4⁄2 Update: A former board member of Effective Ventures US, Rebecca Kagan, has shared that she resigned from the board in protest last year, evidently in part because of various core EAs’ resistance to there being any investigation into what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried. “These mistakes make me very concerned about the amount of harm EA might do in the future.”
Oliver Habryka says that I’m correct that EA still hasn’t yet conducted any sort of investigation about what happened re SBF/FTX, beyond the narrow investigation into whether EV was facing legal risk:
I am quite confident there is no such investigation. I have been trying to convince people to do such a thing for like 1.5 years, but appetite for it seems low among leadership.
I might even offer for Lightcone to do it, if we could get EA orgs to collaborate.
(I’ve had conversations with Kagan, Habryka, and a bunch of other EAs about this in the past, and I knew Kagan’s post was in the pipeline, though the stuff they’ve said on this topic has been independent of me and would have been written in my absence.)
Someone else messaged me to say that they thought there had been an investigation, but after talking to staff at CEA, they’ve confirmed again that no investigation has ever taken place.
Find someone to run an investigation into how EA individuals and organizations could have better handled the FTX situation.
Barriers:
People who did things that were bad or will make them look bad will not want to tell you about it. Everyone’s lawyers will have told them not to talk about anything.
Existing work / resources:
EV’s investigation has a defined scope that won’t be relevant to all the things EAs want to know, and it won’t necessarily publish any of its results.
Oliver Habryka and friends have done a discussion series informally looking at what happened and how trust within EA related to the problem.
[Update Apr. 5: Julia tells me “I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly.”]
So, bizarre as it seems, the situation does seem to be as it appears: there’s been literally no action on this in the ~17 months since FTX imploded.
Will MacAskill’s appearance on Sam Harris podcast is out now, and I’m very happy to hear the new details from Will about what happened from his perspective.
But while he talks (at 56:00) about a lot of individual EAs undergoing an enormous amount of “self-reflection, self-scrutiny” in the wake of FTX’s collapse, and he notes that a lot of EA’s leadership has been replaced with new leadership, I don’t consider this a replacement for the whole (obvious, from my perspective) “actually pay someone to look into what happened and write up a postmortem” thing. If anything I’d have expected EAs to have multiple such write-ups by now so we could compare different perspectives on what happened, not literally zero.
4⁄4 Update: An EA who was involved in EA’s early response to the FTX disaster has give me their take on why there hasn’t yet been an investigation. They think EA leaders (at least, the ones they talked to a lot at the time) had “little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs”, and had more to do with things like “general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties”.
See this comment for a lot more details, and a short response from Habryka.
Also, some corrections: I said that “there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year”, which I think risks overstating how narrow the investigation probably was. I also said that Julia Wise had “been calling for the existence of such an investigation”, when from her perspective she “listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly”. Again, see the comment for details.
Julia tells me “I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly.”]
It actually was not just neutrally listed as a “possible” project, because it was the fourth bullet point under “Projects and programs we’d like to see” here.
4⁄2 Update: A former board member of Effective Ventures US, Rebecca Kagan, has shared that she resigned from the board in protest last year, evidently in part because of various core EAs’ resistance to there being any investigation into what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried. “These mistakes make me very concerned about the amount of harm EA might do in the future.”
Oliver Habryka says that I’m correct that EA still hasn’t yet conducted any sort of investigation about what happened re SBF/FTX, beyond the narrow investigation into whether EV was facing legal risk:
(I’ve had conversations with Kagan, Habryka, and a bunch of other EAs about this in the past, and I knew Kagan’s post was in the pipeline, though the stuff they’ve said on this topic has been independent of me and would have been written in my absence.)
Someone else messaged me to say that they thought there had been an investigation, but after talking to staff at CEA, they’ve confirmed again that no investigation has ever taken place.
Julia Wise and Ozzie Gooen apparently also called for an investigation, a full five months ago:
[Update Apr. 5: Julia tells me “I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly.”]
So, bizarre as it seems, the situation does seem to be as it appears: there’s been literally no action on this in the ~17 months since FTX imploded.
Will MacAskill’s appearance on Sam Harris podcast is out now, and I’m very happy to hear the new details from Will about what happened from his perspective.
But while he talks (at 56:00) about a lot of individual EAs undergoing an enormous amount of “self-reflection, self-scrutiny” in the wake of FTX’s collapse, and he notes that a lot of EA’s leadership has been replaced with new leadership, I don’t consider this a replacement for the whole (obvious, from my perspective) “actually pay someone to look into what happened and write up a postmortem” thing. If anything I’d have expected EAs to have multiple such write-ups by now so we could compare different perspectives on what happened, not literally zero.
4⁄4 Update: An EA who was involved in EA’s early response to the FTX disaster has give me their take on why there hasn’t yet been an investigation. They think EA leaders (at least, the ones they talked to a lot at the time) had “little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs”, and had more to do with things like “general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties”.
See this comment for a lot more details, and a short response from Habryka.
Also, some corrections: I said that “there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year”, which I think risks overstating how narrow the investigation probably was. I also said that Julia Wise had “been calling for the existence of such an investigation”, when from her perspective she “listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly”. Again, see the comment for details.
It actually was not just neutrally listed as a “possible” project, because it was the fourth bullet point under “Projects and programs we’d like to see” here.