DM conversation I had with Eliezer in response to this post. Since it was a private convo and I was writing quickly I had somewhat exaggerated in a few places that I’ve now indicated with edits.
Hmm, I do feel like I maybe want to have some kind of public debate about whether indeed we could have noticed that a bunch of stuff about FTX was noticeable, and whether we have some substantial blame to carry.
Like, to be clear, I think the vast majority of EAs had little they could have or should have done here. But I think that I, and a bunch of people in the EA leadership, had the ability to actually do something about this.
I sent emails in which I warned people of SBF. I had had messages written but that I never sent that seem to me like if I had sent them they would have actually caused people to realize a bunch of inconsistencies in Sam’s story. I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all uncomfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.
Also, ultimately Sam’s social group was my social group. The author of the Scholomance books did not also happen to hang out with Sam at multiple 5-day retreats in the last year. They are not close friends with metamours of Sam and Caroline. They do not share 75% of their friends, do not hang out in the same office and do not read the same forums, all in addition to not subscribing explicitly to the same ethical philosophy that’s centered around a few thousand pages of writing. [To clarify some exaggerations, I think I share more like 30% of friends with FTX leadership, and Caroline visited Constellation, a Berkeley coworking space that I sometimes work out of, a number of times in the last year, though neither she nor Sam usually work there]
Like, I am open to there being nothing I could have done, but the conclusion doesn’t seem obvious to me at the moment.
I asked Sam a couple of times if we could schedule a long conversation, and he never got back to me go figure. I passed through the Bahamas and ended up meeting with the Future Fund people but not, iirc, the FTX people. I don’t have the sense that SBF was one of My People. If Caroline was one of My People and not just somebody who read some EY fiction but ultimately a Singer/Givewell type, I haven’t yet heard the account of it.
The question isn’t whether there’s anything we could’ve done, but anything we could’ve done in a more meaningful sense than I “could’ve” recced Bitcoin to HPMOR readers in 2010.
I mean, I am a lot more embedded in the EA space beyond MIRI than you are, and I mean, I think there is an important sense in which I don’t think you had the relevant info, but I do think a bunch of other people had.
I do also think it is pretty unlikely we could have prevented FTX exploding, though I do think we could have likely prevented FTX being super embedded in the EA Community, having a ton of people rely on its funding, and having Sam be held up in tons of places as a paragon of the EA community.
Like, I think we fucked up pretty hard by saying for a few years that we think Sam did great by our values, when I think it was already pretty clear by that point that he quite likely wasn’t.
I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to post that, or if you wanted to post this whole conversation. My experience was much more of FTX being some weird distant people who were doing a kind of longtermism that never intersected with much I considered useful until their regranting program started.
Commending Habryka for willing to share about these things. It takes courage and I think reflections/discussions like this could be really valuable (perhaps essential) to the EA community having the kind of reckoning about FTX that we need.
Great points, all. Even if most people could do nothing and Sam was not motivated by a core problem with EA philosophy, that doesn’t mean there was nothing that EAs close to the situation could have done differently. I would love to see a public airing of what genuine evidence people think they might have had that should have changed those people’s behavior around Sam.
I think I share more like 30% of friends with FTX leadership
Assuming that this means that the FTX leadership is friends with prominent EAs, I think that this fact raises some questions that many people might consider important.
For instance, I think some people might find it important to know what those friends have been doing with respect to this situation for the past week. What sort of communication have they had with the FTX leadership? Do they still feel loyalty toward SBF/Caroline/etc.? Are they in any way aiding or abetting them to commit crimes or avoid the legal or reputational consequences of their actions?
These might be dumb questions, and I apologize if so. They occurred to me because I model people as being quite likely to aid and abet with their close friends’ criminal or malicious activity, but I acknowledge that that model could be wrong and/or not very applicable to this situation.
DM conversation I had with Eliezer in response to this post. Since it was a private convo and I was writing quickly I had somewhat exaggerated in a few places that I’ve now indicated with edits.
Commending Habryka for willing to share about these things. It takes courage and I think reflections/discussions like this could be really valuable (perhaps essential) to the EA community having the kind of reckoning about FTX that we need.
Great points, all. Even if most people could do nothing and Sam was not motivated by a core problem with EA philosophy, that doesn’t mean there was nothing that EAs close to the situation could have done differently. I would love to see a public airing of what genuine evidence people think they might have had that should have changed those people’s behavior around Sam.
Assuming that this means that the FTX leadership is friends with prominent EAs, I think that this fact raises some questions that many people might consider important.
For instance, I think some people might find it important to know what those friends have been doing with respect to this situation for the past week. What sort of communication have they had with the FTX leadership? Do they still feel loyalty toward SBF/Caroline/etc.? Are they in any way aiding or abetting them to commit crimes or avoid the legal or reputational consequences of their actions?
These might be dumb questions, and I apologize if so. They occurred to me because I model people as being quite likely to aid and abet with their close friends’ criminal or malicious activity, but I acknowledge that that model could be wrong and/or not very applicable to this situation.