I’m confused about how to relate to speaking about these issues. I feel like I can speak to several but not all of the questions you raise (as well as some things you don’t directly ask about). I’m not sure there’s anything too surprising there, but I’d I feel generically good about the EA community having more information.
But—this is a topic which invites drama, in a way that I fear is sometimes disproportionate. And while I’m okay (to a fault) sharing information which invites drama for me personally, I’d feel bad about potentially stirring it up for other people.
That makes me hesitant. And I’m not sure how much my speaking would really help (of course I can’t speak with anything like the authority of an external investigation). So my default is not to speak, at least yet (maybe in another year or two?).
Open to hearing arguments or opinions that that’s the wrong meta-level orientation. (An additional complication is that some-but-not-all of the information I have came via my role on the board of EV, which makes me think it’s not properly my information to choose whether to share. But this can be regarded as a choice about the information which does feel like it’s mine to choose what to do with.)
This seems like the wrong meta-level orientation to me. A meta-level orientation that seems better to me is something like “Truth and transparency have strong global benefits, but often don’t happen enough because they’re locally aversive. So assume that sharing information is useful even when you’re not concretely sure how it’ll help, and assume by default that power structures (including boards, social networks, etc) are creating negative externalities insofar as they erect barriers to you sharing information”.
The specific tradeoff between causing drama and sharing useful information will of course be situation-dependent, but in this situation the magnitude of the issues involved feels like it should significantly outweigh concerns about “stirring up drama”, at least if you make attempts to avoid phrasing the information in particularly-provocative or careless ways.
Thanks, this felt clarifying (and an important general point).
I think I’m now at “Well I’d maybe rather share my information with an investigator who would take responsibility for working out what’s worth sharing publicly and what’s extraneous detail; but absent that, speaking seems preferable to not-speaking. So I’ll wait a little to see whether the momentum in this thread turns into anything, but if it’s looking like not I’ll probably just share something.”
One way you could engage would be to share your thoughts on when, generally speaking, you think an independent investigation would be warranted. You wouldn’t have to go into any specific details about this particular incident, you could discuss this in terms of high level principles and considerations that you think should guide the decision.
Happy to share some thoughts (and not thereby signalling that I plan not to say more about the object-level):
Independent investigations are by their nature somewhat weird
You get someone coming in with less context, which makes it harder for them to discover things (relative to someone with more context)
But they also get to dodge group think or similar issues
There are, as I see it, two different purposes of independent investigations:
actually gaining insight into the situation
being able to credibly signal that the conclusions are fair/independent/untainted by bias or groupthink
There’s a spectrum of different notions of “independent” which could be at play here:
Independent = largely but not completely unconnected with the FTX cluster
Independent = unconnected with the FTX cluster, but still in the EA sphere
Independent = unconnected with EA
The greater the independence, the higher the costs of the investigation, but if it’s done well, the more robust the benefits
Whether it’s worth having an independent investigation, and of what kind, depends on:
The relative costs of different types of investigation
How much people might reasonably learn
How much pain there is from distrust that might be helpfully dispelled by an independent investigation
What risks, if any, are thereby created? (ammunition for media hit-pieces? chance of sparking vexatious lawsuits?)
In this case:
Given the existence of the EV-commissioned investigation by Mintz (at significant expense), it seems somewhat weird to me that EV didn’t publish more of a summary of the findings
I think there are lots of reasons they might not have wanted to publish the full investigation, and feel relatively sympathetic to their not having done that
I can imagine there are various risks-of-exposure from publishing even a summary, and they may have been advised by professionals whose job it is to monitor and guard against exposure (lawyers and/or PR folks) to play it safe
Nevertheless my guess is that if I were privy to the considerations, I would have thought that the better path involved sharing rather more with the EA community
At this point I don’t think it’s likely to be worth another fully-independent investigation, as from a law firm
They’re very expensive
Some of the most interesting questions will ultimately be judgement calls, which means that in order to derive value from it you have to have high trust in the judgement of the people performing the investigation
Some of the trust it would facilitate doesn’t seem threatened (e.g. there doesn’t seem to be any concern that there was a huge cover-up or anything)
I do think it might well be worth an investigation by someone (or some few) in EA, but not connected to FTX
Partially because there seems to be a good amount of appetite for it from the EA community; partially because I think that’s probably at the sweet spot of “people most likely to have useful critical takes about how to do things”
The principal challenge IMO is finding someone(s) who will:
Have good sensible takes on things
Be sufficiently non-consequentialist that their takes can be trusted to be “fair assessments” not “things they think will be most likely to lead to good outcomes”
Have minimal (if any) conflicts of interest
Ideally no connections to FTX
Also not beholden to anyone who might be reasonably criticised by an investigation (or whom outside observers might suspect of having that status)
Can credibly signal the above, so that their takes can be trusted by a broader audience
Be willing to spend time on it (and motivated to do a good job)
I think if there was someone who looked good for this, and it looked like a serious and legitimate attempt at an independent investigation, then it probably wouldn’t be too challenging to get people to put in some money to pay for their time, and it wouldn’t be too challenging to secure cooperation from enough people-that-they’d-like-to-interview
This is then kind of a headhunting task; but who would take responsibility for that?
It ideally shouldn’t be the folks who have too much in the way of connections with FTX
Else the choice of person might be seen as suspect?
There’s maybe a problem where a lot of the central community infrastructure does have some FTX connections, and other folks don’t naturally read this as their responsibility?
I basically agree with this take. I think an investigation conducted from within the EA community (by someone(s) with a bit of distance from FTX) makes a lot more sense than Mintz v2. Ideally, the questions this investigation would seek to answer would be laid out and published ahead of time. Would also be good to pre-publish the principles that would determine what information would be redacted or kept confidential from public communication around findings.
This is then kind of a headhunting task; but who would take responsibility for that?
If we had one or more ombudspeople or explicit community representation on the CEA board (which I really wish we did), this would be a great role for them. As things stand, my low-conviction take is that this would be a reasonable thing for the new non-OP connected EV board members to take on, or perhaps the community health team. I have some reservations about having CEA involved in this, but also give a lot of weight to Rebecca saying “CEA is a logical place to house” an investigation.
Personally, I’d consider Rethink Priorities to be kind of the default choice to do an investigation; I’ve seen others toss their name around too. It’d be nice to have some process for generating other candidates (e.g. community health coming up with a few) and then some method of finding which of the options had the most community buy-in (e.g. ranked choice voting among everyone who has filled out the EA survey sometime in the last three years; I don’t think this would be an ideal methodology but it’s at least loosely in the ballpark of ways of finding an investigator that the community would find credible).
Ideally, the questions this investigation would seek to answer would be laid out and published ahead of time.
Not sure I buy this, on principle—surely the investigation should have remit to add questions as it goes if they’re warranted by information it’s turned up? Maybe if the questions for this purpose are more broad principles than specific factual ones it would make sense to me.
Would also be good to pre-publish the principles that would determine what information would be redacted or kept confidential from public communication around findings.
This checks out to me.
As things stand, my low-conviction take is that [headhunting for investigators] would be a reasonable thing for the new non-OP connected EV board members to take on, or perhaps the community health team.
Have you directly asked these people if they’re interested (in the headhunting task)? It’s sort of a lot to just put something like this on someone’s plate (and it doesn’t feel to me like a-thing-they’ve-implicitly-signed-up-for-by-taking-their-role).
In general my instinct would be more like “work out who feels motivated to have an investigation happen, and then get one (or more) of them to take responsibility for the headhunting”.
surely the investigation should have remit to add questions as it goes if they’re warranted by information it’s turned up?
Yeah, absolutely. What I had in mind when I wrote this was this excerpt from an outstanding comment from Jason on the Mintz investigation; I’d hope these ideas could help inform the structure of a future investigation:
How The Investigation Could Have Actually Rebuilt Lost Trust and Confidence
There was a more transparent / credible way to do this. EVF could have released, in advance, an appropriate range of specific questions upon which the external investigator was being asked to make findings of fact—as well as a set of possible responses (on a scale of “investigation rules this out with very high confidence” to “investigation shows this is almost certain”). For example—and these would probably have several subquestions each—one could announce in advance that the following questions were in scope and that the investigator had committed to providing specific answers:
Did anyone associated with EVF ever raise concerns about SBF being engaged in fraudulent activity? Did they ever receive any such concerns?
Did anyone associated with EVF discourage, threaten, or seek to silence any person who had concerns about illegal, unethical, or fraudulent conduct by SBF? (cf. the “Will basically threatened Tara” report).
When viewed against the generally-accepted norms for donor vetting in nonprofits, was anyone associated with EVF negligent, grossly negligent, or reckless in evaluating SBF’s suitability as a donor, failing to raise concerns about his suitability, or choosing not to conduct further investigation?
That kind of pre-commitment would have updated my faith in the process, and my confidence that the investigation reached all important topics. If EVF chose not to release the answers to those questions, it would have known that we could easily draw the appropriate inferences. Under those circumstances—but not the actual circumstances—I would view willingness to investigate as a valuable signal.
Have you directly asked these people if they’re interested (in the headhunting task)? It’s sort of a lot to just put something like this on someone’s plate (and it doesn’t feel to me like a-thing-they’ve-implicitly-signed-up-for-by-taking-their-role).
I have not. While nobody in EA leadership has weighed in on this explicitly, the general vibe I get is “we don’t need an investigation, and in any case it’d be hard to conduct and we’d need to fund it somehow.” So I’m focusing on arguing the need for an investigation, because without that the other points are moot. And my assumption is that if we build sufficient consensus on the need for an investigation, we could sort out the other issues. If leaders think an investigation is warranted but the logistical problems are insurmountable, they should make that case and then we can get to work on seeing if we can actually solve those logistical problems.
Hmm, I think perhaps I have different takes on the basic mechanisms that make sense here?
Here’s a scattershot of background takes:
It makes sense to first check for consensus
People’s sense of “need for an investigation” isn’t binary
Lots of people may think “all else equal that would be nice to have” (as they think about many things), without it ever rising to the top of their internal importance-stack
Probably people who were closer to things generally feel less need for investigation
(since they’re more likely to think they understand the basic dynamics)
If there isn’t consensus on how important this is, I don’t expect it to be easy to reach one
Since presumably one driver of different views is different people having access to different information (exactly the kind of thing an investigation might help with)
In general things go best when they’re done by people who feel the need for them
… and then given those, my position is that if you want it to happen, the right step is less like “try to create a consensus that it should happen” and more like “try to find/make an alliance of people who want it, and then make sure there’s someone taking responsibility for the specific unblocking steps”. (I guess this view is not very much about the investigation, and more like my generic take on how to make things happen.)
Honestly my view of how important it is that the whole project happen will also be somewhat mediated by whether it can find a decently strong lead and can attract some moderate amount of funding. Since these would be indicative of “people really want answers”, and I think the whole project is more valuable if that demand exists.
I’m confused about how to relate to speaking about these issues. I feel like I can speak to several but not all of the questions you raise (as well as some things you don’t directly ask about). I’m not sure there’s anything too surprising there, but I’d I feel generically good about the EA community having more information.
But—this is a topic which invites drama, in a way that I fear is sometimes disproportionate. And while I’m okay (to a fault) sharing information which invites drama for me personally, I’d feel bad about potentially stirring it up for other people.
That makes me hesitant. And I’m not sure how much my speaking would really help (of course I can’t speak with anything like the authority of an external investigation). So my default is not to speak, at least yet (maybe in another year or two?).
Open to hearing arguments or opinions that that’s the wrong meta-level orientation. (An additional complication is that some-but-not-all of the information I have came via my role on the board of EV, which makes me think it’s not properly my information to choose whether to share. But this can be regarded as a choice about the information which does feel like it’s mine to choose what to do with.)
This seems like the wrong meta-level orientation to me. A meta-level orientation that seems better to me is something like “Truth and transparency have strong global benefits, but often don’t happen enough because they’re locally aversive. So assume that sharing information is useful even when you’re not concretely sure how it’ll help, and assume by default that power structures (including boards, social networks, etc) are creating negative externalities insofar as they erect barriers to you sharing information”.
The specific tradeoff between causing drama and sharing useful information will of course be situation-dependent, but in this situation the magnitude of the issues involved feels like it should significantly outweigh concerns about “stirring up drama”, at least if you make attempts to avoid phrasing the information in particularly-provocative or careless ways.
Thanks, this felt clarifying (and an important general point).
I think I’m now at “Well I’d maybe rather share my information with an investigator who would take responsibility for working out what’s worth sharing publicly and what’s extraneous detail; but absent that, speaking seems preferable to not-speaking. So I’ll wait a little to see whether the momentum in this thread turns into anything, but if it’s looking like not I’ll probably just share something.”
One way you could engage would be to share your thoughts on when, generally speaking, you think an independent investigation would be warranted. You wouldn’t have to go into any specific details about this particular incident, you could discuss this in terms of high level principles and considerations that you think should guide the decision.
Happy to share some thoughts (and not thereby signalling that I plan not to say more about the object-level):
Independent investigations are by their nature somewhat weird
You get someone coming in with less context, which makes it harder for them to discover things (relative to someone with more context)
But they also get to dodge group think or similar issues
There are, as I see it, two different purposes of independent investigations:
actually gaining insight into the situation
being able to credibly signal that the conclusions are fair/independent/untainted by bias or groupthink
There’s a spectrum of different notions of “independent” which could be at play here:
Independent = largely but not completely unconnected with the FTX cluster
Independent = unconnected with the FTX cluster, but still in the EA sphere
Independent = unconnected with EA
The greater the independence, the higher the costs of the investigation, but if it’s done well, the more robust the benefits
Whether it’s worth having an independent investigation, and of what kind, depends on:
The relative costs of different types of investigation
How much people might reasonably learn
How much pain there is from distrust that might be helpfully dispelled by an independent investigation
What risks, if any, are thereby created? (ammunition for media hit-pieces? chance of sparking vexatious lawsuits?)
In this case:
Given the existence of the EV-commissioned investigation by Mintz (at significant expense), it seems somewhat weird to me that EV didn’t publish more of a summary of the findings
I think there are lots of reasons they might not have wanted to publish the full investigation, and feel relatively sympathetic to their not having done that
I can imagine there are various risks-of-exposure from publishing even a summary, and they may have been advised by professionals whose job it is to monitor and guard against exposure (lawyers and/or PR folks) to play it safe
Nevertheless my guess is that if I were privy to the considerations, I would have thought that the better path involved sharing rather more with the EA community
At this point I don’t think it’s likely to be worth another fully-independent investigation, as from a law firm
They’re very expensive
Some of the most interesting questions will ultimately be judgement calls, which means that in order to derive value from it you have to have high trust in the judgement of the people performing the investigation
Some of the trust it would facilitate doesn’t seem threatened (e.g. there doesn’t seem to be any concern that there was a huge cover-up or anything)
I do think it might well be worth an investigation by someone (or some few) in EA, but not connected to FTX
Partially because there seems to be a good amount of appetite for it from the EA community; partially because I think that’s probably at the sweet spot of “people most likely to have useful critical takes about how to do things”
The principal challenge IMO is finding someone(s) who will:
Have good sensible takes on things
Be sufficiently non-consequentialist that their takes can be trusted to be “fair assessments” not “things they think will be most likely to lead to good outcomes”
Have minimal (if any) conflicts of interest
Ideally no connections to FTX
Also not beholden to anyone who might be reasonably criticised by an investigation (or whom outside observers might suspect of having that status)
Can credibly signal the above, so that their takes can be trusted by a broader audience
Be willing to spend time on it (and motivated to do a good job)
I think if there was someone who looked good for this, and it looked like a serious and legitimate attempt at an independent investigation, then it probably wouldn’t be too challenging to get people to put in some money to pay for their time, and it wouldn’t be too challenging to secure cooperation from enough people-that-they’d-like-to-interview
This is then kind of a headhunting task; but who would take responsibility for that?
It ideally shouldn’t be the folks who have too much in the way of connections with FTX
Else the choice of person might be seen as suspect?
There’s maybe a problem where a lot of the central community infrastructure does have some FTX connections, and other folks don’t naturally read this as their responsibility?
I basically agree with this take. I think an investigation conducted from within the EA community (by someone(s) with a bit of distance from FTX) makes a lot more sense than Mintz v2. Ideally, the questions this investigation would seek to answer would be laid out and published ahead of time. Would also be good to pre-publish the principles that would determine what information would be redacted or kept confidential from public communication around findings.
If we had one or more ombudspeople or explicit community representation on the CEA board (which I really wish we did), this would be a great role for them. As things stand, my low-conviction take is that this would be a reasonable thing for the new non-OP connected EV board members to take on, or perhaps the community health team. I have some reservations about having CEA involved in this, but also give a lot of weight to Rebecca saying “CEA is a logical place to house” an investigation.
Personally, I’d consider Rethink Priorities to be kind of the default choice to do an investigation; I’ve seen others toss their name around too. It’d be nice to have some process for generating other candidates (e.g. community health coming up with a few) and then some method of finding which of the options had the most community buy-in (e.g. ranked choice voting among everyone who has filled out the EA survey sometime in the last three years; I don’t think this would be an ideal methodology but it’s at least loosely in the ballpark of ways of finding an investigator that the community would find credible).
Not sure I buy this, on principle—surely the investigation should have remit to add questions as it goes if they’re warranted by information it’s turned up? Maybe if the questions for this purpose are more broad principles than specific factual ones it would make sense to me.
This checks out to me.
Have you directly asked these people if they’re interested (in the headhunting task)? It’s sort of a lot to just put something like this on someone’s plate (and it doesn’t feel to me like a-thing-they’ve-implicitly-signed-up-for-by-taking-their-role).
In general my instinct would be more like “work out who feels motivated to have an investigation happen, and then get one (or more) of them to take responsibility for the headhunting”.
Yeah, absolutely. What I had in mind when I wrote this was this excerpt from an outstanding comment from Jason on the Mintz investigation; I’d hope these ideas could help inform the structure of a future investigation:
I have not. While nobody in EA leadership has weighed in on this explicitly, the general vibe I get is “we don’t need an investigation, and in any case it’d be hard to conduct and we’d need to fund it somehow.” So I’m focusing on arguing the need for an investigation, because without that the other points are moot. And my assumption is that if we build sufficient consensus on the need for an investigation, we could sort out the other issues. If leaders think an investigation is warranted but the logistical problems are insurmountable, they should make that case and then we can get to work on seeing if we can actually solve those logistical problems.
Hmm, I think perhaps I have different takes on the basic mechanisms that make sense here?
Here’s a scattershot of background takes:
It makes sense to first check for consensus
People’s sense of “need for an investigation” isn’t binary
Lots of people may think “all else equal that would be nice to have” (as they think about many things), without it ever rising to the top of their internal importance-stack
Probably people who were closer to things generally feel less need for investigation
(since they’re more likely to think they understand the basic dynamics)
If there isn’t consensus on how important this is, I don’t expect it to be easy to reach one
Since presumably one driver of different views is different people having access to different information (exactly the kind of thing an investigation might help with)
In general things go best when they’re done by people who feel the need for them
… and then given those, my position is that if you want it to happen, the right step is less like “try to create a consensus that it should happen” and more like “try to find/make an alliance of people who want it, and then make sure there’s someone taking responsibility for the specific unblocking steps”. (I guess this view is not very much about the investigation, and more like my generic take on how to make things happen.)
Honestly my view of how important it is that the whole project happen will also be somewhat mediated by whether it can find a decently strong lead and can attract some moderate amount of funding. Since these would be indicative of “people really want answers”, and I think the whole project is more valuable if that demand exists.