On the Clearer Thinking podcast MacAskill (in a tone of regret) discusses three things:
Mentioning Bankman-Fried in podcasts and interviews as a role model;
Bankman-Fried appearing on the 80,000 Hours podcast; and
Feeling apprehensive for a bit about Bankman-Fried talking a lot about EA. See eg:
00:58:10 Spencer Greenberg
When you saw him being interviewed by really major media companies about EA. And seeing that a huge number of people were hearing about effective altruism for the first time through Sam’s voice, how did that make you feel? Was that exciting to see you being pushed out there? Or were you kind of apprehensive because you wouldn’t necessarily chosen him as the person to promote EA? Yeah. What was your feeling about it at the time?
00:58:28 Will MacAskill
Yeah. I mean, I think initially I was apprehensive again, not because of any attitude to Sam, but just him being a crypto billionaire. You know, crypto has a very mixed reputation. Billionaires do not have a great reputation. And then the thing that surprised me was just the coverage seemed so positive. The media were really like fawning over him. The pieces were just kind of uniformly uniformly, very positive. And that certainly kind of took away my apprehension. So it certainly wasn’t the case that I was thinking. Oh, this is—like—terrible that Sam is becoming so famous and and and pushing against him.
So just avoiding those three things with any future billionaires would be good.
Prominent spokespeople for the community (like MacAskill) shouldn’t repeatedly highlight them as role models,
They perhaps shouldn’t be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on); and
The whole community, especially those at CEA or those that work professionaly in communications, should be wary if some billionaire starts talking a lot about EA in media interviews/puff-pieces, and shilling for their consumer-facing company in the same breath as promoting EA etc.
This is definitely do-able. As I noted, Moskovitz & Tuna and Buterin are large donors with a public platform, but are not the “face” of EA.
They perhaps shouldn’t be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on)
I personally would be pretty interested to hear an interview with Moskovitz, Tuna, or Buterin and would feel sad if 80k felt prohibited from talking to them. I don’t remember being that excited about Buterin’s 2019 interview (I recall it mostly being about block chain stuff which I wasn’t that interested in), so I guess that’s some sign that prohibiting interviews with him wouldn’t cost that much, but I’m interested to hear some of his answers to these questions.
I do expect on priors that there is a decent chance that Buterin will be revealed to have committed some type of serious misconduct, and if that does happen I wouldn’t be surprised to see a headline like “yet another EA billionaire is a criminal.” A blanket prohibition on inviting him to the 80k podcast feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
A thing that would update me here is evidence that engagement with a community/set of ideas by billionaires is on expectation negative. My sense is that EA’s involvement with SBF was toward the tail of the distribution of how bad engagement with billionaires goes, but I could be wrong about that, and if it is closer to the median case then a blanket prohibition feels more warranted.
Fair point.
On the Clearer Thinking podcast MacAskill (in a tone of regret) discusses three things:
Mentioning Bankman-Fried in podcasts and interviews as a role model;
Bankman-Fried appearing on the 80,000 Hours podcast; and
Feeling apprehensive for a bit about Bankman-Fried talking a lot about EA. See eg:
So just avoiding those three things with any future billionaires would be good.
Prominent spokespeople for the community (like MacAskill) shouldn’t repeatedly highlight them as role models,
They perhaps shouldn’t be interviewed on popular EA podcasts like 80,000 Hours (as far as I can tell Moskovitz or Tuna have never been on); and
The whole community, especially those at CEA or those that work professionaly in communications, should be wary if some billionaire starts talking a lot about EA in media interviews/puff-pieces, and shilling for their consumer-facing company in the same breath as promoting EA etc.
This is definitely do-able. As I noted, Moskovitz & Tuna and Buterin are large donors with a public platform, but are not the “face” of EA.
I personally would be pretty interested to hear an interview with Moskovitz, Tuna, or Buterin and would feel sad if 80k felt prohibited from talking to them. I don’t remember being that excited about Buterin’s 2019 interview (I recall it mostly being about block chain stuff which I wasn’t that interested in), so I guess that’s some sign that prohibiting interviews with him wouldn’t cost that much, but I’m interested to hear some of his answers to these questions.
I do expect on priors that there is a decent chance that Buterin will be revealed to have committed some type of serious misconduct, and if that does happen I wouldn’t be surprised to see a headline like “yet another EA billionaire is a criminal.” A blanket prohibition on inviting him to the 80k podcast feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
A thing that would update me here is evidence that engagement with a community/set of ideas by billionaires is on expectation negative. My sense is that EA’s involvement with SBF was toward the tail of the distribution of how bad engagement with billionaires goes, but I could be wrong about that, and if it is closer to the median case then a blanket prohibition feels more warranted.
Thanks! I appreciate the concrete suggestions.