“We should do things by the book”: Agree 6⁄10 → 9⁄10
This feels like a confusing update, largely due to “by the book” being a vague phrase.
I agree that FTX’s “move fast and break things” culture seems to be upstream of some of their problems, and this is a point in favor of, for example, separating the bank accounts of legally distinct entities (which is a “by the book” practice).
But if I imagine a world in which EA organizations caught/prevented the FTX issues, I think this would have required a bunch of non-”by the book” work. I think very few nonprofits would do the kind of due diligence that would have been required to uncover this level of fraud in one of their donors, and if EA’s had been compelled to do so it would have been through arguments like “‘by the book’ behavior underrates the severity of tail risks so therefore you should do this weird stuff despite it being costly and different from ‘the book.’” So I think you could make the opposite update, for a reasonable definition of “do things by the book”.
One concrete example from your document: you say that an implication of the update that we should do more things “by the book” is that we should do more impact evaluations. I think impact evaluations are great, but I’m confused what “book” you are referring to which states that nonprofits should do more impact evaluation. Normal nonprofits do ~0 impact eval. Arguably all of EA is a reaction to the fact that normal nonprofits do ~0 impact eval. If you think we should do more impact evals then this does not seem to be justifiable by an appeal to what normal/best practice/”by the book” nonprofits do.
This feels like a confusing update, largely due to “by the book” being a vague phrase.
I agree that FTX’s “move fast and break things” culture seems to be upstream of some of their problems, and this is a point in favor of, for example, separating the bank accounts of legally distinct entities (which is a “by the book” practice).
But if I imagine a world in which EA organizations caught/prevented the FTX issues, I think this would have required a bunch of non-”by the book” work. I think very few nonprofits would do the kind of due diligence that would have been required to uncover this level of fraud in one of their donors, and if EA’s had been compelled to do so it would have been through arguments like “‘by the book’ behavior underrates the severity of tail risks so therefore you should do this weird stuff despite it being costly and different from ‘the book.’” So I think you could make the opposite update, for a reasonable definition of “do things by the book”.
One concrete example from your document: you say that an implication of the update that we should do more things “by the book” is that we should do more impact evaluations. I think impact evaluations are great, but I’m confused what “book” you are referring to which states that nonprofits should do more impact evaluation. Normal nonprofits do ~0 impact eval. Arguably all of EA is a reaction to the fact that normal nonprofits do ~0 impact eval. If you think we should do more impact evals then this does not seem to be justifiable by an appeal to what normal/best practice/”by the book” nonprofits do.