1. I don’t think any EA group outside of FTX would take responsibility for having done a lot ($60k+ worth) of due-diligence and investigation of FTX. My impression is that OP considered this as not their job, and CEA was not at all in a position to do this (to biased, was getting funded by FTX). In general, I think that our community doesn’t have strong measures in place to investigate funders. For example, I doubt that EA orgs have allocated $60k+ to investigate Dustin Moskovitz (and I imagine he might complain if others did!). My overall impression was that this was just a large gap that the EA bureaucracy failed at. I similarly think that the “EA bureaucracy” is much weaker / less powerful than I think many imagine it being, and expect that there are several gaps like this. Note that OP/CEA/80k/etc are fairly limited organizations with specific agendas and areas of ownership.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea that OP is not responsible for anything in this case. But CEA/EV should have done at least the due diligence that fit their official policies developed in the aftermath of Ben Delo affair. I think it’s reasonable for the community to ask whether or not that actually happened. Also, multiple media outlets have reported that CEA did do an investigation after the Alameda dispute. So it would be nice to know if that actually happened and what it found.
I don’t think the comparison about investigating Dustin is particularly apt, as he didn’t have all the complaints/red flags that SBF did. CEA received credible warnings from multiple sources about a CEA board member, and I’d like to think that warrants some sort of action. Which raises another question: if CEA received credible serious concerns about a current board member, what sort of response would CEA’s current policies dictate?
Re: gaps, yes, there are lots of gaps, and the FTX affair exposed some of them. Designing organizational and governance structures that will fix those gaps should be a priority, but I haven’t seen credible evidence that this is happening. So my default assumption is that these gaps will continue to cause problems.
2. I think there were some orange/red flags around, but that it would have taken some real investigation to figure out how dangerous FTX was. I have uncertainty in how difficult it would have been to notice that fraud or similar were happening (I previously assumed this would be near impossible, but am less sure now, after discussions with one EA in finance). I think that the evidence / flags around then were probably not enough to easily justify dramatically different actions at the time, without investigation—other than the potential action of doing a lengthy investigation—but again, that doing one would have been really tough, given the actors involved.
Note that actually pulling off a significant investigation, and then taking corresponding actions, against an actor as powerful as SBF, would be very tough and require a great deal of financial independence.
I very much agree that we shouldn’t be holding EA leaders/orgs/community to a standard of “we should have known FTX was a huge fraud”. I mentioned this in my post, but want to reiterate it here. I feel like this is point where discussions about EA/FTX often get derailed. I don’t believe the people calling for an independent investigation are doing so because they think EA knew/should have known that FTX was a fraud; most of us have said that explicitly.
That said, given what was known at the time, I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that it would have been smart to do some things differently on the margin, e.g. 80k putting SBF on less on a pedestal. A post-mortem could help identify those things and provide insights on how to do better going forward.
3. My impression is that being a board member at CEA was incredibly stressful/intense, in the following months after the FTX collapse. My quick guess is that most of the fallout from the board would have been things like, “I just don’t want to have to deal with this anymore” rather than particular disagreements with the organizations. I didn’t get the impression that Rebecca’s viewpoints/criticisms were very common for other board members/execs, though I’d be curious to get their takes.
This seems like a very important issue. I think one big problem is that other board members/execs are disincentivized to voice concerns they might have, and this is one of the things an independent investigation could help with. Learning that several, or none of, the other board members had concerns similar to Rebecca’s would be very informative, and an investigation could share that sort of finding publicly without compromising any individual’s privacy.
4. I think that OP / CEA board members haven’t particularly focused on / cared about being open and transparent with the EA community. Some of the immediate reason here was that I assume lawyers recommended against speaking up then—but even without that, it’s kind of telling how little discussion there has been in the last year or so.
I suggest reading Dustin Moskovitz’s comments for some specific examples. Basically, I think that many people in authority (though to be honest, basically anyone who’s not a major EA poster/commenter) find “posting to the EA forum and responding to comments” to be pretty taxing/intense, and don’t do it much.
Remember that OP staff members are mainly accountable to their managers, not the EA community or others. CEA is mostly funded by OP, so is basically similarly accountable to high-level OP people. (accountable means, “being employed/paid by” here)
Pretty much agree with everything you wrote here. Though I want to emphasize that I think this is a pretty awful outcome, and could be improved with better governance choices such as more community representation, and less OP representation, on CEA’s board.
If OP doesn’t want to be accountable to the EA community, I think that’s suboptimal though their prerogative. But if CEA is going to take responsibility for community functions (e.g. community health, running effectivealtruism.org, etc.) there should be accountability mechanisms in place.
I also want to flag that an independent investigation would be a way for people in authority to get their ideas (at least on this topic) out in a less taxing and/or less publicly identifiable way than forum posting/commenting.
5. In terms of power, I think there’s a pretty huge power gap between the funders and the rest of the EA community. I don’t think that OP really regards themselves as responsible for or accountable to the EA community. My impression is that they fund EA efforts opportunistically, in situations where it seems to help both parties, but don’t want to be seen as having any long-term obligations or such. We don’t really have strong non-OP funding sources to fund things like “serious investigations into what happened.” Personally, I find this situation highly frustrating, and think it gets under-appreciated.
Very well put!
6. My rough impression is that from the standpoint of OP / CEA leaders, there’s not a great mystery around the FTX situation, and they also don’t see it happening again. So I think there’s not that much interest here into a deep investigation.
I think Zvi put it well: “a lot of top EA leaders ‘think we know what happened.’ Well, if they know, then they should tell us, because I do not know. I mean, I can guess, but they are not going to like my guess. There is the claim that none of this is about protecting EA’s reputation, you can decide whether that claim is credible.”
Here’s an update from CEA’s operations team, which has been working on updating our practices for handling donations. This also applies to other organizations that are legally within CEA (80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Forethought Foundation, and EA Funds).
“We are working with our lawyers to devise and implement an overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors and donations going forward.
We’ve engaged a third party who now conducts KYC (know your client) due diligence research on all major donors (>$20K a year).
We have established a working relationship with TRM who conduct compliance and back-tracing for all crypto donations.”
I honestly doubt that this process would have, or should have, flagged anything about SBF. But I can imagine it helping in other cases, and I think it’s important for CEA to actually be following its stated procedures.
I hope that the “overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors” that was put together post-Delo in 2021 was well designed. But it’s also worth noting Zach has also discussed “increasing the rigor of donor due diligence” in 2023. Maybe the 2023 improvements took the process from good to great. Maybe they suggest that the 2021 policies weren’t very good. It’d be great for the new and improved policy, and how it differs from the previous policy, to be shared (as Zach has suggested it will be) so other orgs can leverage it and to help the entire community understand what specific improvements have been made post-FTX.
I don’t think the comparison about investigating Dustin is particularly apt, as he didn’t have all the complaints/red flags that SBF did.
And—if we are talking about 2024 -- there’s another reason it doesn’t seem like a great comparison to me. Researching catastrophic risks (to one’s movement or otherwise) is generally only compelling to the extent that you can mitigate the likelihood and/or effect of those risks. Given the predominance of a single funder, investigating certain risks posed by that funder may not lead to actionable information to reduce risk no matter what the facts are.[1] At some level of vulnerability, the risk becomes akin to the risk of a massive life-extinguishing asteroid crashing into Earth in the next week; I’m just as dead if I know about it a week in advance rather than seconds in advance.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about. The more likely Dustin is to turn out to be perpetrating a fraud (which I think is very unlikely!) the more the marginal person should be earning to give. And the more projects should be taking approaches that conserve runway at the cost of making slower progress toward their goals.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about.
Agree—I don’t think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here.
To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years’ clawback of prior OP grants, and it’s not clear that getting months to years’ worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!)
Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn’t likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.
Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea that OP is not responsible for anything in this case. But CEA/EV should have done at least the due diligence that fit their official policies developed in the aftermath of Ben Delo affair. I think it’s reasonable for the community to ask whether or not that actually happened. Also, multiple media outlets have reported that CEA did do an investigation after the Alameda dispute. So it would be nice to know if that actually happened and what it found.
I don’t think the comparison about investigating Dustin is particularly apt, as he didn’t have all the complaints/red flags that SBF did. CEA received credible warnings from multiple sources about a CEA board member, and I’d like to think that warrants some sort of action. Which raises another question: if CEA received credible serious concerns about a current board member, what sort of response would CEA’s current policies dictate?
Re: gaps, yes, there are lots of gaps, and the FTX affair exposed some of them. Designing organizational and governance structures that will fix those gaps should be a priority, but I haven’t seen credible evidence that this is happening. So my default assumption is that these gaps will continue to cause problems.
I very much agree that we shouldn’t be holding EA leaders/orgs/community to a standard of “we should have known FTX was a huge fraud”. I mentioned this in my post, but want to reiterate it here. I feel like this is point where discussions about EA/FTX often get derailed. I don’t believe the people calling for an independent investigation are doing so because they think EA knew/should have known that FTX was a fraud; most of us have said that explicitly.
That said, given what was known at the time, I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that it would have been smart to do some things differently on the margin, e.g. 80k putting SBF on less on a pedestal. A post-mortem could help identify those things and provide insights on how to do better going forward.
This seems like a very important issue. I think one big problem is that other board members/execs are disincentivized to voice concerns they might have, and this is one of the things an independent investigation could help with. Learning that several, or none of, the other board members had concerns similar to Rebecca’s would be very informative, and an investigation could share that sort of finding publicly without compromising any individual’s privacy.
Pretty much agree with everything you wrote here. Though I want to emphasize that I think this is a pretty awful outcome, and could be improved with better governance choices such as more community representation, and less OP representation, on CEA’s board.
If OP doesn’t want to be accountable to the EA community, I think that’s suboptimal though their prerogative. But if CEA is going to take responsibility for community functions (e.g. community health, running effectivealtruism.org, etc.) there should be accountability mechanisms in place.
I also want to flag that an independent investigation would be a way for people in authority to get their ideas (at least on this topic) out in a less taxing and/or less publicly identifiable way than forum posting/commenting.
Very well put!
I think Zvi put it well: “a lot of top EA leaders ‘think we know what happened.’ Well, if they know, then they should tell us, because I do not know. I mean, I can guess, but they are not going to like my guess. There is the claim that none of this is about protecting EA’s reputation, you can decide whether that claim is credible.”
What was EV’s official policy post-Ben Delo?
As of February 2021:
I honestly doubt that this process would have, or should have, flagged anything about SBF. But I can imagine it helping in other cases, and I think it’s important for CEA to actually be following its stated procedures.
I hope that the “overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors” that was put together post-Delo in 2021 was well designed. But it’s also worth noting Zach has also discussed “increasing the rigor of donor due diligence” in 2023. Maybe the 2023 improvements took the process from good to great. Maybe they suggest that the 2021 policies weren’t very good. It’d be great for the new and improved policy, and how it differs from the previous policy, to be shared (as Zach has suggested it will be) so other orgs can leverage it and to help the entire community understand what specific improvements have been made post-FTX.
And—if we are talking about 2024 -- there’s another reason it doesn’t seem like a great comparison to me. Researching catastrophic risks (to one’s movement or otherwise) is generally only compelling to the extent that you can mitigate the likelihood and/or effect of those risks. Given the predominance of a single funder, investigating certain risks posed by that funder may not lead to actionable information to reduce risk no matter what the facts are.[1] At some level of vulnerability, the risk becomes akin to the risk of a massive life-extinguishing asteroid crashing into Earth in the next week; I’m just as dead if I know about it a week in advance rather than seconds in advance.
Of course, certain ethical duties would still exist.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about. The more likely Dustin is to turn out to be perpetrating a fraud (which I think is very unlikely!) the more the marginal person should be earning to give. And the more projects should be taking approaches that conserve runway at the cost of making slower progress toward their goals.
Agree—I don’t think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here.
To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years’ clawback of prior OP grants, and it’s not clear that getting months to years’ worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!)
Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn’t likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.
Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible.