All that is to suggest that the community might want to screen for erratic judgment in addition to character and trustworthiness (C&T). Assessing C&T is hard; just ask any intelligence agency—which has polygraphs, FBI agents, intelligence information, and so forth that EA will never have. There are going to be cases in which the result is “mixed,” “middling,” or “not enough information to have decent error bars.” Assessing consistency of good judgment isn’t easy either, but at least we are trying to measure two things rather than just one.
I’d suggest that the combination of problematic character and a lack of consistent good judgment may be significantly more dangerous than either alone. I’m reminded of reports that 20% of business leaders may have traits associated with psychopathy. I’m not endorsing that statistic, and not equating untrustworthiness with psychopathy.
My thesis, rather, is that untrustworthy people who also display a lack of consistent good judgment may be particularly risky in synergistic ways. Thus, it may be prudent to treat a C&T rating of “mixed,” “middling,” or “not enough information” with a good-judgment rating of “poor” or even “mixed/middling” much the same as a C&T rating of “poor” as far as risk tolerance.
I can understand the decision not to plead guilty, especially since it sounds like it would have been a blind plea rather than a plea bargain. I would have made a blind plea in his shoes, but at least understand why he didn’t. And it’s hard to imagine a viable defense here that didn’t include taking the stand. But other stuff—the substack, personally contacting a witness, using a VPN, leaking derogatory information about a witness to the Times—is hard to justify as sound strategy, much less some galaxy-brained EV+ plan.
Do you have thoughts on how one might screen for “erratic judgment”? In particular: are there ways of screening for this which wouldn’t be well correlated with screens hiring managers already normally do?
I could imagine reference checks turning some of this up, for example, but reference checks are pretty standard thing that managers do anyway.
On “AI welfare should be an EA priority,” approximately how much EA talent/funding is “unrestricted”?
If, say, only 10% is unrestricted, 5% of that would be 0.5% of all EA talent/funding. The question then would be, roughly: should AI welfare be even a minor/non-trivial EA cause area? If 90% is unrestricted, then a “priority” would be 4.5% of all EA talent/funding = ~ should AI welfare be a considerable EA cause area?
The difference between those statements would influence where I placed on the agree-disagree continuum.
Last night, I quickly thumbed through the websites (and Ambitious Impact listings) of some smaller charities as I started thinking about my end of year giving plans.
I’d encourage smaller orgs to refer to something on their website dated within the past few months—an event, a dated blog post, etc. -- that the median website visitor will ~quickly see. This is particularly true if the website refers to more distant events, has older-dated blog posts, etc. Without some indicator of freshness, the visitor may be left uncertain whether the org is still meaningfully active and potentially worth funding. After all, the closure rate for small, new orgs is not low.
[Caveats: the thumbing was on mobile, while taking a bath, and at the end of a difficult day, so there could easily have been misses on my part]
Hot take: For posts not involving breaking news that may benefit from cooler reflection, the Forum should trial allowing a poster to petition the mods for a quiet period of 1 to 7 days before comments are allowed. This would need to be done pre-posting and a header would need to appear at the top of the post. For example, I think discussion on the Doing EA Better post would have benefitted from a quiet period.
I’m hesitant to extend the trial to breaking news because the risk of the delay being viewed as mods cutting off discussion is higher, and because I think people have a stronger interest in being able to promptly discuss stuff that happens externally to the Forum. Finally, no one “owns” breaking news, and the requirement for both the post author + a mod to concur is a safeguard against erroneous imposition of quiet periods.
I have thought about this, but concluded it had a big problem, which is commenters would just write their own top-level posts in response (rather than giving the original post a huge first mover advantage). I don’t think recent drama would have been improved by a proliferation of top-levels.
(Epistemic status: rather uncertain and tentative)
In the non-EA world, I tend to view special interest groups with some skepticism, and cheap/performative signaling by individuals with even more skepticism. But maybe EA needs a little more of both when it comes to “governance/internal politics” (G/IP) matters.
The norm here seems to be that, if you’re not happy about something, you should write a post—or at least a long substantive comment—about that. In other words, EA norms point toward relatively direct, high-involvement G/IP engagement compared to (e.g.) voting in a democratic republic. There’s a lot to be said for EA’s norms, especially as applied to more object-level disagreements. But there are also some real downsides, which I think were somewhat on display during the Manifest discussions:
Individuals with strong feelings on an issue are disproportionately likely to find high-cost methods of engagement worth using. This is a double-edged sword, as it will usually make the discussion a warped reflection of overall community sentiment. Outlier views will seem more prominent, while moderate views may be less likely to be expressed compared to their prevalence in the population.
High-cost engagement is . . . costly, and takes away from other things people might be writing about (or doing off-Forum). In the major “drama” threads, I think there comes a point at which no real progress is being made but we keep posting.
In contrast, special interest groups can be a more efficient way of developing norms and influencing “policy.” Advocacy organizations (e.g., gun-rights/gun-control groups in the US) can make more sophisticated arguments than individual members would have time to prepare. People who want to promote those positions can give time and resources to the advocacy organization, as well as publicly or privately endorsing the group by joining. This is low to moderate cost engagement, but it allows the resulting G/IP matter to reflect the overall community viewpoint more accurately than a world in which relatively high-cost engagement predominates. Although it doesn’t happen in electoral politics, one could imagine a world in which a few champions for each side conducted more of a dialogue than the free-for-all that is a hot Forum comment section.
Moreover, even cheap/performative signaling has its uses from a psychological perspective. People tend to feel better if they feel they’ve had a reasonable chance to express their views. Many have a felt need to distance themselves from things in their community that they find problematic—whether that be what they perceive as attempted censorship or as racism. I think that can be a relatively healthy way of reducing ~ cognitive dissonance between “X is not in accord with my values” and “I perceive that people in my community are doing X / that many in my community support X.”
In many cases, it seems desirable to enable this benefit at minimal cost. I submit that the major problem with people posting the meme de jour on their Meta profile / on X is that they think that doing so has somehow accomplished much of anything external to them. The inaccurate belief that posting something to your friends actually does something to combat the effects of global poverty can reduce the motivation to actually do something meaningful like donate to an effective charity. But if there is no effective action for the individual to take (e.g., because the Forum thread on the controversial topic has reached the point of no further meaningful progress being made), then this substitution effect may be good. Better that the person do something cheap and externally ineffective than something expensive and internally ineffective.
Random thoughts on grants (inspired by some recent posts):
Do (m)any grantmakers offer participation grants for certain unsuccessful grant applicants who submitted grants in good faith, to (help) defray the time and expense of applying? I briefly floated this idea at the end of a discussion about grants in medium-income countries, and I think it ties into a recent discussion about compensating applications for work trials to some extent.The grant-seeker and the grant-maker are semi-cooperatively producing a joint product of sorts—a good grant portfolio. Both incur costs to make that product happen. It seems that common practice is that the grant-seeker and the grant-maker both bear their own costs for unsuccessful grants, but I can’t think of any a priori reason that should be case vs. a potentially more satisfactory allocation of the burden.
And in the recent discussion about work tests, the consensus was that job applicants should be (and generally were) compensated for trial tasks that took a few hours—even though many of those tasks are standardized and thus do not have any substantive value for the would-be employer. Rather, they only have value to the semi-cooperative joint product of hiring the best employee. Even though both candidate and employer benefit from that process, we have (correctly, in my view) decided that the employer should bear more of the costs of the matching process by compensating the candidate for work trials.
Providing some minimal compensation for most unsuccessful applicants would presumably encourage more grant applications among the group to whom the offer was extended. The initial suggestion was to presumptively give such compensation to applicants from low/middle-income countries for various reasons, but one could imagine other objectives for selectively boosting applications (e.g., trying to encourage more applications among groups underrepresented in EA).
In my field (law), the court can kick out your case-initating document in a few different ways. That can include “with prejudice” (i.e., there is a fatal flaw that you can’t fix), “without prejudice” (i.e., you may be able to fix the weakness and can try again), or without prejudice to refiling after a certain event (e.g., you didn’t follow the proper process at the administrative agency but can come back after you complete those). For grantmakers who don’t want to offer more complete feedback, even knowing which of those categories a rejection generally falls into would be helpful, e.g.:
We just don’t think this is a viable idea absent a significant change in circumstances. You should consider moving on to another one.
We don’t think you are the right person for this idea. You should consider moving on to another one.
We think you need more experience. Consider reapplying once you have it.
There’s nothing wrong with this grant proposal, it just didn’t quite clear the funding bar this year (although it might have in prior years and might in future years).
Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
I have five nieces and nephews (ages ~7-14) who I don’t see that often. They are old enough to understand helping others, and I’d like to start slowly nudging them in that direction (and with an effective bent) this holiday season. I don’t think any (or at least most) of them would really “get” a charitable gift in their honor without some sort of tangible object that might serve as a prompt to remember the gift. Of course, I would give such a gift in addition to a gift at the normative level for uncle-to-nibling gifts; having the expection of a desired toy replaced with a charitable gift would probably hurt my objective. It would very likely be in global health/development to make it palatable to the parents.
I’m aware of gift catalogs like this one from World Vision that offer various small items in exchange for a donation. And of course I could make the donation and the purchase separately. This kind of exercise is easier to do when you can make some sort of (possibly nebulous) connection between the donation and the item (e.g., here is an item made by the group of disadvantaged people who are helped by the donation). But effective programs are harder to convey in objects than give someone a cow, get a cow ornament for your holiday tree.
Any recommendations? (Also fine to say that my theory of change here is misguided, or that this just isn’t workable.)
People have given me Christmas gifts like this before! Most memorable were a colorful bracelet that was from an anti-malaria donation, and lottery-style scratch cards where the “wins” go to charity. I was very thankful for both, but also old enough to already care about the charity part.
Do your niblings have any strong moral opinions? At 14, at least, I was definitely old enough to have a couple moral/political opinions. I’m not sure contributing to a 14 y/o’s pet cause is particularly directly effective (even by the cause-preferences of their future-self). However, it could be a) show you know them well enough to know what they care about and b) demonstrate that a person can use resources to have an impact in the real world.
If they volunteer somewhere they care about, you could do a split donation; 50% to the place they volunteer so they can (hopefully) see the impact, and 50% to a related effective charity. Like 50% to a local hospital they volunteer at, at 50% to an effective global health org.
I’ve heard some younger kids go through vegetarian phases, so if that’s true of any of your niblings maybe something like a cute stuffed animal (highland cow?) that also donates to protecting that animal? Though hopefully you know their parents well enough that you won’t get in trouble if the kid ends up less willing to eat steak.
If they don’t have strong opinions yet but are curious about a topic, can you get them a book? For example, if the 14 y/o loves computers, you could get them something AI related. I really liked Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in high school, even though a lot of it went over my head. Less-technical high schoolers might prefer a book of philosophy, psychology, or fiction. (I know very little about kids younger than high school, but surely there are equivalents!)
Otherwise if you’re just going to get a physical gift from donating to a charity that your niblings don’t particularly care about, I’d prioritize that object also being something they would like independently of the donation. (ex. a cool bracelet they can wear to school, a classy notebook if they like to write, whatever)
Today’s shower thought: When strong downvoting a post, one should be required to specify a reason for the strong downvote (either from a list, or through text entry if no pre-made reason fits). These reasons should be publicly displayed, but not linked to individual voters. [Alternative: They should be displayed to the commenter who is being downvoted only.] This is not intended to apply to strong disagreevotes.
Getting downvoted isn’t fun, and I’ve seen a number of follow-up comments recently along the lines of “why am I being downvoted for this?” Right now, we generally don’t provide any meaningful feedback for people who are being downvoted. In some cases (including some where I didn’t vote at all), I’ve tried to provide feedback—e.g., that particular language could be seen as “premature and unfriendly without allowing [an organization] time for a response”—which I hope has been sometimes helpful. But I’m wondering whether there is a broader way to give people some feedback.
The other reason that I think a reasons-giving requirement might make sense is that it serves as a tiny stop-and-think moment. It interrupts the all-too-human tendency to reach for the strong-downvote icon when one viscerally disagrees with a post, and reminds the user what the generally appropriate reason for strong downvotes are.
Does anyone have a sense of the volume of EA donations made to funds in a non-tax-advantaged way?
I see GWWC’s recommendation to generally give to funds even if not tax-advantaged, but I wonder if there is a better solution around the problem for everyone other than the government—at least in Global Health & Development. (I don’t know other cause areas well enough to opine.)
AMF is tax-deductible in a lot of places. All GWWC recommended GH&D funds are ultimately powered by GiveWell at their core. Even All Grants is expected to send 75% to one of the four top charities. Given AMF’s status as a GiveWell top charity, it’s safe to say that a lot of money will flow through GiveWell to AMF.
It would seem advantageous to have a simple way in which a donor could tell GiveWell and AMF: “I have $1000 that I would like to give to GiveWell Top Charities Fund (or whatever), but I am hereby giving it directly to AMF for tax reasons rather than only being able to afford $700 to GiveWell. Please compensate.” GiveWell could then treat (say) $850 of those monies as akin to an advance grant payment to AMF, and reduce a future grant by that amount. (Alternatively, if it were seen as important for the money to go only to GiveWell-endorsed efforts, AMF could agree to park $850 of the donation in a safe investment until GiveWell “grants” that money as part of its normal grants process.)
The end result is that AMF is $150 better off than if the donor had given directly to GiveWell, as it received $1000 from the donor instead of $850 from GiveWell. The GiveWell fund is $150 better off too—it lost a $700 contribution from the donor but got “credited” for an $850 grant to AMF, leaving $150 more to distribute to other organizations than in the donor-to-GiveWell scenario.
Whether the operations setup would be worthwhile depends on amount of tax-disadvantaged monies flowing into the GH&D funds.
(I am aware of the donation swap and actually have some active offers to swap at the moment to help out non-US donors. However, the approach above doesn’t require finding compatible counterparties, and allows money flows to ultimately track the fund’s allocation that is what is desired. My example has an even split of the “surplus” between AMF and the fund, but that was for simplicity rather than an expression of my position. Finally, one could use a different charity as the partner, but I think AMF is the most widely-deductible GiveWell Top Charity and so would cover more donors for a fixed amount of work.)
Does anyone know if this notice that FTX is writing entities to ask for return of donations is limited to political contributions? That seems to be the focus, but I’m not sure why the estate wouldn’t seek return of all donated funds at this time.
Based on some recent discussions of “passive philantrophy,” I am wondering if there are circumstances in which people spend money at cross purposes and might be agreeable to offset their monies and donate them to an effective charity instead. One possible example follows.
In any US political campaign where the candidates/parties have roughly equal funding resources, the utility of donating $1 to my preferred candidate is roughly equal to the utility of depriving the opposing candidate of $1. Stated another way, if I donate $100 to a SuperPAC boosting Candidate X, and you donate $100 to one boosting her opponent Candidate ~X, $200 gets essentially wasted because the donations’ effect cancels each other out.
Would it be possible to develop a website that attempts to capture this “wasted” money and route it to an effective charity? Ideally, if X boosters committed $1200 and ~X boosters committed $1000, the website would send $200 to the SuperPAC boosting X and send the other $2000 to an effective charity. I wonder if there could even be a way to get a tax writeoff for the people whose money got send over to the effective charity (campaign contributions usually are not tax-deductible).
Roadblocks/drawbacks:
(1) Campaign finance law is complex, so no guarantees there!
(2) Donors would have to feel confident that someone wasn’t gaming the system. For instance, if I was indifferent to American politics but wanted to support the effective charity, I could basically double my donation by committing funds to the candidate who was behind on the website. I suppose that only netting 50% would solve that problem if no better solution could be found. Back to the hypo, X’s SuperPAC would get $700, ~X’s SuperPAC would get $500, and the effective charity would get $1000.
(3) This could potentially backfire and lead to more money flooding into American politics, although my late-night ideas are usually not popular enough to have effects of that magnitude. :)
(4) To the extent that big donors contribute for influence rather than for ideological reasons, this probably wouldn’t work (although maybe they get a certificate certifying that they destroyed/offset $Y of the opponent’s funds that they could peddle for influence?)
Hadn’t to my knowledge (but I can’t rule out the possibility that I had seen it in previous forum lurking a while ago and just don’t remember). One conscious trigger, at least, was hearing about how SBF and others at FTX gave tens of millions to different parties and shaking my head at the waste (this was before the origin of those funds was fully known).
Caveat: I am a lawyer but am not speaking with any real assessment of the merits beyond a skim of the FEC letter back in 2015. The viewpoint below is based on general principles of civil litigation strategy and is not something anyone should actually rely on without talking to a campaign-finance expert.
My initial reaction to the threat of legal challenges, if someone thinks there is enough potential value here, is to commit to funding this appropriately and just let them sue. If you were particularly worried about litigation, set it up the first time so that the only candidate pair is from the general-election presidential race. That should sharply limit the number of entities that have Article III standing to file a lawsuit, maybe just to the candidates and their campaign committees themselves. Make one of them risk the negative publicity of filing a lawsuit to shut down a non-profit website that was benefitting impoverished people in Africa. In any event, do not set up a pair in a House or Senate race where one of the candidates is a sure loser (who makes a good sacrificial lamb for a political party that wants the website shut down) or a clear winner (who can probably risk a reputational hit).
In a sense, this creates a bifurcation of risk—there’s a risk the website just doesn’t catch on, and a risk of litigation, but probably a low risk of both at the same time. What rational candidate is going to commit money to litigation to secure an a small amount of additional funds for themselves when: (1) the amount isn’t that much; (2) they alone bear optics/PR risk; (3) their opponent gets the exact same benefit they get without incurring any of the costs? For litigation to make sense, you’d either need to believe the amount of money coming through this site was going to be pretty significant, or would need to believe that the marginal benefit of an extra dollar to your campaign was much greater than for your opponent.
Next, any litigation would likely be—like many election-related challenges—only practically winnable in accelerated proceedings. With a favorable FEC opinion letter, few district judges would grant emergency relief to a litigant like a temporary restraining order. In ordinary litigation, the federal courts can take a while to get around to deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction. Would a judge be inclined to put this high on their priority list? Depends on the judge, but I think it would only get priority if pretty successful. The ship may well have sailed by then—and note that a decision by a district court is often not a particularly effective weapon for other litigants who want to sue you in future elections. (For the lawyers, if there is a concern about offensive collateral estoppel, I think the solution is for the next attempt to be with a different, unrelated non-profit with whom the first non-profit is not in privity.)
If the court did grant a preliminary injunction, I would ask the court to (1) require the organization to pass through 100% of funds to both sides, but (2) require the opposing party to post an injunction bond in the amount lost to charity [at least to its own candidate]. Injunction bonds aren’t required as often as I think they should be, but it would be worth a shot. Alternatively, you could ask that the organization be allowed to continue but required to lock up the money pending final judgment.
I’d also consider whether to stick a nice “poison pill” in the user agreement. Suppose that there were an adverse litigation outcome—what should happen to the money? You could try adding a provision that it has to be returned to the donors, attempting to deprive the plaintiff of any concrete benefit from winning the suit in the first place. They would be no better off, unless and until their would-be donors chose to give them the money. And, if I were a candidate, I would be worried that some percentage of my donors would be annoyed at my litigation antics and that my opponent’s donor re-gift rate would be higher.
I suspect Professor Zolt didn’t move forward in part because (if I understand correctly) his for-profit entity was going to be funded by a tiny sliver of the funds flowing through the entity. That’s probably not enough revenue to justify defending this in litigation. On the other hand, if the monies were going to something like GiveDirectly (more legible) or AMF, the EA community “captures” the vast majority of the value of the offset funds. So the community should more willing to accept a quarter-million in expected litigation costs if the idea has upside to drive at least several times that to effective charities.
Finally, a less effective but potentially “safer” way to do something along the same lines would be to form a SuperPAC. I am reminded of the one Stephen Colbert did back in his Colbert Report days as a parody of the campaign-finance system. That’s a much harder attack surface, as the main attraction of SuperPACs is that they are . . . unregulated.
I would have to check whether a SuperPAC can donate to another SuperPAC, which would be an easy way of getting rid of the non-netted funds. Simply returning the non-netted funds might be another option. Actually running ads would be awkward. Colbert donated most of the proceeds of his super-PAC to non-political charities when he dissolved it, so shipping the netted funds to the chosen charit(ies) at the end of the election shouldn’t be a problem. The biggest downside of this approach, in addition to probably being less legible to would-be donors, is that donations to a superPAC definitely are not tax-deductible (vs. I don’t know if netted donations to something like I originally suggested would be).
The FTX and Alameda estates have filed an adversary complaint against the FTX Foundation, SBF, Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Nick Beckstead, and some biosciences firms, available here. I should emphasize that anyone can sue over anything, and allege anything in a complaint (although I take complaints signed by Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys significantly more seriously than I take the median complaint). I would caution against drawing any adverse inferences from a defendant’s silence in response to the complaint.
The complaint concerns a $3.25MM “philantrophic gift” made to a biosciences firm (PLS), and almost $70MM in non-donation payments (investments, advance royalties, etc.) -- most of which were also to PLS. The only count against Beckstead relates to the donation. The non-donation payments were associated with Latona, which according to the complaint “purports to be a non-profit, limited liability company organized under the laws of the Bahamas[,] incorporated in May 2022 for the purported purpose of investing in life sciences companies [which] held itself out as being part of the FTX Foundation.”
The complaint does not allege that either Beckstead or Rheingans-Yoo knew of the fraud at the core of FTX and Alameda.
It does, however, allege (para. 46) that the “transfers were nominally made on behalf of the
FTX Foundation and Latona, but actually were made for the benefit of Bankman-Fried.” This is a weak spot in the complaint for me. There’s a quote from SBF about needing to do some biosecurity work for PR and political reasons (para. 47), but corporations do charitable stuff for PR and political reasons all the time. There are quotations about wanting to de-emphasize the profit motive / potential in public communications (para. 49-50), but if the profits flowed to a non-profit it’s unclear how that would personally enrich SBF.
Quoting Beckstead, the complaint alleges that the investments were “ill-advised and not well-evaluated” (para. 51). It further alleges that there was no, or very little due dilligence (para. 51), such as a lack of any valuation analysis and in most cases lack of access to a data room. As a result, Latona “often paid far more than fair or reasonably equivalent value for the
investments” (para. 52). As for the $3.25MM gift, it was “was made in a similarly slapdash fashion” as the Foundation agreed to it without even knowing whether the recipient was a non-profit (para. 53). There are also allegations about how that gift came to be (para. 53-64).
Paragraph 68 is troubling in terms of Latona’s lack of internal controls:
On May 23, 2022, Rheingans-Yoo sent a Slack message to the Head of
Operations for FTX Ventures, asking her to wire $50 million to PLS on behalf of Latona,
because “Latona doesn’t have a bank account yet, and we’d like to move these funds as soon as possible.” After the Head of Operations inquired why they were wiring $50 million when the SAFE agreement was only for $35 million, Rheingans-Yoo said there was a “separate purchase agreement [that] had a $15mln cash advance.” When the Head of Operations asked for the purchase agreement for $15 million, Rheingans-Yoo replied, “I have an email, no formal agreement,” but “if that’s not sufficient, we can send the 35 first and get the purchase more formally papered.
There apparently wasn’t an attempt to formally paper the $15MM until September, and that paper was woefully vague and inadequate if the complaint is credible (para. 70). Likewise, Rheingans-Yoo allegedly offered to send over $3MM to another firm, Lumen, “on a handshake basis” without any paperwork “while we hammer out the full details” (para. 75). However, the funding was not actually sent until an agreement was signed (para. 78-79). A third investment was made on Rheingans-Yoo’s recommendation despite Beckstead describing it as “unattractive” for various reasons (para. 82-84).
The “donate, then invest” approach seemed to also be in play with a fourth firm called Riboscience. Paragraph 93 doesn’t sound great: “On June 29, 2022, Glenn emailed Rheingans-Yoo that “sufficient time ha[d] passed since the (most generous) donation to the Glenn Labs, that we can now proceed with your desired investment in Riboscience.”
Counts One to Five are similar to what I would expect most clawback complaints would look like. Note that they do not allege any misconduct by the recipients as part of the cause of action, as no such misconduct is necessary for a fraudulent conveyance action. You can also see the bankruptcy power to reach beyond the initial transferee to subsequent transferees under 11 USC 550 at play here. Most of the prefactory material is doubtless there in an attempt to cut off a defense from the defendant biosciences firms that they gave something of reasonably equivalent value in exchange for the investments.
In Count Eleven, the complaint alleges that “Rheingans-Yoo knew that the transactions with the Lifesciences Defendants did not provide and had virtually no prospect of providing Alameda with reasonably equivalent value, and that Bankman-Fried personally benefited from the transactions. Rheingans-Yoo thus knowingly assisted in and/or failed to prevent Bankman-Fried’s breaches of fiduciary duty to Alameda.” (para. 169). This allegedly harmed Alameda to the tune of $68.3MM. Elsewhere, the complaint alleges that ” [u]pon information and belief, Bankman-Fried and Rheingans-Yoo intended to benefit personally from any profits generated by any of
these companies if they turned out to be successful and/or developed a successful product.” (para. 5). However, “upon information and belief” is lawyer-speak for “we’re speculating, or at least don’t have a clear factual basis for this allegation yet.”
In Count Twelve, the complaint alleges that “Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo knew that the transfer to PLS funded by FTX did not provide and had virtually no prospect of providing FTX with reasonably equivalent value, and that Bankman-Fried personally benefited from the transaction. Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo thus aided and abetted Bankman-Fried’s breaches of fiduciary duty to FTX.” (para. 174). This allegedly harmed FTX to the tune of $3.25MM.
In the end, the complaint doesn’t exactly make me think highly of anyone involved with FTX or the FTX Foundation. However, from my non-specialist eyes, I’m not seeing a slam dunk case for critical assertions about Beckstead and Rheingans-Yoo’s knowledge in paras. 169 and 174.
Just want to say I appreciate your commentary over the past 9 months. Having someone with legal expertise and (what seems to me) a pretty even-handed and sensible perspective is a really valuable contribution.
Thanks for sharing this; I was originally confused by the complaint because I didn’t understand why a nonprofit making unprofitable investments would be cause for concern, but it sounds like your speculation is that the stuff about these being bad investments is included just to prevent the life sciences companies from claiming that the equity Latona received was of reasonably equivalent value and therefore they don’t have to give the money back?
That’s the main purpose of those allegations on my read.
A possible secondary purpose could be to imply something like: these ‘investments’ and ‘donations’ made so little sense that it’s implausible that they were motivated by legitimate charitable purposes. Therefore, the individual defendants must have known (or clearly should have known) there was something nefarious afoot like personally benefitting SBF.
That could be enough to get past a motion to dismiss, where the bar is fairly low (at that stage, the court basically has to accept all factual allegations as pled, and draw all plausible inferences in the plaintiff’s favor) and haul the defendants in for depositions under oath. As I mentioned, I found the complaint to be not particularly convincing in its characterization of the individual defendants’ knowledge—but to be fair to Sullivan & Cromwell, it’s not reasonable to expect a particularly strong case on alleged improper purpose before conducting depositions.
Do you have a take on whether we should read things into them not alleging that Beckstead/RY knew about FTX’s improper use of customer funds?
On the one hand: I assume that if they did have evidence here it would make their case much much stronger, and based on your comments about “upon information and belief” it sounds like they don’t need a very high evidentiary standard to make such an allegation. But on the other: maybe there’s some complex legal strategy I don’t understand which would make them not include this allegation even if they did have evidence.
I wouldn’t read very much into it.
The complaint only needs to be strong enough to get past a motion to dismiss for now, and it is fairly easy to amend a complaint if need be. There is some benefit to putting your best foot forward, but there are a number of plausible reasons one might not allege knowledge of fraud against depositors despite some evidence. Those reasons follow.
I should note that I personally thought—and still think—it very unlikely that any FTXFF staff knew about the customer fraud. Keeping one’s conspiracy information on a strict need-to-know basis is Being a Fraudster 101, and I can think of no reason why SBF and his co-conspirators would have concluded anyone at FTXFF had a need to know.
Unless they are much richer than charitable foundation officials tend to be, Beckstead and RY are very likely not the primary targets here. There are much bigger fish in this lawsuit and in the pond as a whole. Moreover, as a practical matter, I doubt the recovery against Beckstead and RY would be appreciably higher as a result of proving knowledge about the misuse of customer funds than “merely” proving an allegation that they aided and abetted SBF fleecing FTX (and for RY, Alameda). So the upside of making an allegation of customer-fraud knowledge seems more limited to me than might first appear.
Alleging that someone was basically in on the customer fraud[1]makes that the main story of the complaint and could take the narrative focus away from your primary targets—the biotech firms that actually have (or had) the money.
Judges are human. If one were going to allege that specific individuals were in on the fraud (when the judge knows that allegation wasn’t necessary to make in the complaint), they had best be fairly confident they are going to be able to connect on that allegation. Failure to do so would risk one’s credibility with a judge who will decide billions of dollars worth of other disputes in your case.
My guess is that this complaint has received priority because startups can burn money fast (and may be particularly incentivized to burn fast if they know a clawback suit, which they cannot withstand without some big risks paying off, is coming soon). It’s unlikely that fully investigating Beckstead and RY has been much of a priority.
If substantial evidence existed that a particular person at FTX or FTXFF knew about the fraud, that person would presumably be a significant criminal target. I believe FTX is cooperating with DOJ, and its lawyers would know even without DOJ telling them they should not unnecessarily disclose information that suggests someone is a criminal target. The judge knows the unstated rules too, and wouldn’t hold it against FTX’s lawyers for slow-playing information to avoid compromising a criminal investigation (but would probably be at least annoyed if they compromised one).
This is a weird case in which the plaintiffs probably have much more access to Beckstead and RY’s records than an average plaintiff would have at this stage, maybe more access than Beckstead and RY themselves have! They will need to turn over those records in discovery. However, I could see an argument for not giving defendants a roadmap as to what the plaintiffs already know, in order to potentially preserve some traps for the discovery process. Giving the defendants a roadmap could help them prepare for their interrogatories and depositions.
I would characterize directing the expenditure of FTX or Alameda funds, with knowledge of the underlying depositor fraud, as being “in on it.”
Thanks! This is helpful.
The government’s sentencing memorandum for SBF is here; it is seeking a sentence of 40-50 years.
As typical for DOJ in high-profile cases, it is well-written and well-done. I’m not just saying that because it makes many of the same points I identified in my earlier writeup of SBF’s memorandum. E.g., p. 8 (“doubling down” rather than walking away from the fraud); p. 43 (“paid in full” claim is highly misleading) [page cites to numbers at bottom of page, not to PDF page #].
EA-adjacent material: There’s a snarky reference to SBF’s charitable donations “(for which he still takes credit)” (p. 2) in the intro, and the expected hammering of SBF’s memo for taking credit for attempting to take credit for donations paid with customer money (p. 95). There’s a reference to SBF’s “idiosyncratic . . . beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value” (pp. 88-89). This leads to the one surprise theme (for me): the need to incapacitate SBF from committing additional crimes (pp. 87, 90). Per the feds, “the defendant believed and appears still to believe that it is rational and necessary for him to take great risks including imposing those risks on others, if he determines that it will serve what he personally deems a worthy project or goal,” which contributes to his future dangerousness (p. 89).
For predictors: Looking at sentences where the loss was > $100MM and the method was Ponzi/misappropriation/embezzlement, there’s a 20-year, two 30-years, a bunch of 40-years, three 50-years, and three 100+-years (pp. 96-97).
Interesting item: The government has gotten about $3.45MM back from political orgs, and the estate has gotten back ~$280K (pp. 108-09). The proposed forfeiture order lists recipients, and seems to tell us which ones returned monies to the government (Proposed Forfeiture Order, pp. 24-43).
Life Pro Tip: If you are arrested by the feds, do not subsequently write things in Google Docs that you don’t want the feds to bring up at your sentencing. Jotting down the idea that “SBF died for our sins” as some sort of PR idea (p. 88; source here) is particularly ill-advised.
My Take: In Judge Kaplan’s shoes, I would probably sentence at the high end of the government’s proposed range. Where the actual loss will likely be several billion, and the loss would have been even greater under many circumstances, I don’t think a consequence of less than two decades’ actual time in prison would provide adequate general deterrence—even where the balance of other factors was significantly mitigating. That would imply a sentence of ~25 years after a prompt guilty plea. Backsolving, that gets us a sentence of ~35 years without credit for a guilty plea.
But the balance of other factors is aggravating, not mitigating. Stealing from lots of ordinary people is worse than stealing from sophisticated investors. Outright stealing by someone in a fiduciary role is worse than accounting fraud to manipulate stock prices. We also need to adjust upward for SBF’s post-arrest conduct, including trying to hide money from the bankruptcy process, multiple attempts at witness tampering, and perjury on the stand. Stacking those factors would probably take me over 50 years, but like the government I don’t think a likely-death-in-prison sentence is necessary here.
In case you know this off-hand or it’s easy for you to get or point me in the right direction, do you know how they established SBF’s intent to misuse the billions in customer funds? What I got from Googling this didn’t seem very convincing, but I didn’t read court documents directly. (See also https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ggkiDAZowmuzqZrnX/is-anyone-else-still-confused-about-what-exactly-happened-at )
I’d look at pp. 5-12 of the linked sentencing memo for customers, pp. 15-18 for investors/lenders for the government’s statement of the offense conduct. The jury merely utters guilty / not guilty on each count, it does not provide detailed findings of fact. Judge Kaplan heard all the evidence as he presided at trial, and can rely on his own factual findings at sentencing under a more-likely-than-not standard. Of course, that is just a summary; Ellison alone testified for ~3 days.
Basically, SBF & FTX falsely represented that the customer assets were segregated from FTX’s own assets and would not be used by FTX. Yet Alameda regularly took large sums of money out of accounts holding FTX customer funds, and the “allow negative” feature allowed it to borrow ~unlimited money as well. This was not limited to funds made available to customers through the margin lending program.
At various points discussed on pp. 9-11, SBF directed Alameda to “borrow” more money from FTX despite knowing it was underwater at the time. For instance, at one point SBF directed Ellison “to use FTX customer funds to repay loans” (her words), despite knowing that Alameda was $11B in the hole and was already “borrowing” $13B in customer funds (p. 11). About $4.5B more in customer funds was used to pay Alameda’s lenders as a result (p. 11). In short, I don’t think the narrative presented in the linked post is backed up by the trial evidence.
The document is written by the prosecution though, right? Not the judge.
Or are you saying that, since the judge ended up more or less agreeing with the prosecution, we can just trust the prosecution’s arguments?
Yes, that’s in the quick take. It was still (and may still be), in my view, the best source reasonably available. The jury doesn’t say anything other than guilty / not guilty to each count—where a conviction could be based on multiple theories, it doesn’t even tell us which one the jury bought. The sentencing judge would make factual findings at sentencing (then a future event) but only as necessary to sentence. Anything written by the defense would almost certainly be inconsistent with the jury’s verdict, so that leaves the prosecution.
Given that the USAO is a long-term player, knows that Judge Kaplan presided over the trial and the pre-trial motions, and knows that SBF could file a reply, it’s very unlikely it would puff the facts to more than a moderate extent. Probably the trial transcripts provide a more authoritative resource, but are too long to recommend to much of anyone.
Cool, I fully acknowledge that this is my naivete, but for what it’s worth I assumed that “The government’s sentencing memorandum” was a memo explaining the judge’s sentencing decision, not what the prosecution was requesting the judge to decide.
Good to know! This may be one of those interpretations that becomes more plausible due to an intervening event. (The quick take was posted well before the judge decided the sentence.)
I can’t think of any circumstances like this in which “the government” would mean the court rather than the government-as-a-party-before-the-court. But that could only be obvious to me because of professional background.
Why did SBF only get 25 years when the prosecution called for 40-50 (and the sentencing guidelines call for 110)?
Pretty much everyone in the system agrees that the Guidelines tend to be too harsh for economic offenses, especially as the loss amount (as computed under the Guidelines) becomes the main driver of the Guidelines figure.
As for the rest, I haven’t seen a transcript of Judge Kaplan’s sentencing remarks. The federal system gives very broad discretion to the sentencing judge (unless there is a mandatory minimum, which there wasn’t here). So while we can conclude that Judge Kaplan believed a 25-year sentence was “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to achieve the purposes of sentencing, I don’t know why he believed that.
SBF’s sentencing memorandum is here.
On the first page of the intro, we get some quotes about SBF’s philanthropy. On the next, we are told he “lived a very modest life” and that any reports of extravagance are fabrications. [N.B.: All page citations are to the typed numbers at the bottom, not to the PDF page number.]
For the forecasters: based on Guidelines calculations in the pre-sentence report (PSR) by Probation, the Guidelines range is 110 years (would be life, but is capped at the statutory max). Probation recommended 100 years. PSRs are sealed, so we’ll never see the full rationale on that. The average fraud defendant with a maxed-out offense level, no criminal history, and no special cooperation credit receives a sentence of 283 months.
The first part of the memo is about the (now advisory) Sentencing Guidelines used in federal court. The major argument is that there should be no upward adjustment for loss because everyone is probably getting all their money back. Courts have traditionally looked at the greater of actual or “intended” loss, but the memo argues that isn’t correct after a recent Supreme Court decision.
As a factual matter, I’m skeptical that the actual loss is $0, especially where much of the improvement is due to increases in the crypto market that customers would have otherwise benefitted from directly. Plus everyone getting money back (including investors who were defrauded) is far from a certain outcome, the appellate courts have been deferential to best-guess loss calculations, and the final Guidelines range would not materially change if the loss amount were (say) $25MM. If I’m the district judge here, I’d probably include some specific statements and findings in my sentencing monologue in an attempt to insulate this issue from appeal. Such as: I’d impose the same sentence no matter what the Guidelines said, because $0 dramatically understates the offense severity and $10B overstates it.
There are a few places in which the argument ventures into tone-deaf waters. The argument that SBF wasn’t in a position of public or private trust (p. 25-26) seems awfully weak and ill-advised to my eyes. The discussion of possible equity-holder losses (pp. 20-21) also strikes me as dismissive at points. No, equity holders don’t get a money-back guarantee, but they are entitled to not be lied to when deciding where to invest.
The second half involves a discussion of the so-called 3553 factors that a court must consider in determining a sentence that is sufficient, but not greater than necessary. Pages 41-42 discuss Peter Singer and earning to give, while pages 46-50 continue on about SBF’s philanthropy (including a specific reference to GWWC and link to the pledger list on page 46).
Throughout the memo, the defense asserts that FTX was different from various other schemes that were fraudulent from day one (e.g., p. 56). My understanding is that the misuse of customer funds started pretty early in FTX’s history, so I don’t give this much weight. The memo asserts that SBF was less culpable than various comparators, ranging from Madoff himself (150 years) to Elizabeth Holmes (135 months) (pp. 73-80). The bottom-line request is for a sentence of 63-78 months, which is the Guidelines range if one accepts the loss amount as $0 (p. 89).
There are 29 letters in SBF’s support by family members, his psychiatrist, Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Kat Woods, and a bunch of names I don’t recognize.
[Caution: The remainder of this post contains more opinion-laden commentary than what has preceded it!]
I generally find the 3553 discussion unpersuasive. The section on “remorse” (pp. 55-56) rings hollow to me, although this is an unavoidable consequence of SBF’s trial litigation choices. There is “remorse” that people were injured and impliedly that SBF made various errors in judgment, but there isn’t any acknowledgment of wrongdoing. One sentence of note to this audience: “Sam is simply devastated that the advice, mentorship, and funding that he has given to the animal welfare, global poverty, and pandemic prevention movements does not begin to counteract the damage done to them by virtue of their association with him.” (p. 55).
I find the discussion of the FTX Foundation to be jarring, such as “Ultimately, the FTX Foundation donated roughly $150 million to charities working on issues such as pandemic prevention, animal welfare, and funding anti-malarial mosquito netting in Africa.” (p. 57). Attempting to take credit for sending some of the money you took from customers to charity takes a lot of nerve!
Although the memo asserts that SBF’s neurodiversity makes him “uniquely vulnerable” in prison (p. 58), the unfortunate truth is that many convicted criminals have characteristics that make successfully adapting to prison life more difficult than for the average person (e.g., severe mental illness, unusually low intelligence). So I’m not convinced by the memo that he would face an atypical burden that would warrant serious consideration in sentencing.
Although I certainly can’t fault counsel for pointing to SBF’s positive characteristics, I’m sure Judge Kaplan knows that many of his opportunities to legibly display these characteristics have been enabled by privilege that most people being sentenced in federal court do not have.
I’m also not generally convinced by the arguments about general deterrence. In abbreviated form, the argument is that running SBF through the ringer and exposing him to public disgrace is strong enough that a lower sentence (and the inevitable lifetime public stigma) suffices to deter other would-be fraudsters. See pp. 66-67. And there’s good evidence that severity of punishment is relatively less important in deterrence.
However, if a tough sentence is otherwise just, I don’t think we need a high probability of deterrent effect for an extremely serious offense for extended incarceration to be worth it. Crypto scams are common, and as a practical matter it is difficult to increase certainty and speed of punishment because so much of the problematic conduct happens outside the U.S. So severity is the lever the government has. Moreover, discounts for offenders who have a lot to lose (because they are wealthy already) and/or are seen as having more future productive value seem backward as far as moral desert.
Finally, I think there’s potentially value in severity deterrence of someone already committing fraud; if the punishment level is basically maxed out at the $500M customer money you’ve already put at risk, there is no reason (other than an increased risk of detection) not to put $5B at risk. As the saying goes, “might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” as the penalty for ovine theft was death either way.
Defense recommendations on sentencing are generally unrealistic in cases without specific types of plea deal. This one is no different. Also, the sentencing discussion will sound extremely harsh to at least non-US readers . . . but that’s the situation in the US and especially in the federal system.
I’d note that SBF’s post-arrest decisions will likely have triggered a substantial portion of his sentence. Much has been written about the US “trial penalty,” and it is often a problem. However, I don’t think a discount of ~25-33% for a prompt guilty plea, as implied by the Guidelines for most offenses (also by the guidelines used in England and Wales) is penologically unjustified or coercive. Instead of that, SBF’s sentence is likely to be higher because of multiple attempts at witness tampering and evasive, incredible testimony on the stand. So he could be looking at ~double the sentence he would be facing if he had pled guilty.
He likely could not have gotten the kind of credit for cooperation his co-conspirators received (a “5K.1”) because there was no other big fish to rat out. Providing 5K.1 cooperation often reduces sentences by a lot, in my opinion often too much. Given the 5K.1 cooperation and the lesser role, one must exercise caution in using co-conspirator sentences to estimate what SBF would have received if he had promptly accepted responsibility.
Finally, I’d view any sentence over ~60 years as de facto life and chosen more for symbolic purposes than to actually increase punishment. Currently, one can receive a ~15% discount for decent behavior in prison, and can potentially serve ~25-33% of the sentence in a halfway house or the like for participating in programs under the First Step Act. It’s hard to predict what the next few decades will bring as far as sentencing policy, but the recent trend has been toward expanding the possibilities for early release. So I’d estimate that SBF will actually serve ~75% of his sentence, and probably some portion of it outside of a prison.
The Met (a major art museum in NYC) is returning $550K in FTX-linked donations; article below includes link to the court filing. 100% return, donations were outside of 90 days. This is the first court filing of this nature I’m aware of, although I haven’t been watching comprehensively.
A smart move for the Met, I think. I doubt it had any viable defenses, it clearly has $550K to return without causing any hardship, that’s enough money for the FTX estate to litigate over, and it avoids bad PR by agreeing to turn 100% of the money over without litigation. Perhaps it could have negotiated a small discount, but saving $50K or whatever just wouldn’t have been worth it in light of PR/optics concerns. (Plus, I think the Met was very likely obliged to return the whole $550K from an ethical perspective anyway . . . . { edit: perhaps with a small deduction for its legal expenses })
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/06/05/new-yorks-met-museum-agrees-to-return-550k-in-ftx-donations/
I notice my surprise that FTX was donating to the Met Museum, lol
They also paid for naming rights to various stadiums, I could imagine a similar thing with the Met (a gallery for FTX-traded NFTs?)
Some thoughts on future Debate Week topics:
I would prefer that the next topic move away from financial allocation between cause areas, so maybe something like:
There are 100 young, smart, flexible recent university graduates who are open to ~any kind of work. What is the optimal allocation of those graduates between object-level work, meta work, earning to give, or something else?
Should EA move directionally toward being a more r-selected (higher growth, less investment in each offspring) or K-selected movement, [1]or stay roughly where it is?
Two advantages of these sorts of topics, vis-a-vis a financial cause-prio debate:
A. I think these kinds of issues are generally more likely to be action-relevant for Forum users. Even I won a billion-dollar lottery prize and established a trust to give $50MM to effective animal welfare charities, the net effect on cause prio might be far less than $50MM because OP might reduce its spend by almost that amount. While there are niches in which this effect is absent or less pronounced, structuring a debate week with broad participation around them may be challenging.
B. These kinds of issues should be more accessible to those from a variety of cause perspectives. For various reasons, the last Debate Week was set up to have a predominant focus on a single cause area (AW). Cf. this discussion. That’s not a bad thing, but I don’t think all or most Weeks should be set up like that. Other questions may not have this effect—for instance, I expect that the answers to questions 1 & 2 would differ substantially due to cause prio. So there’s value in authoring discussion of these questions from a GH perspective, from an AW perspective, from a GCR perspective, and so on.[2]
More generally, it might be helpful to plan a Debate Season well in advance—a “season” of (e.g.) one week each on a topic that is either specifically within a major cause area or for which it is expected to predominate, plus one or more cause prio questions, plus one or more cross-cutting questions that are not explicitly cause prio questions.
Someone who has better background than self-taught AP Biology twenty years ago can probably come up with a better metaphor.
From a voting perspective, this could be facilitated by optionally allowing the voter to color their dot if their answer was based primarily on a consideration of a specific cause area, allowing a visual representation of how cause prio is a crux on these issues.
Thanks for thinking about this Jason! Lots of good ideas here.
FWIW financial allocation was an attempt to get a more precise debate after several users reported the “more of a priority” framing of the AI Welfare debate as being a bit confusing.
I think it’s generally nice to be tracking something relatively unified along the X axis, but that could just be strength of agreement, as long as users agree on the meaning of the debate statement.
The season idea is cool, though I’d probably prefer to do a more spaced out season, with the debates at very least a few weeks apart. Some authors might want to contribute to multiple debates, and writing a post a week is a bit of a large ask. It’d be great to have the topics published in advance though, so that people can start thinking earlier.
Yeah, I definitely see the appeal to financial-allocation framings. I think some of my reaction is that I read the AI Welfare question as substantially about financial allocation as well. So I am more about moving away from a perceived trendline rather than objecting to financial allocation as part of a mix of topic types.
I also agree with a spaced-out season; week after week of Debates in a row would be exhausting! The season concept is more a recognition that—like matchup pairs in a sports league—individual Debate Weeks are very hard to balance. Zooming out to the season level helps with that—the NFL can balance out (to some extent) who gets the good matchups, the primetime TV slots, the more competent referees,[1] etc. It can also try to balance the demands on each team—for instance, if it schedules a team to play in London, it usually balances that by giving them the next week off. So picking the right order could minimize the odds that a particular person would want to write major posts for successive Weeks.
If we are committed to desktop-only voting anyway, I wonder if a 2-D response grid system (as opposed to points on a line) would allow tracking responses on two dimensions and thus a bit more complexity in posed questions. I initially conceived question 1 as ~ “more people should do EtG” and it could move back toward those roots if needed. Relatedly, I am undecided on how tightly I think the poll question has to cover the scope of the Debate Week vs. focusing on a portion of the Debate Week topic for operationalization purposes.
This item is not meant to be taken seriously.
For the two specific topics you recommended, people’s answers could be pretty specific to the cause area. That might be fine, but worth flagging. Could be best for people to specify the cause they’re speaking for, or make the debate week cause-specific.
A second interim report has been filed by the FTX debtor-in-possession here, with some potentially relevant information. The report explains how FTX used accounts into which customers deposited money, as well as other accounts with commingled funds, to conduct various activities. The report is very much a birds-eye view, so only describes examples:
(alterations in original)
Rational Animations is probably the YouTube channel the report is referring to, in case anyone’s curious.
Did the book about figuring out humans’ utility functions ever get written?
I thought this recent study in JAMA Open on vegan nutrition was worth a quick take due to its clever and legible study design:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2812392
This was an identical twin study in which one twin went vegan for eight weeks, and the other didn’t. Nice results on some cardiometabolic lab values (e.g., LDL-C) even though the non-vegan twin was also upping their game nutritionally. I don’t think the fact that vegan diets generally improve cardiometabolic health is exactly fresh news, but I find the study design to be unusually legible for nutritional research.
I had written up what I learned as a Manifund micrograntor a few months ago, but have never gotten around to polishing that for publication. Still, I think those reactions could be useful for people in the EA Community Choice program now. You’ve got the same basic pattern of a bunch of inexperienced grantmakers with a few hundred bucks to spend each and ~40-50 projects to look at quickly. I’m going to post those without much editing, since the program is fairly short. A few points are specific to the types of proposals that were in the microgranting experiment (which came from the ACX program).
General Feedback for Grant Applicants [from ACX Microgrants Experience]
Caution: This feedback is based on a single micrograntor’s experience. It may be much less applicable to other contexts—e.g., those involving larger grantors, grantors who do not need to evaluate a large number of proposals in a limited amount of time, or grantors who are in a position to fund a significant percentage of grants reviewed. I had pre-committed to myself that I would look at every single proposal unless the title convinced me that it was way too technical for me to understand. This probably affected my experience, and was done more for educational / information value reasons than anything else.
If you have a longer proposal, please start with an executive summary, limited to ~ 300 words. You may get only 2-3 minutes on an initial screen, maybe even less.
After getting a sense of the basic contours of the proposal, I found myself with a decent sense of where the weaker points probably were and wanted to see if these were clear dealbreakers in an efficient manner. Please be sure to red-team your proposal and address the weak points!
Use shorter paragraphs with titles or other clear, skimmable signals. As per above, I need to be able to quickly find your discussion on specific points.
One recurrent weakness involved an unclear theory of impact that I had to infer from the proposal. It is usually helpful to explicitly lay out what the theory of impact is. In particular, there were several proposals with a theory of impact of ~ “I publish something, then impact somehow.” This does work sometimes, but most academic publications end up with ~0 impact. I found myself wanting more specific information about why there’s a reasonable chance that won’t happen to the applicant’s publication.
I would not assume that I know the importance of various signals of quality in your field. For example, if Professor Smith is highly regarded (such that his invitation to work with you is a good signal), how can you succinctly show—rather than just tell—me that?
I would like to see a CV, resume, 1-2 page bio, etc. linked for most applicants. An organizational/project website helps too, if you have one.
Please be realistic when projecting the likelihood of success on various outcomes. If I think they are unrealistic, I would generally assume you are biting off more than you think you are and/or are overselling the project. I recall one project with a 1-2% chance of its high-level impact; I took that as a positive signal because it was realistic.
If there is some real thought and/or data behind an estimate that may look optimistic, I’d suggest showing it (e.g., linking to a Google doc to avoid cluttering up the main proposal page).
In some cases, I’d want to hear about success or lack thereof with other funders—this was more common in biomedical research or projects that seemed potentially commercializable. Given that decent funding exists in those areas, I’d rather you get it if possible and leave the open / unrestricted charitable funding for projects with no good alternative. If you can’t get it, then I have to consider whether I have a good enough reason to override the judgment of people who know a whole lot more about the subject area than I do. I’m open to the possibility that I should, but I’ll need convincing. This is doubly true if your theory of impact requires non-EA/non-Manifund funding shortly after the seed stage. In those cases, I need some indication of how likely you are to get that funding even if your seed stage goes well.
One challenge of fundraising on Manifund is that you don’t know how much you will be offered. In many cases, reading about the $50K version of the project gives me very little information about what would happen with the minimum amount specified to proceed (which was often 10% or less than the target). In several cases, I thought the project was clearly not viable at or near the stated minimum—and I ruled out the possibility of making a small signalling offer because I didn’t want to fund the project at a low level.
I tended to value “sweat equity” or “skin in the game” in which the person seeking the grant could show prior investment of their own time and/or resources into earlier stages of the project. I recognize that this is not exactly fair to certain applicants, but I find it a costly and thus valuable signal of the prospective grantee’s commitment to and valuation of the proposed work. In addition, the presence of the applicant’s volunteer time and/or resources can create a multiplier effect by which the grant unlocks the value of that time and/or those resources. So to the extent that an applicant can show these factors, I think they are worth mentioning,
Hyperlinks are your friend—you can link to a deeper discussion of something if I’m interested in reading more without bogging the proposal down in details if I’m not.
After all the text I went through in rapid fashion, I would have welcomed a good infographic or two.
Dang, I wish I’d read this before I put in my Manifund application—and before I chucked in some money towards other Manifund proposals. This is very insightful. I hope to participate in more Manifund funding efforts, and hope to take your advice to heart going forward.
For a different kind of FarmKind post:
FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I’ve seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).
I’m personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But—although I haven’t dug under the hood too much—FarmKind’s calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.
Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering).
In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind’s for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much “credit” to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I’ve put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind’s work than my personal musings about offsets.
In more detail:
Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that’s fine! But in an offset situation, I don’t think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that will cost other consumers $10, and then claim all the impact myself for offset purposes. I would have just pushed most of the costs of offsetting my actions onto other people. Treating financial costs to other consumers as collateral damage doesn’t strike me as consistent with impartiality where I am also participating in the system as a consumer. (I will make an exception for financial costs imposed on Big Ag that it cannot effectively pass on to consumers.)
There’s also a tendency to give all (or at least too much) of the moral credit to the donor, as if donating money were the only input to successful action. It seems that some of the credit should go to people who work at animal-welfare organizations, even non-EA ones. Frankly, corporate campaigns wouldn’t work too well if the public didn’t care at all and wouldn’t punish corporations that refused to make welfare commitments. As with third-party financial costs, I think there is a difference in how we should think about these things when deciding whether to donate and when thinking about how much offset credit we can take.
Some orgs have limited room for more funding compared to the number of omnivorous consumers out there. I’d be uneasy with publishing an offset estimate that would be woefully inadequate if more than a tiny number of people chose to offset. There’s likely to always be a limit on the number of individuals who can effectively offset, but adding orgs with room for more funding (e.g., those in the cultured meat space) should significantly increase that number.
In addition to philosophical concerns about offsetting in general, I sense two practical concerns flowing more specifically from low figures:
The idea that an omnivore’s involvement in the factory-farming system can be offset for (e.g.) a nickel a day risks trivializing the magnitude of the harm. Something that can be fixed for that amount doesn’t feel like a big problem.
It is unvirtuous to derive net benefit from the factory-farming system. If you’re saving $25/month on your food spend due to factory farming’s existence, and then kicking back $1 to offset, you are still retaining 96% of the financial benefit of the system. I don’t think the net benefit has to be calculated as the difference between what non-negative-welfare products would cost today and what one’s actual spend is. I would be somewhat more lenient and characterize it as the difference between what one spends today and what one would need to spend for the same consumption in a world where non-negative-welfare products were the norm.
I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but was a bit surprised to find zero EA organizations registered with the Combined Federal Campaign, the US federal government employee charitable donation drive. I think the federal HR office (“OPM”) is exaggerating a bit when it calls the CFC “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign,” but it is true that there are several million federal employees out there. Admittedly, CFC numbers are down over the last few years, but there are still about 80K donors a year.
There are some user fees, red tape, and overhead costs, meaning the CFC is not a great way to move a lot of money. But it might be worthwhile for certain organizations with potentially broader appeal (e.g., AMF, GiveWell) to experiment with an application as a form of low-cost advertising and see if they get (m)any bites. I’m less confident in that after seeing the decline in CFC participation over the last six years. And maybe perhaps some orgs have done so in past years and found out it wasn’t effective enough for the investment.
I see that IPA (which is on the EA organization list) is registered. Maybe organizations considering going through this process should ask IPA how it’s worked out so far.
Is it normal for nonprofits to initiate this? Rather than employees of the Federal gov’t who are invested? Most employee giving programs I’m aware of have primarily employee-initiated ways of adding charities.
Only the nonprofit can initiate it, see the “user fees” link above.
I started donations today to two smaller EA nonprofits, but noticed that both had seemed to set up donation platforms in a more expensive way than necessary. I wrote both organizations (which I won’t name) and will complete donations to both. But I thought it was worth noting that optimizing fees could be low-hanging fruit. In addition to saving a few percent of donations, donors really don’t like the idea that a non-trivial chunk of their donations will be consumed by credit card companies and platforms.
Some options to consider in the US for organizations with 501(c)(3) status:
Meta doesn’t charge platform fees or credit card fees for donations made in Facebook fundraisers or through Meta Pay, whatever that is. I believe those route through the Network for Good DAF. A small nonprofit I advise (which is not part of the EA community) keeps a link to a current Facebook fundraiser on its homepage for exactly this reason.
Paypal doesn’t charge platform or card fees for donations made to its DAF through its Giving Fund, which routes funds through a DAF into the charity’s coffers. TLYCS is set up with them, for instance. My understanding is that, even if you don’t want to go that route, Paypal rates are somewhat lower for charities than the default rates if you get that set up.
I am less confident in—and haven’t recently researched—the best solution for donors who don’t want to go through Meta or Paypal. Donorbox is generally 2.3% for ACH transactions, 3.7% for cards, so that is worth checking as a benchmark against whatever an organization is using.
Although I’m sure various platforms offer various advantages to organizations and donors, my guess is that many EAs will be drawn to methods that reduce/eliminate fees if those do not involve any additional marginal work for the organization. My own reaction as a donor is to be impressed/pleased when an organization displays awareness about how to minimize transaction costs. (I am aware that I should be considering any extra cost to the organization, e.g., from handling paper checks, but it’s not obvious to me that there would be any from the three options listed above.)
So even if an organization decides to use a more expensive platform on its website for features or other reasons, it may still make sense to sign up for something more efficient as a secondary pathway and promote that where appropriate (e.g., on this forum during giving season).
Strong upvoted mainly to incentivise accompanying the pointing out of a potential problem with i) acknowledgement of counter-considerations and ideally ii) some contribution to the solution.
https://www.every.org/ is another free platform I’ve found through this forum
Much to my surprise, the SBF trial went ahead—and on time!
I’ve been mostly absent the last few months due to a personal/family situation, but one general reflection:
Much has been said about the importance of evaluating character in the wake of the FTX collapse. I’d also point out the importance of evaluating consistency of good judgment. From the outside perspective (but as a lawyer), SBF’s choices as a criminal defendant appear to reflect quite poor judgment.[1] I’d characterize it as well below average for college-educated defendants who are represented by counsel with enough resources to do a good job. I am less confident that this trend toward making a number of bad judgments could have been detected earlier, but I’d suggest that many people who make really bad decisions have a detectable history of making bad decisions in the past.
All that is to suggest that the community might want to screen for erratic judgment in addition to character and trustworthiness (C&T). Assessing C&T is hard; just ask any intelligence agency—which has polygraphs, FBI agents, intelligence information, and so forth that EA will never have. There are going to be cases in which the result is “mixed,” “middling,” or “not enough information to have decent error bars.” Assessing consistency of good judgment isn’t easy either, but at least we are trying to measure two things rather than just one.
I’d suggest that the combination of problematic character and a lack of consistent good judgment may be significantly more dangerous than either alone. I’m reminded of reports that 20% of business leaders may have traits associated with psychopathy. I’m not endorsing that statistic, and not equating untrustworthiness with psychopathy.
My thesis, rather, is that untrustworthy people who also display a lack of consistent good judgment may be particularly risky in synergistic ways. Thus, it may be prudent to treat a C&T rating of “mixed,” “middling,” or “not enough information” with a good-judgment rating of “poor” or even “mixed/middling” much the same as a C&T rating of “poor” as far as risk tolerance.
I can understand the decision not to plead guilty, especially since it sounds like it would have been a blind plea rather than a plea bargain. I would have made a blind plea in his shoes, but at least understand why he didn’t. And it’s hard to imagine a viable defense here that didn’t include taking the stand. But other stuff—the substack, personally contacting a witness, using a VPN, leaking derogatory information about a witness to the Times—is hard to justify as sound strategy, much less some galaxy-brained EV+ plan.
Do you have thoughts on how one might screen for “erratic judgment”? In particular: are there ways of screening for this which wouldn’t be well correlated with screens hiring managers already normally do?
I could imagine reference checks turning some of this up, for example, but reference checks are pretty standard thing that managers do anyway.
On “AI welfare should be an EA priority,” approximately how much EA talent/funding is “unrestricted”?
If, say, only 10% is unrestricted, 5% of that would be 0.5% of all EA talent/funding. The question then would be, roughly: should AI welfare be even a minor/non-trivial EA cause area? If 90% is unrestricted, then a “priority” would be 4.5% of all EA talent/funding = ~ should AI welfare be a considerable EA cause area?
The difference between those statements would influence where I placed on the agree-disagree continuum.
Last night, I quickly thumbed through the websites (and Ambitious Impact listings) of some smaller charities as I started thinking about my end of year giving plans.
I’d encourage smaller orgs to refer to something on their website dated within the past few months—an event, a dated blog post, etc. -- that the median website visitor will ~quickly see. This is particularly true if the website refers to more distant events, has older-dated blog posts, etc. Without some indicator of freshness, the visitor may be left uncertain whether the org is still meaningfully active and potentially worth funding. After all, the closure rate for small, new orgs is not low.
[Caveats: the thumbing was on mobile, while taking a bath, and at the end of a difficult day, so there could easily have been misses on my part]
Hot take: For posts not involving breaking news that may benefit from cooler reflection, the Forum should trial allowing a poster to petition the mods for a quiet period of 1 to 7 days before comments are allowed. This would need to be done pre-posting and a header would need to appear at the top of the post. For example, I think discussion on the Doing EA Better post would have benefitted from a quiet period.
I’m hesitant to extend the trial to breaking news because the risk of the delay being viewed as mods cutting off discussion is higher, and because I think people have a stronger interest in being able to promptly discuss stuff that happens externally to the Forum. Finally, no one “owns” breaking news, and the requirement for both the post author + a mod to concur is a safeguard against erroneous imposition of quiet periods.
I have thought about this, but concluded it had a big problem, which is commenters would just write their own top-level posts in response (rather than giving the original post a huge first mover advantage). I don’t think recent drama would have been improved by a proliferation of top-levels.
(Epistemic status: rather uncertain and tentative)
In the non-EA world, I tend to view special interest groups with some skepticism, and cheap/performative signaling by individuals with even more skepticism. But maybe EA needs a little more of both when it comes to “governance/internal politics” (G/IP) matters.
The norm here seems to be that, if you’re not happy about something, you should write a post—or at least a long substantive comment—about that. In other words, EA norms point toward relatively direct, high-involvement G/IP engagement compared to (e.g.) voting in a democratic republic. There’s a lot to be said for EA’s norms, especially as applied to more object-level disagreements. But there are also some real downsides, which I think were somewhat on display during the Manifest discussions:
Individuals with strong feelings on an issue are disproportionately likely to find high-cost methods of engagement worth using. This is a double-edged sword, as it will usually make the discussion a warped reflection of overall community sentiment. Outlier views will seem more prominent, while moderate views may be less likely to be expressed compared to their prevalence in the population.
High-cost engagement is . . . costly, and takes away from other things people might be writing about (or doing off-Forum). In the major “drama” threads, I think there comes a point at which no real progress is being made but we keep posting.
In contrast, special interest groups can be a more efficient way of developing norms and influencing “policy.” Advocacy organizations (e.g., gun-rights/gun-control groups in the US) can make more sophisticated arguments than individual members would have time to prepare. People who want to promote those positions can give time and resources to the advocacy organization, as well as publicly or privately endorsing the group by joining. This is low to moderate cost engagement, but it allows the resulting G/IP matter to reflect the overall community viewpoint more accurately than a world in which relatively high-cost engagement predominates. Although it doesn’t happen in electoral politics, one could imagine a world in which a few champions for each side conducted more of a dialogue than the free-for-all that is a hot Forum comment section.
Moreover, even cheap/performative signaling has its uses from a psychological perspective. People tend to feel better if they feel they’ve had a reasonable chance to express their views. Many have a felt need to distance themselves from things in their community that they find problematic—whether that be what they perceive as attempted censorship or as racism. I think that can be a relatively healthy way of reducing ~ cognitive dissonance between “X is not in accord with my values” and “I perceive that people in my community are doing X / that many in my community support X.”
In many cases, it seems desirable to enable this benefit at minimal cost. I submit that the major problem with people posting the meme de jour on their Meta profile / on X is that they think that doing so has somehow accomplished much of anything external to them. The inaccurate belief that posting something to your friends actually does something to combat the effects of global poverty can reduce the motivation to actually do something meaningful like donate to an effective charity. But if there is no effective action for the individual to take (e.g., because the Forum thread on the controversial topic has reached the point of no further meaningful progress being made), then this substitution effect may be good. Better that the person do something cheap and externally ineffective than something expensive and internally ineffective.
Random thoughts on grants (inspired by some recent posts):
Do (m)any grantmakers offer participation grants for certain unsuccessful grant applicants who submitted grants in good faith, to (help) defray the time and expense of applying? I briefly floated this idea at the end of a discussion about grants in medium-income countries, and I think it ties into a recent discussion about compensating applications for work trials to some extent.The grant-seeker and the grant-maker are semi-cooperatively producing a joint product of sorts—a good grant portfolio. Both incur costs to make that product happen. It seems that common practice is that the grant-seeker and the grant-maker both bear their own costs for unsuccessful grants, but I can’t think of any a priori reason that should be case vs. a potentially more satisfactory allocation of the burden.
And in the recent discussion about work tests, the consensus was that job applicants should be (and generally were) compensated for trial tasks that took a few hours—even though many of those tasks are standardized and thus do not have any substantive value for the would-be employer. Rather, they only have value to the semi-cooperative joint product of hiring the best employee. Even though both candidate and employer benefit from that process, we have (correctly, in my view) decided that the employer should bear more of the costs of the matching process by compensating the candidate for work trials.
Providing some minimal compensation for most unsuccessful applicants would presumably encourage more grant applications among the group to whom the offer was extended. The initial suggestion was to presumptively give such compensation to applicants from low/middle-income countries for various reasons, but one could imagine other objectives for selectively boosting applications (e.g., trying to encourage more applications among groups underrepresented in EA).
In my field (law), the court can kick out your case-initating document in a few different ways. That can include “with prejudice” (i.e., there is a fatal flaw that you can’t fix), “without prejudice” (i.e., you may be able to fix the weakness and can try again), or without prejudice to refiling after a certain event (e.g., you didn’t follow the proper process at the administrative agency but can come back after you complete those). For grantmakers who don’t want to offer more complete feedback, even knowing which of those categories a rejection generally falls into would be helpful, e.g.:
We just don’t think this is a viable idea absent a significant change in circumstances. You should consider moving on to another one.
We don’t think you are the right person for this idea. You should consider moving on to another one.
We think you need more experience. Consider reapplying once you have it.
There’s nothing wrong with this grant proposal, it just didn’t quite clear the funding bar this year (although it might have in prior years and might in future years).
Re: participation grants—I don’t know if I like the suggestion or not, but I want to point out that it’s significantly different from compensation on work tasks, in that paid work tasks are not the first stage of a hiring process. So orgs have control over who gets to do the work task to begin with. This probably reduces the number of people only doing it for that compensation, if not eliminating those entirely. With participation grants, this is IMO a problem you’ll encounter.
Agreed—I tried to account for this with weasel words like “most,” “good-faith,” and “presumptively.”
I know at least one of the prize contests this year offered participation prizes for good-faith submissions (e.g., GiveWell awarded 39 $500 participation prizes). I would be curious whether the judges felt there were a bunch of submissions that seemed engineered to just garner one of those prizes.
My hunch is the compensation-seeking problem is manageable if the grants are modest; it would be tricky for someone to figure out how to do enough to clear the good-faith/serious application bar while working quickly enough to make compensation-seeking an attractive approach. Presumably, there would be one participation grant per lifetime, unless the applicant was given specific encouragement to reapply on a prior round and reasonably addressed any suggestions given. Also, I wouldn’t be opposed to the grantmaker compensating for somewhat less than the value of the applicant’s time—both as a means of discouraging compensation-seeking, and because it’s not unreasonable for the would-be grantee to bear some of the costs of the joint product.
Edit: typo, should be not UNreasonable
I have five nieces and nephews (ages ~7-14) who I don’t see that often. They are old enough to understand helping others, and I’d like to start slowly nudging them in that direction (and with an effective bent) this holiday season. I don’t think any (or at least most) of them would really “get” a charitable gift in their honor without some sort of tangible object that might serve as a prompt to remember the gift. Of course, I would give such a gift in addition to a gift at the normative level for uncle-to-nibling gifts; having the expection of a desired toy replaced with a charitable gift would probably hurt my objective. It would very likely be in global health/development to make it palatable to the parents.
I’m aware of gift catalogs like this one from World Vision that offer various small items in exchange for a donation. And of course I could make the donation and the purchase separately. This kind of exercise is easier to do when you can make some sort of (possibly nebulous) connection between the donation and the item (e.g., here is an item made by the group of disadvantaged people who are helped by the donation). But effective programs are harder to convey in objects than give someone a cow, get a cow ornament for your holiday tree.
Any recommendations? (Also fine to say that my theory of change here is misguided, or that this just isn’t workable.)
People have given me Christmas gifts like this before! Most memorable were a colorful bracelet that was from an anti-malaria donation, and lottery-style scratch cards where the “wins” go to charity. I was very thankful for both, but also old enough to already care about the charity part.
Do your niblings have any strong moral opinions? At 14, at least, I was definitely old enough to have a couple moral/political opinions. I’m not sure contributing to a 14 y/o’s pet cause is particularly directly effective (even by the cause-preferences of their future-self). However, it could be a) show you know them well enough to know what they care about and b) demonstrate that a person can use resources to have an impact in the real world.
If they volunteer somewhere they care about, you could do a split donation; 50% to the place they volunteer so they can (hopefully) see the impact, and 50% to a related effective charity. Like 50% to a local hospital they volunteer at, at 50% to an effective global health org.
I’ve heard some younger kids go through vegetarian phases, so if that’s true of any of your niblings maybe something like a cute stuffed animal (highland cow?) that also donates to protecting that animal? Though hopefully you know their parents well enough that you won’t get in trouble if the kid ends up less willing to eat steak.
If they don’t have strong opinions yet but are curious about a topic, can you get them a book? For example, if the 14 y/o loves computers, you could get them something AI related. I really liked Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in high school, even though a lot of it went over my head. Less-technical high schoolers might prefer a book of philosophy, psychology, or fiction. (I know very little about kids younger than high school, but surely there are equivalents!)
Otherwise if you’re just going to get a physical gift from donating to a charity that your niblings don’t particularly care about, I’d prioritize that object also being something they would like independently of the donation. (ex. a cool bracelet they can wear to school, a classy notebook if they like to write, whatever)
Today’s shower thought: When strong downvoting a post, one should be required to specify a reason for the strong downvote (either from a list, or through text entry if no pre-made reason fits). These reasons should be publicly displayed, but not linked to individual voters. [Alternative: They should be displayed to the commenter who is being downvoted only.] This is not intended to apply to strong disagreevotes.
Getting downvoted isn’t fun, and I’ve seen a number of follow-up comments recently along the lines of “why am I being downvoted for this?” Right now, we generally don’t provide any meaningful feedback for people who are being downvoted. In some cases (including some where I didn’t vote at all), I’ve tried to provide feedback—e.g., that particular language could be seen as “premature and unfriendly without allowing [an organization] time for a response”—which I hope has been sometimes helpful. But I’m wondering whether there is a broader way to give people some feedback.
The other reason that I think a reasons-giving requirement might make sense is that it serves as a tiny stop-and-think moment. It interrupts the all-too-human tendency to reach for the strong-downvote icon when one viscerally disagrees with a post, and reminds the user what the generally appropriate reason for strong downvotes are.
Interesting if it was possible to quickly pick between common reasons, but don’t agree it should be required
Does anyone have a sense of the volume of EA donations made to funds in a non-tax-advantaged way?
I see GWWC’s recommendation to generally give to funds even if not tax-advantaged, but I wonder if there is a better solution around the problem for everyone other than the government—at least in Global Health & Development. (I don’t know other cause areas well enough to opine.)
AMF is tax-deductible in a lot of places. All GWWC recommended GH&D funds are ultimately powered by GiveWell at their core. Even All Grants is expected to send 75% to one of the four top charities. Given AMF’s status as a GiveWell top charity, it’s safe to say that a lot of money will flow through GiveWell to AMF.
It would seem advantageous to have a simple way in which a donor could tell GiveWell and AMF: “I have $1000 that I would like to give to GiveWell Top Charities Fund (or whatever), but I am hereby giving it directly to AMF for tax reasons rather than only being able to afford $700 to GiveWell. Please compensate.” GiveWell could then treat (say) $850 of those monies as akin to an advance grant payment to AMF, and reduce a future grant by that amount. (Alternatively, if it were seen as important for the money to go only to GiveWell-endorsed efforts, AMF could agree to park $850 of the donation in a safe investment until GiveWell “grants” that money as part of its normal grants process.)
The end result is that AMF is $150 better off than if the donor had given directly to GiveWell, as it received $1000 from the donor instead of $850 from GiveWell. The GiveWell fund is $150 better off too—it lost a $700 contribution from the donor but got “credited” for an $850 grant to AMF, leaving $150 more to distribute to other organizations than in the donor-to-GiveWell scenario.
Whether the operations setup would be worthwhile depends on amount of tax-disadvantaged monies flowing into the GH&D funds.
(I am aware of the donation swap and actually have some active offers to swap at the moment to help out non-US donors. However, the approach above doesn’t require finding compatible counterparties, and allows money flows to ultimately track the fund’s allocation that is what is desired. My example has an even split of the “surplus” between AMF and the fund, but that was for simplicity rather than an expression of my position. Finally, one could use a different charity as the partner, but I think AMF is the most widely-deductible GiveWell Top Charity and so would cover more donors for a fixed amount of work.)
Does anyone know if this notice that FTX is writing entities to ask for return of donations is limited to political contributions? That seems to be the focus, but I’m not sure why the estate wouldn’t seek return of all donated funds at this time.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ftx-debtors-send-messages-to-recipients-of-avoidable-donations-301738948.html?tc=eml_cleartime
Based on some recent discussions of “passive philantrophy,” I am wondering if there are circumstances in which people spend money at cross purposes and might be agreeable to offset their monies and donate them to an effective charity instead. One possible example follows.
In any US political campaign where the candidates/parties have roughly equal funding resources, the utility of donating $1 to my preferred candidate is roughly equal to the utility of depriving the opposing candidate of $1. Stated another way, if I donate $100 to a SuperPAC boosting Candidate X, and you donate $100 to one boosting her opponent Candidate ~X, $200 gets essentially wasted because the donations’ effect cancels each other out.
Would it be possible to develop a website that attempts to capture this “wasted” money and route it to an effective charity? Ideally, if X boosters committed $1200 and ~X boosters committed $1000, the website would send $200 to the SuperPAC boosting X and send the other $2000 to an effective charity. I wonder if there could even be a way to get a tax writeoff for the people whose money got send over to the effective charity (campaign contributions usually are not tax-deductible).
Roadblocks/drawbacks:
(1) Campaign finance law is complex, so no guarantees there!
(2) Donors would have to feel confident that someone wasn’t gaming the system. For instance, if I was indifferent to American politics but wanted to support the effective charity, I could basically double my donation by committing funds to the candidate who was behind on the website. I suppose that only netting 50% would solve that problem if no better solution could be found. Back to the hypo, X’s SuperPAC would get $700, ~X’s SuperPAC would get $500, and the effective charity would get $1000.
(3) This could potentially backfire and lead to more money flooding into American politics, although my late-night ideas are usually not popular enough to have effects of that magnitude. :)
(4) To the extent that big donors contribute for influence rather than for ideological reasons, this probably wouldn’t work (although maybe they get a certificate certifying that they destroyed/offset $Y of the opponent’s funds that they could peddle for influence?)
Have you seen this post? Getting money out of politics and into charity
Hadn’t to my knowledge (but I can’t rule out the possibility that I had seen it in previous forum lurking a while ago and just don’t remember). One conscious trigger, at least, was hearing about how SBF and others at FTX gave tens of millions to different parties and shaking my head at the waste (this was before the origin of those funds was fully known).
Caveat: I am a lawyer but am not speaking with any real assessment of the merits beyond a skim of the FEC letter back in 2015. The viewpoint below is based on general principles of civil litigation strategy and is not something anyone should actually rely on without talking to a campaign-finance expert.
My initial reaction to the threat of legal challenges, if someone thinks there is enough potential value here, is to commit to funding this appropriately and just let them sue. If you were particularly worried about litigation, set it up the first time so that the only candidate pair is from the general-election presidential race. That should sharply limit the number of entities that have Article III standing to file a lawsuit, maybe just to the candidates and their campaign committees themselves. Make one of them risk the negative publicity of filing a lawsuit to shut down a non-profit website that was benefitting impoverished people in Africa. In any event, do not set up a pair in a House or Senate race where one of the candidates is a sure loser (who makes a good sacrificial lamb for a political party that wants the website shut down) or a clear winner (who can probably risk a reputational hit).
In a sense, this creates a bifurcation of risk—there’s a risk the website just doesn’t catch on, and a risk of litigation, but probably a low risk of both at the same time. What rational candidate is going to commit money to litigation to secure an a small amount of additional funds for themselves when: (1) the amount isn’t that much; (2) they alone bear optics/PR risk; (3) their opponent gets the exact same benefit they get without incurring any of the costs? For litigation to make sense, you’d either need to believe the amount of money coming through this site was going to be pretty significant, or would need to believe that the marginal benefit of an extra dollar to your campaign was much greater than for your opponent.
Next, any litigation would likely be—like many election-related challenges—only practically winnable in accelerated proceedings. With a favorable FEC opinion letter, few district judges would grant emergency relief to a litigant like a temporary restraining order. In ordinary litigation, the federal courts can take a while to get around to deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction. Would a judge be inclined to put this high on their priority list? Depends on the judge, but I think it would only get priority if pretty successful. The ship may well have sailed by then—and note that a decision by a district court is often not a particularly effective weapon for other litigants who want to sue you in future elections. (For the lawyers, if there is a concern about offensive collateral estoppel, I think the solution is for the next attempt to be with a different, unrelated non-profit with whom the first non-profit is not in privity.)
If the court did grant a preliminary injunction, I would ask the court to (1) require the organization to pass through 100% of funds to both sides, but (2) require the opposing party to post an injunction bond in the amount lost to charity [at least to its own candidate]. Injunction bonds aren’t required as often as I think they should be, but it would be worth a shot. Alternatively, you could ask that the organization be allowed to continue but required to lock up the money pending final judgment.
I’d also consider whether to stick a nice “poison pill” in the user agreement. Suppose that there were an adverse litigation outcome—what should happen to the money? You could try adding a provision that it has to be returned to the donors, attempting to deprive the plaintiff of any concrete benefit from winning the suit in the first place. They would be no better off, unless and until their would-be donors chose to give them the money. And, if I were a candidate, I would be worried that some percentage of my donors would be annoyed at my litigation antics and that my opponent’s donor re-gift rate would be higher.
I suspect Professor Zolt didn’t move forward in part because (if I understand correctly) his for-profit entity was going to be funded by a tiny sliver of the funds flowing through the entity. That’s probably not enough revenue to justify defending this in litigation. On the other hand, if the monies were going to something like GiveDirectly (more legible) or AMF, the EA community “captures” the vast majority of the value of the offset funds. So the community should more willing to accept a quarter-million in expected litigation costs if the idea has upside to drive at least several times that to effective charities.
Finally, a less effective but potentially “safer” way to do something along the same lines would be to form a SuperPAC. I am reminded of the one Stephen Colbert did back in his Colbert Report days as a parody of the campaign-finance system. That’s a much harder attack surface, as the main attraction of SuperPACs is that they are . . . unregulated.
I would have to check whether a SuperPAC can donate to another SuperPAC, which would be an easy way of getting rid of the non-netted funds. Simply returning the non-netted funds might be another option. Actually running ads would be awkward. Colbert donated most of the proceeds of his super-PAC to non-political charities when he dissolved it, so shipping the netted funds to the chosen charit(ies) at the end of the election shouldn’t be a problem. The biggest downside of this approach, in addition to probably being less legible to would-be donors, is that donations to a superPAC definitely are not tax-deductible (vs. I don’t know if netted donations to something like I originally suggested would be).