My sense is people are realizing this, based on the disagree-votes, but just for the record: No, the most important part of any FTX investigation is of course not that we prevent causing further harm to EA, lol. It’s to prevent causing further harm to the world. Indeed, this kind of naive-consequentialist reasoning seems like one of the key components of how FTX happened in the first place.
I really appreciate when someone puts an explanation for why they down-voted something I wrote :D
Indeed, I knew that what I wrote would be unpopular when I wrote it. And maybe it just looks like I’m an old cynic polluting the idealism of youth. But I don’t agree that it’s naive. If anything, the naivete lies on the other side.
How can an EA not realise that damaging the EA movement is damaging to the world?
So you need to balance the potential damage to the world thought damage to EA vs the potential of avoiding damage to the world from the investigation. I have not seen any comments mentioning this, so I wrote about it, because it is important.
I’m not clear in what sense anything the EA movement did with SBF has damaged the world, unless you believe that SBF would have behaved ethically were it not for the EA movement, and that EA’s actively egged him on to commit fraud. I presume that when you refer to “naive-consequentialist reasoning”, you are referring to what happened within FTX (in addition to my own reasoning of course!), rather than to something that someone in the EA movement (other than SBF) did?
I don’t know the details, but I would expect that the donations that we received from him were spent very effectively and had a positive impact on many people. (If that is not the case, that should be investigated, I’d agree!). So it is highly likely that the impact of the EA movement was to make the net impact of SBF’s fraud significantly less negative overall.
Of course, I may be wrong—I am interested to hear any specific ways in which people believe that the EA movement might be responsible for the damage SBF caused to investors, or to anyone other than the EA movement itself.
But my reading of this is that SBF caused damage to EA, and not the other way round. And there was very little that EA could have done to prevent that damage other than somehow realising, unlike plenty of very experienced investors, that he was committing fraud.
So (and again I may be wrong) I don’t see how an EA investigation will prevent harm to the world.
But I do very clearly see how an investigation could cause damage to the EA movement. The notion that we can do an investigation of what we did wrong in the SBF case and not have it perceived externally as a validation of the negative stereotype that the SBF case has projected on the EA movement is optimistic at best.
I’m not sure if this position comes from people who mostly associate with other EA’s and are just unaware of the PR problems that SBF has caused the EA movement.
Remember that there as been a long and very public trial, so all the facts are out there and public. People are already convinced that SBF did bad things.
The EA movement just needs to keep doing what we can to minimise the public’s connection between SBF and EA.
Again, to finish, I do appreciate that many people disagree with this perspective. It seems like ethically we should investigate, especially if we believe we have nothing to hide. But that’s just not how the world works.
And I really appreciate that you explained your disagreement.
My sense is people are realizing this, based on the disagree-votes, but just for the record: No, the most important part of any FTX investigation is of course not that we prevent causing further harm to EA, lol. It’s to prevent causing further harm to the world. Indeed, this kind of naive-consequentialist reasoning seems like one of the key components of how FTX happened in the first place.
Thank you for this comment.
I really appreciate when someone puts an explanation for why they down-voted something I wrote :D
Indeed, I knew that what I wrote would be unpopular when I wrote it. And maybe it just looks like I’m an old cynic polluting the idealism of youth. But I don’t agree that it’s naive. If anything, the naivete lies on the other side.
How can an EA not realise that damaging the EA movement is damaging to the world?
So you need to balance the potential damage to the world thought damage to EA vs the potential of avoiding damage to the world from the investigation. I have not seen any comments mentioning this, so I wrote about it, because it is important.
I’m not clear in what sense anything the EA movement did with SBF has damaged the world, unless you believe that SBF would have behaved ethically were it not for the EA movement, and that EA’s actively egged him on to commit fraud. I presume that when you refer to “naive-consequentialist reasoning”, you are referring to what happened within FTX (in addition to my own reasoning of course!), rather than to something that someone in the EA movement (other than SBF) did?
I don’t know the details, but I would expect that the donations that we received from him were spent very effectively and had a positive impact on many people. (If that is not the case, that should be investigated, I’d agree!). So it is highly likely that the impact of the EA movement was to make the net impact of SBF’s fraud significantly less negative overall.
Of course, I may be wrong—I am interested to hear any specific ways in which people believe that the EA movement might be responsible for the damage SBF caused to investors, or to anyone other than the EA movement itself.
But my reading of this is that SBF caused damage to EA, and not the other way round. And there was very little that EA could have done to prevent that damage other than somehow realising, unlike plenty of very experienced investors, that he was committing fraud.
So (and again I may be wrong) I don’t see how an EA investigation will prevent harm to the world.
But I do very clearly see how an investigation could cause damage to the EA movement. The notion that we can do an investigation of what we did wrong in the SBF case and not have it perceived externally as a validation of the negative stereotype that the SBF case has projected on the EA movement is optimistic at best.
I’m not sure if this position comes from people who mostly associate with other EA’s and are just unaware of the PR problems that SBF has caused the EA movement.
Remember that there as been a long and very public trial, so all the facts are out there and public. People are already convinced that SBF did bad things.
The EA movement just needs to keep doing what we can to minimise the public’s connection between SBF and EA.
Again, to finish, I do appreciate that many people disagree with this perspective. It seems like ethically we should investigate, especially if we believe we have nothing to hide. But that’s just not how the world works.
And I really appreciate that you explained your disagreement.