I do not follow everything that happens in the EA world. I don’t use Twitter. I’m out of the loop. So, I don’t know if any of the people named have responded to the claims made in this Time article from March 2023:
...[Will] MacAskill had long been aware of concerns around Bankman-Fried. He was personally cautioned about Bankman-Fried by at least three different people in a series of conversations in 2018 and 2019, according to interviews with four people familiar with those discussions and emails reviewed by TIME.
He wasn’t alone. Multiple EA leaders knew about the red flags surrounding Bankman-Fried by 2019, according to a TIME investigation based on contemporaneous documents and interviews with seven people familiar with the matter. Among the EA brain trust personally notified about Bankman-Fried’s questionable behavior and business ethics were Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher who went on to lead Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic arm, the FTX Future Fund, and Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of OpenPhilanthropy, a nonprofit organization that makes grants supporting EA causes. Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
Many of the emerging issues at Alameda that were reported to EA leaders beginning in 2018—including pervasive dishonesty, sloppy accounting, and rejection of corporate controls—presaged the scandal that unfolded at FTX four years later, according to sources who were granted anonymity to avoid professional retribution or becoming entangled in Bankman-Fried’s ongoing legal drama. “I was shocked at how much of what came out about FTX rhymed with the concerns we raised in the early days,” says one person who spoke directly with MacAskill and others about Bankman-Fried in 2018. “It was the same thing. All of the same problems.”
It’s not entirely clear how EA leaders reacted to the warnings. Sources familiar with the discussions told TIME that the concerns were downplayed, rationalized as typical startup squabbles, or dismissed as “he said-she said,” as two people put it. EA leaders declined or did not respond to multiple requests from TIME to explain their reaction to these warnings and what they did in response. But by the end of 2018, Bankman-Fried’s behavior was such an open secret that EA leaders were debating Bankman-Fried’s presence on the board of the Centre for Effective Altruism. In emails among senior EA leaders, which TIME reviewed, one person wrote that they had raised worries about Bankman-Fried’s trustworthiness directly with MacAskill, and that MacAskill had dismissed the concerns as “rumor.” In 2019, Bankman-Fried left CEA’s board.
MacAskill declined to answer a list of detailed questions from TIME for this story. “An independent investigation has been commissioned to look into these issues; I don’t want to front-run or undermine that process by discussing my own recollections publicly,” he wrote in an email. “I look forward to the results of the investigation and hope to be able to respond more fully after then.” Citing the same investigation, Beckstead also declined to answer detailed questions. Karnofsky did not respond to a list of questions from TIME. Through a lawyer, Bankman-Fried also declined to respond to a list of detailed written questions. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) did not reply to multiple requests to explain why Bankman-Fried left the board in 2019. A spokesperson for Effective Ventures, the parent organization of CEA, cited the independent investigation, launched in Dec. 2022, and declined to comment while it was ongoing.
In the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation with Bankman-Fried and in the months that followed, [Tara] Mac Aulay and others warned MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founder’s alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions. Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.
[Naia] Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”
“He was treating it like a ‘he said-she said,’ even though every other long-time EA involved had left because of the same concerns,” Bouscal adds.
To me, this feels like the most important part of the whole story.
Hi Yarrow (and others on this thread) - this topic comes up on the Clearer Thinking podcast, which comes out tomorrow. As Emma Richter mentions, the Clearer Thinking podcast is aimed more at people in or related to EA, whereas Sam Harris’s wasn’t; it was up to him what topics he wanted to focus on.
Will MacAskill appears to be ignoring these questions. E.g. he was interviewed about FTX recently by Sam Harris¹ and made zero mention of any whistleblowing in his account. He also gave the impression that he barely knew SBF, describing only a few fairly shallow interactions (not at all the impression I’d received while SBF was still in favour).
The interview portion of the episode was 80 min, so it wasn’t for lack of time.
I’ve been waiting for a response from Will – a full explanation and (if things are as they seem) a sincere mea culpa. I would expect no less of myself; and I expect more from someone who has held such responsibility.
Based on public information, it seems to me that Will exercised very poor judgement and a lack of moral leadership. And he now appears to be avoiding responsibility with a distorted retelling of events.
I hope and expect that his role in EA in future is restricted to that of a philosopher, and not in any sense that of a leader.
(These arguments might also apply in varying degrees to other leaders who were involved with SBF, or who ignored/hushed whistleblowers – however I’m less familiar with their roles.)
If this continues, and if Will’s lack of spine is matched by that of the rest of the EA leadership², I’ll sadly continue to drift away from EA.
¹Making Sense podcast, “#361 Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism”, 2 April 2024.
² Edited to add this one note. I’m using EA leadership here as shorthand for leaders of influential EA orgs – of course EA itself is not an organisation.
And some/many in leadership are no doubt working or lobbying in ways we can’t see – my strongly worded comment isn’t intended as a blanket criticism.
Edit: I meant to add that I imagine Will to have acted in the best interests of EA as he saw it. I imagine him not as corrupt himself, but as giving space to corruption through poor judgement. I wouldn’t want to expel him from the community, I just wouldn’t want to see him in any position of leadership. (And that’s all based on the events as I understand them.)
I will listen with interest to the new Clearer Thinking episode Will mentions in his comment.
I strongly suspect Will is trying to avoid being sued.
Even from a purely selfish point of view, explicitly apologising and saying “sorry I made a mistake in not trusting the people who told me Sam behaved badly at Alameda”, since it would actually help restore his reputation a bit.
EDIT: Actually the bit about Beckstead here is wrong, I’d misremembered the exact nature of the suit. See Jason’s comment below. But Nick Beckstead has already been sued (unsuccessfully) on the grounds that he in some sense endorsed SBF whilst he “should have known” that he was a fraud. And this was on grounds far weaker than “people who worked Sam told him he was unethical and lies to clients.” Being sued is not nice, even if you eventually win. Every time FTX has come up on the forum, EAs with legal experience have said “people and orgs probably can’t say much without risking legal exposure”. Seems plausible to me that is right.
Unfortunately this means we’ll likely never have a full accounting of who did what when.
If this is the case that MacAskill cannot be forthcoming for valid reasons (opening himself up to legal vulnerability), as a community it would still make sense for us to err on the side of caution and have other leaders for this community as Chris argues for.
So I think there are three plausible paths forward as far as how to read Will’s silence:
One could draw an adverse inference, assuming that the information he has would be bad. One argument in favor of this would be that his prior assertion that he couldn’t talk because of concerns about interfering with the EVF internal investigation comes across as less than forthcoming if he was never really planning on talking after that was done.
One could simply decide on the evidence that is known—which basically means taking the Time article at face value, because it has not been effectively contested and is quoted to named sources.
One could assume that information exists that would exonerate Will, or mitigate things, that he nevertheless isn’t in a position to share for legal reasons.
I’m not anyone’s lawyer, and Will should definitely listen to his lawyers rather than semi-pseudonymous Forum commenters! But as a community member, I am somewhat more inclined to a mix between 1 or 2 for him than I would be for most other actors. The reason is that a potential plaintiff’s attorney already has a good bit of information in the public domain with which to construct a complaint that would make it past a motion to dismiss and into discovery. The Time article exists, and its contents can be pled in a complaint and will be assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. Will’s connection to FTXFF is well known.
For someone without that publicly-available information, silence helps them avoid alerting plaintiffs’ attorneys that they are a potential target, and probably makes it much harder for them to assemble enough information for a complaint that they can sign off on that will meet the standards for surviving a motion to dismiss. [Citations to US federal-law sources, because that’s my background.] Competent attorneys do not need Will’s help to figure out that he might be a target, and I’m not convinced they need his help to marshal information for a complaint either. So the tactical disadvantage to speaking out might be limited to potentially making things a little easier for the other side in discovery?[1]
[EDIT to clarify: None of this is to doubt that ~anyone remotely involved in FTX/SBF stuff was given legal advice that “talking isn’t going to help your personal legal situation, and may hurt.” Almost any lawyer would have given that advice; their client is the person, not EA! However, my guesses about the marginal additional legal risk that a person would incur by speaking out are relevant to the credence that I am willing to place on each of the three inferences above. This is particularly true as we are now ~18 months from the FTX explosion.]
I am not opining on—and indeed, have no opinion on—whether anyone has a viable case against Will, and if so whether anything that happened prior to the formation of FTXFF would be relevant to that case. I am merely applying the framework I have used for other leaders, which recognizes that getting sued is disruptive, stressful, and expensive, and thus gives significant weight to a desire not to be sued or a desire to get any case that is filed dismissed prior to discovery.
Can you link to a discussion of the suit in question? I don’t think that would be an accurate characterization of the suit I am aware of (complaint analyzed here). That suit is about roughly about aiding SBF in making specific transfers in breach of his fiduciary duty to Alameda. I wouldn’t say it is about “endors[ing]” in the ordinary meaning of the word, or that it relied on allegations that Nick should have known about the criminal frauds going on at FTX.
That being said, I do agree more generally that “people who had a role at FTXFF” tend to be at the top of my mental lists of people who should worry most about the possibility of individual suits and people who have probably been advised by counsel to keep their mouths shut.
To add—I strongly do not think MacAskill is the key figure here, which I take to be in step 5 ‘EA support for launching the FTX Foundation’. The key decisions were taken—and the (presumably defective) due dilligence was conducted—in and around October 2021, ahead of the re-launch of the FTX Foundation in early November 2021.
MacAskill didn’t get listed publicly as involved until 3-4 months later, only in an unpaid capacity, had little due diligence/grantmaking experience, and was presumably busy with the writing and publicity for What We Owe The Future.
I think it would be important and useful to hear more from Beckstead about that period and those decisions, but he presumably faces even more legal risk than MacAskill, and has much less experience talking and writing publicly.
I think part of the issue is that the Time article sort of contains a very serious allegation about Will specifically, which he hasn’t (yet*) publicly given evidence against (or clearly denied), namely Naia Bouscal’s allegation that he threatened Tara Mac Aulay. I say “sort of”, because saying someone “basically” X-ed, where X-ing is bad arguably carries the implication that it maybe wasn’t really X exactly, but something a bit like it. Which makes it a bit hard to tell exactly what Naia was actually accusing Will of. Alas, as far as I know, she’s not said more on here (she might have in another venue.)
Culpable mistakes and failures of integrity around very rich people with large amounts of money, are I expect common, and not *necessarily* a (strong) sign of personal bad character. Genuinely threatening someone in an ‘I will end your career in this space’ sort of way on the other hand, seems to me to be genuinely an indication of bad character.
*We’ll here what if anything he has to say about it in his interview on the Clearer Thinking podcast tonight.
I do not follow everything that happens in the EA world. I don’t use Twitter. I’m out of the loop. So, I don’t know if any of the people named have responded to the claims made in this Time article from March 2023:
To me, this feels like the most important part of the whole story.
Hi Yarrow (and others on this thread) - this topic comes up on the Clearer Thinking podcast, which comes out tomorrow. As Emma Richter mentions, the Clearer Thinking podcast is aimed more at people in or related to EA, whereas Sam Harris’s wasn’t; it was up to him what topics he wanted to focus on.
Will MacAskill appears to be ignoring these questions. E.g. he was interviewed about FTX recently by Sam Harris¹ and made zero mention of any whistleblowing in his account. He also gave the impression that he barely knew SBF, describing only a few fairly shallow interactions (not at all the impression I’d received while SBF was still in favour).
The interview portion of the episode was 80 min, so it wasn’t for lack of time.
I’ve been waiting for a response from Will – a full explanation and (if things are as they seem) a sincere mea culpa. I would expect no less of myself; and I expect more from someone who has held such responsibility.
Based on public information, it seems to me that Will exercised very poor judgement and a lack of moral leadership. And he now appears to be avoiding responsibility with a distorted retelling of events.
I hope and expect that his role in EA in future is restricted to that of a philosopher, and not in any sense that of a leader.
(These arguments might also apply in varying degrees to other leaders who were involved with SBF, or who ignored/hushed whistleblowers – however I’m less familiar with their roles.)
If this continues, and if Will’s lack of spine is matched by that of the rest of the EA leadership², I’ll sadly continue to drift away from EA.
¹Making Sense podcast, “#361 Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism”, 2 April 2024.
² Edited to add this one note. I’m using EA leadership here as shorthand for leaders of influential EA orgs – of course EA itself is not an organisation. And some/many in leadership are no doubt working or lobbying in ways we can’t see – my strongly worded comment isn’t intended as a blanket criticism.
Edit: I meant to add that I imagine Will to have acted in the best interests of EA as he saw it. I imagine him not as corrupt himself, but as giving space to corruption through poor judgement. I wouldn’t want to expel him from the community, I just wouldn’t want to see him in any position of leadership. (And that’s all based on the events as I understand them.) I will listen with interest to the new Clearer Thinking episode Will mentions in his comment.
I strongly suspect Will is trying to avoid being sued.
Even from a purely selfish point of view, explicitly apologising and saying “sorry I made a mistake in not trusting the people who told me Sam behaved badly at Alameda”, since it would actually help restore his reputation a bit.
EDIT: Actually the bit about Beckstead here is wrong, I’d misremembered the exact nature of the suit. See Jason’s comment below. But Nick Beckstead has already been sued (unsuccessfully) on the grounds that he in some sense endorsed SBF whilst he “should have known” that he was a fraud. And this was on grounds far weaker than “people who worked Sam told him he was unethical and lies to clients.” Being sued is not nice, even if you eventually win. Every time FTX has come up on the forum, EAs with legal experience have said “people and orgs probably can’t say much without risking legal exposure”. Seems plausible to me that is right.
Unfortunately this means we’ll likely never have a full accounting of who did what when.
If this is the case that MacAskill cannot be forthcoming for valid reasons (opening himself up to legal vulnerability), as a community it would still make sense for us to err on the side of caution and have other leaders for this community as Chris argues for.
So I think there are three plausible paths forward as far as how to read Will’s silence:
One could draw an adverse inference, assuming that the information he has would be bad. One argument in favor of this would be that his prior assertion that he couldn’t talk because of concerns about interfering with the EVF internal investigation comes across as less than forthcoming if he was never really planning on talking after that was done.
One could simply decide on the evidence that is known—which basically means taking the Time article at face value, because it has not been effectively contested and is quoted to named sources.
One could assume that information exists that would exonerate Will, or mitigate things, that he nevertheless isn’t in a position to share for legal reasons.
I’m not anyone’s lawyer, and Will should definitely listen to his lawyers rather than semi-pseudonymous Forum commenters! But as a community member, I am somewhat more inclined to a mix between 1 or 2 for him than I would be for most other actors. The reason is that a potential plaintiff’s attorney already has a good bit of information in the public domain with which to construct a complaint that would make it past a motion to dismiss and into discovery. The Time article exists, and its contents can be pled in a complaint and will be assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. Will’s connection to FTXFF is well known.
For someone without that publicly-available information, silence helps them avoid alerting plaintiffs’ attorneys that they are a potential target, and probably makes it much harder for them to assemble enough information for a complaint that they can sign off on that will meet the standards for surviving a motion to dismiss. [Citations to US federal-law sources, because that’s my background.] Competent attorneys do not need Will’s help to figure out that he might be a target, and I’m not convinced they need his help to marshal information for a complaint either. So the tactical disadvantage to speaking out might be limited to potentially making things a little easier for the other side in discovery?[1]
[EDIT to clarify: None of this is to doubt that ~anyone remotely involved in FTX/SBF stuff was given legal advice that “talking isn’t going to help your personal legal situation, and may hurt.” Almost any lawyer would have given that advice; their client is the person, not EA! However, my guesses about the marginal additional legal risk that a person would incur by speaking out are relevant to the credence that I am willing to place on each of the three inferences above. This is particularly true as we are now ~18 months from the FTX explosion.]
I am not opining on—and indeed, have no opinion on—whether anyone has a viable case against Will, and if so whether anything that happened prior to the formation of FTXFF would be relevant to that case. I am merely applying the framework I have used for other leaders, which recognizes that getting sued is disruptive, stressful, and expensive, and thus gives significant weight to a desire not to be sued or a desire to get any case that is filed dismissed prior to discovery.
Can you link to a discussion of the suit in question? I don’t think that would be an accurate characterization of the suit I am aware of (complaint analyzed here). That suit is about roughly about aiding SBF in making specific transfers in breach of his fiduciary duty to Alameda. I wouldn’t say it is about “endors[ing]” in the ordinary meaning of the word, or that it relied on allegations that Nick should have known about the criminal frauds going on at FTX.
That being said, I do agree more generally that “people who had a role at FTXFF” tend to be at the top of my mental lists of people who should worry most about the possibility of individual suits and people who have probably been advised by counsel to keep their mouths shut.
OK, I misremembered the exact nature of the suit. Sorry.
Unendorsed as I trust Jason on this far more than my own judgment, since he’s an actual lawyer.
To add—I strongly do not think MacAskill is the key figure here, which I take to be in step 5 ‘EA support for launching the FTX Foundation’. The key decisions were taken—and the (presumably defective) due dilligence was conducted—in and around October 2021, ahead of the re-launch of the FTX Foundation in early November 2021.
MacAskill didn’t get listed publicly as involved until 3-4 months later, only in an unpaid capacity, had little due diligence/grantmaking experience, and was presumably busy with the writing and publicity for What We Owe The Future.
I think it would be important and useful to hear more from Beckstead about that period and those decisions, but he presumably faces even more legal risk than MacAskill, and has much less experience talking and writing publicly.
I think part of the issue is that the Time article sort of contains a very serious allegation about Will specifically, which he hasn’t (yet*) publicly given evidence against (or clearly denied), namely Naia Bouscal’s allegation that he threatened Tara Mac Aulay. I say “sort of”, because saying someone “basically” X-ed, where X-ing is bad arguably carries the implication that it maybe wasn’t really X exactly, but something a bit like it. Which makes it a bit hard to tell exactly what Naia was actually accusing Will of. Alas, as far as I know, she’s not said more on here (she might have in another venue.)
Culpable mistakes and failures of integrity around very rich people with large amounts of money, are I expect common, and not *necessarily* a (strong) sign of personal bad character. Genuinely threatening someone in an ‘I will end your career in this space’ sort of way on the other hand, seems to me to be genuinely an indication of bad character.
*We’ll here what if anything he has to say about it in his interview on the Clearer Thinking podcast tonight.
But I do take your point that Will was not the only person involved, or necessarily the most important internally.
Yes, I responded to it here