My reading (and of course I could be completlely wrong) is that SBF wanted to invest in Twitter (he seems to have subsequently pitched the same deal through Michael Grimes), and Will was helping him out. I don’t imagine Will felt it any of his business to advise SBF as to whether or not this was a good move. And I imagine SBF expected the deal to make money, and therefore not to have any cost for his intended giving.
Part of the issue here is that people have been accounting the bulk of SBF’s net worth as “EA money”. If you phrase the question as “Should EA invest in Twitter?” the answer is no. EA should probably also not invest in Robinhood or SRM. If SBF’s assets truly were EA assets, we ought to have liquidated them long ago and either spent them or invested them reasonably. But they weren’t.
I feel like anyone reaching out to Elon could say “making it better for the world” because that’s exactly what would resonate with Elon. It’s probably what I’d say to get someone on my side and communicate I want to help them change the direction of Twitter and “make it better.”
I disagree with the implied principle. E.g., I think it’s good for me to help animal welfare and global poverty EAs with their goals sometimes (when I’m in an unusually good position to help out), even though I think their time and money would be better spent on existential risk mitigation.
Agreed that a principle of ‘only cooperate on goals you agree with’ is too strong. On the object-level, if MacAskill was personally neutral or skeptical on the object-level question of whether SBF should buy Twitter, do you think he should have helped SBF out?
When is cooperation inappropriate? Maybe when the outcome you’re cooperating on is more consequential (in the bad direction, according to your own goals) than the expected gains from establishing reciprocity.
This would have been the largest purchase in EA history, replacing much or most of FTXFF with “SBF owns part of Twitter”. I think when the outcome is as consequential as that, we should hold cooperators responsible as if they were striving for the outcome, because the effects of helping SBF buy Twitter greatly outweigh the benefits from improving Will’s relationship with SBF (which I model as already very good).
if MacAskill was personally neutral or skeptical on the object-level question of whether SBF should buy Twitter, do you think he should have helped SBF out
If Will had no reason to think SBF was a bad egg, then I’d guess he should have helped out even if he thought the thing was not the optimal use of Sam’s money. (While also complaining that he thinks the investment is a bad idea.)
If Will thought SBF was a “bad egg”, then it could be more important to establish influence with him, because you don’t need to establish influence (as in ‘willingness to cooperate’) with someone who is entirely value-aligned with you.
My reading (and of course I could be completlely wrong) is that SBF wanted to invest in Twitter (he seems to have subsequently pitched the same deal through Michael Grimes), and Will was helping him out. I don’t imagine Will felt it any of his business to advise SBF as to whether or not this was a good move. And I imagine SBF expected the deal to make money, and therefore not to have any cost for his intended giving.
I agree that it’s possible SBF just wanted to invest in Twitter in a non-EA capacity. My comment was a response to Habryka’s comment which said:
I think it could be a cost-effective use of $3-10 billion (I don’t know where you got the $8-15 billion from, looks like the realistic amounts were closer to 3 billion). My guess is it’s not, but like, Twitter does sure seem like it has a large effect on the world, both in terms of geopolitics and in terms of things like norms for the safe development of technologies, and so at least to me I think if you had taken Sam’s net-worth at face-value at the time, this didn’t seem like a crazy idea to me.
If SBF did just want to invest in Twitter (as an investor/as a billionaire/as someone who is interested in global politics, and not from an EA perspective) and asked Will for help, that is a different story. If that’s the case, Will could still have refused to introduce SBF to Elon, or pushed back against SBF wanting to buy Twitter in a friend/advisor capacity (SBF has clearly been heavily influenced by Will before), but maybe he didn’t feel comfortable with doing either of those.
You’re right to say people had been assuming SBF’s wealth belonged to EA: I had. In the legal sense it wasn’t, and we paid a price for that. I think it was fair to argue that the wealth ‘rightfully’ belonged to the EA community, in the sense that SBF should defer to representatives of EA on how it should be used, and would be defecting by spending a few billion on personal interests. The reason for that kind of principle is to avoid a situation where EA is captured or unduly influenced by the idiosyncratic preferences of a couple of mega-donors.
The answer is different for each side of your slash.
I see two kinds of relationships EA can have to megadonors:
uneasy, arms’ length, untrusting, but still taking their money
friendly, valorizing, celebratory, going to the same parties, conditional on the donor ceding control of a significant fraction of their wealth to a donor-advised fund (rather than just pledging to give)
My reading (and of course I could be completlely wrong) is that SBF wanted to invest in Twitter (he seems to have subsequently pitched the same deal through Michael Grimes), and Will was helping him out. I don’t imagine Will felt it any of his business to advise SBF as to whether or not this was a good move. And I imagine SBF expected the deal to make money, and therefore not to have any cost for his intended giving.
Part of the issue here is that people have been accounting the bulk of SBF’s net worth as “EA money”. If you phrase the question as “Should EA invest in Twitter?” the answer is no. EA should probably also not invest in Robinhood or SRM. If SBF’s assets truly were EA assets, we ought to have liquidated them long ago and either spent them or invested them reasonably. But they weren’t.
It’s hard to read the proposal as only being motivated by a good business investment, because Will says in his opening DM:
[sorry for multiple comments, seems better to split out separate points]
I feel like anyone reaching out to Elon could say “making it better for the world” because that’s exactly what would resonate with Elon. It’s probably what I’d say to get someone on my side and communicate I want to help them change the direction of Twitter and “make it better.”
Will helping SBF out is de facto making it more likely to happen, and so he should only do it if he thinks it’s a good move.
I disagree with the implied principle. E.g., I think it’s good for me to help animal welfare and global poverty EAs with their goals sometimes (when I’m in an unusually good position to help out), even though I think their time and money would be better spent on existential risk mitigation.
Agreed that a principle of ‘only cooperate on goals you agree with’ is too strong. On the object-level, if MacAskill was personally neutral or skeptical on the object-level question of whether SBF should buy Twitter, do you think he should have helped SBF out?
When is cooperation inappropriate? Maybe when the outcome you’re cooperating on is more consequential (in the bad direction, according to your own goals) than the expected gains from establishing reciprocity.
This would have been the largest purchase in EA history, replacing much or most of FTXFF with “SBF owns part of Twitter”. I think when the outcome is as consequential as that, we should hold cooperators responsible as if they were striving for the outcome, because the effects of helping SBF buy Twitter greatly outweigh the benefits from improving Will’s relationship with SBF (which I model as already very good).
If Will had no reason to think SBF was a bad egg, then I’d guess he should have helped out even if he thought the thing was not the optimal use of Sam’s money. (While also complaining that he thinks the investment is a bad idea.)
If Will thought SBF was a “bad egg”, then it could be more important to establish influence with him, because you don’t need to establish influence (as in ‘willingness to cooperate’) with someone who is entirely value-aligned with you.
I agree that it’s possible SBF just wanted to invest in Twitter in a non-EA capacity. My comment was a response to Habryka’s comment which said:
If SBF did just want to invest in Twitter (as an investor/as a billionaire/as someone who is interested in global politics, and not from an EA perspective) and asked Will for help, that is a different story. If that’s the case, Will could still have refused to introduce SBF to Elon, or pushed back against SBF wanting to buy Twitter in a friend/advisor capacity (SBF has clearly been heavily influenced by Will before), but maybe he didn’t feel comfortable with doing either of those.
You’re right to say people had been assuming SBF’s wealth belonged to EA: I had. In the legal sense it wasn’t, and we paid a price for that. I think it was fair to argue that the wealth ‘rightfully’ belonged to the EA community, in the sense that SBF should defer to representatives of EA on how it should be used, and would be defecting by spending a few billion on personal interests. The reason for that kind of principle is to avoid a situation where EA is captured or unduly influenced by the idiosyncratic preferences of a couple of mega-donors.
Are you arguing that EA shouldn’t associate with / accept money from mega-donors unless they give EA the entirety of their wealth?
The answer is different for each side of your slash.
I see two kinds of relationships EA can have to megadonors:
uneasy, arms’ length, untrusting, but still taking their money
friendly, valorizing, celebratory, going to the same parties, conditional on the donor ceding control of a significant fraction of their wealth to a donor-advised fund (rather than just pledging to give)