[Question] Who are the other senior members of the EA community that have serious character issues?

[supesanon]

It seems that SBF had some character issues that were systematically overlooked by senior members in the community. The natural follow up question is, who else has been overlooked and might act in ways that cause a lot of harm in the future?

[Evan R. Murphy]

I think it’s a good question, but I’m unsure whether a public discussion calling out names is the right way to go. And I think it might be net negative.

On the one hand, publicly calling people out could raise red flags about potential bad actors in the EA community early and in a transparent way. On the other hand, it could lead to witch hunts, false positives, etc. You can also imagine that whatever bad actors are in the community would start retaliating and listing good actors here who are their enemies, so it could cause a lot of confusion and infighting. (Think about the way Donald Trump uses public discourse.)

I think private discussions about this with others you trust are probably a good idea, to help guide personal decisions about who else to trust, work for, donate to etc. And this issue might make more decentralization actionable. For example, to mitigate bad actor risk, we might just have a background expectation that there is always X% chance that any individual in the EA community—even someone who is currently beloved—actually turns out to be a bad actor. And so no individual in the community should be responsible for more than Y% of the money, power, reputation etc. of the community to give EA more resilience against the inevitability of bad actors popping up here and there.

There may be other systemic ways to manage the risk too without making publicly outing suspected bad actors a regular thing. I’m also still open to the idea that public bad actor callouts might be a good idea, but I think it’s a really delicate thing and I’d like to see a convincing argument/​plan for how to make the discussion be productive before I would support it.

[supesanon]

On the one hand, publicly calling people out could raise red flags about potential bad actors in the EA community early and in a transparent way. On the other hand, it could lead to witch hunts, false positives, etc. You can also imagine that whatever bad actors are in the community would start retaliating and listing good actors here who are their enemies, so it could cause a lot of confusion and infighting. (Think about the way Donald Trump uses public discourse.)

I don’t think these concerns hold up. EAs are highly engaged and can distinguish between legitimate and bullshit claims.

I think private discussions about this with others you trust are probably a good idea, to help guide personal decisions about who else to trust, work for, donate to etc. And this issue might make more decentralization actionable.

This would work if not for the power imbalance that arise between bad actors that are senior members in the community and normal community members.

There may be other systemic ways to manage the risk too without making publicly outing suspected bad actors a regular thing. I’m also still open to the idea that public bad actor callouts might be a good idea, but I think it’s a really delicate thing and I’d like to see a convincing argument/​plan for how to make the discussion be productive before I would support it

EA considers very seriously the issue of morality and ethics. Is it that much to ask that the leaders of a community that takes matters of morality and ethics so seriously to have its leaders held up to high moral standards? Unless this morality stuff is just for fun and EAs don’t actually believe in the moral and ethical systems they claim to believe in. Reminds me of this paper

Avoiding addressing this issue will only lead to further pain down the line. I think it is very strange that SBF had so many inconsistencies between his claimed moral positions and his behavior and nobody noticed it. It suggests that maybe his character didn’t seem that strange compared to other senior EA members.

[Evan R. Murphy]

I have thoughts on other points you made but just wanted to comment on this one bit for the moment:

I think it is very strange that SBF had so many inconsistencies between his claimed moral positions and his behavior and nobody noticed it.

Habryka noticed. His full comment is at that link but here are some key excerpts (emphasis mine):

Like, to be clear, I think the vast majority of EAs had little they could have or should have done here. But I think that I, and a bunch of people in the EA leadership, had the ability to actually do something about this.

I sent emails in which I warned people of SBF. I had had messages written but that I never sent that seem to me like if I had sent them they would have actually caused people to realize a bunch of inconsistencies in Sam’s story. I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all uncomfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.

...

I do also think it is pretty unlikely we could have prevented FTX exploding, though I do think we could have likely prevented FTX being super embedded in the EA Community, having a ton of people rely on its funding, and having Sam be held up in tons of places as a paragon of the EA community. Like, I think we fucked up pretty hard by saying for a few years that we think Sam did great by our values, when I think it was already pretty clear by that point that he quite likely wasn’t.

[supesanon]

You’re right. I guess people noticed but there was no meaningful action taken. Oh well I guess until next time.

[sphor]

Sadly, lol.