I don’t think “advising people to earn to give is inherently really bad” is necessary to reach the conclusion that there is a case for EA responsibility here. There exist many ideas that are not inherently bad, but yet it is irresponsible to advocate for them in certain ways / without certain safeguards. An ends-justifies-the-means approach to making money was a foreseeable response to EtG advocacy. Did EA actors do enough to discourage that kind of approach when advocating for EtG?
I don’t think it’s necessary, no. But I do think some early critics of EtG were motivated at least partly by a general anticapitalist case that business or at least finance careers were generically morally problematic in themselves.
Fair, but that wouldnt be a steelmanned—or even fairly balanced—version of criticisms of EtG. It’s the weaker part of a partial motivation held by some critics.
True. We should make sure any particular safeguard wasn’t in place around how people advocated for it before assuming it would have helped though. For what it’s worth my sense is that a much more culpable thing was not blowing the whistle on Sam’s bad behaviour at early Alameda even after Will and other leaders-I forget exactly who, if it’s even known-were informed about it. That mistake was almost certainly far less consequential for the people harmed by FTX (I don’t think it would have stopped the fraud; it might have protected EA itself), but I strongly suspect it was more knowably wrong at the time than anything anyone did or said about EtG as a general idea.
I think there are two separate but somewhat intertwined chains of inquiry under discussion here:
A historical inquiry: what happened in this case, what safeguards failed, what would have helped but wasn’t in place?
A ~first-principles re-evaluation of EtG based on an update: The catastrophic failure of the supposedly most successful instance of EtG should update us that we underestimated the risk and severity of EtG downsides. That suggests a broader re-examination of potential risks and safeguards, which may look more appropriate than they did before the update.
By analogy, whenever there is a school shooting, I don’t think it is inappropriate to analyze and discuss things merely because they would not have prevented that specific school shooting. However, those doing so should be careful to avoiding claiming that their preferred intervention would have been effective in the case in the news.
I don’t think “advising people to earn to give is inherently really bad” is necessary to reach the conclusion that there is a case for EA responsibility here. There exist many ideas that are not inherently bad, but yet it is irresponsible to advocate for them in certain ways / without certain safeguards. An ends-justifies-the-means approach to making money was a foreseeable response to EtG advocacy. Did EA actors do enough to discourage that kind of approach when advocating for EtG?
I don’t think it’s necessary, no. But I do think some early critics of EtG were motivated at least partly by a general anticapitalist case that business or at least finance careers were generically morally problematic in themselves.
Fair, but that wouldnt be a steelmanned—or even fairly balanced—version of criticisms of EtG. It’s the weaker part of a partial motivation held by some critics.
True. We should make sure any particular safeguard wasn’t in place around how people advocated for it before assuming it would have helped though. For what it’s worth my sense is that a much more culpable thing was not blowing the whistle on Sam’s bad behaviour at early Alameda even after Will and other leaders-I forget exactly who, if it’s even known-were informed about it. That mistake was almost certainly far less consequential for the people harmed by FTX (I don’t think it would have stopped the fraud; it might have protected EA itself), but I strongly suspect it was more knowably wrong at the time than anything anyone did or said about EtG as a general idea.
I think there are two separate but somewhat intertwined chains of inquiry under discussion here:
A historical inquiry: what happened in this case, what safeguards failed, what would have helped but wasn’t in place?
A ~first-principles re-evaluation of EtG based on an update: The catastrophic failure of the supposedly most successful instance of EtG should update us that we underestimated the risk and severity of EtG downsides. That suggests a broader re-examination of potential risks and safeguards, which may look more appropriate than they did before the update.
By analogy, whenever there is a school shooting, I don’t think it is inappropriate to analyze and discuss things merely because they would not have prevented that specific school shooting. However, those doing so should be careful to avoiding claiming that their preferred intervention would have been effective in the case in the news.
Agreed