Thanks for this comment! My argument about community building’s particular role is that I think there were certain “community building” efforts specifically that caused the existence of FTX. The founder was urged to work in finance rather than on animal welfare, and then worked at CEA prior to launching Alameda. Alameda/FTX were seen as strategies to expand the amount of funding available to effective altruist causes and were founded and run by a leadership team that identified as effective altruist (including the former CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism). The initial funding was from major EA donors. To me the weight of public evidence really points to Alameda as having been incubated by Center for Effective Altruism in a fairly clear way.
It’s possible that in the absence of Alameda/FTX’s existence its niche would have been filled by another entity that would have done similarly bad things, but it seems hard for me to imagine that without institutional EA’s backing FTX would have existed.
Thanks for explaining, Josh! I understand your position a little better, but I still don’t agree that it makes sense to \weight the impact of movement building on this outcome more heavily than all the other EA related (and unrelated) inputs involved, and accordingly, I am still relatively unconvinced that we need to react to the event by significantly changing our perspective on the value of movement building.
Having said that, I still agree with you that we should be careful with movement building, expect and mitigate downside risks, and keeping evaluating it and trying to do it better.
Just as an FYI—I probably won’t respond to any more comments because of time constraints.
Thanks for this comment! My argument about community building’s particular role is that I think there were certain “community building” efforts specifically that caused the existence of FTX. The founder was urged to work in finance rather than on animal welfare, and then worked at CEA prior to launching Alameda. Alameda/FTX were seen as strategies to expand the amount of funding available to effective altruist causes and were founded and run by a leadership team that identified as effective altruist (including the former CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism). The initial funding was from major EA donors. To me the weight of public evidence really points to Alameda as having been incubated by Center for Effective Altruism in a fairly clear way.
It’s possible that in the absence of Alameda/FTX’s existence its niche would have been filled by another entity that would have done similarly bad things, but it seems hard for me to imagine that without institutional EA’s backing FTX would have existed.
Thanks for explaining, Josh! I understand your position a little better, but I still don’t agree that it makes sense to \weight the impact of movement building on this outcome more heavily than all the other EA related (and unrelated) inputs involved, and accordingly, I am still relatively unconvinced that we need to react to the event by significantly changing our perspective on the value of movement building.
Having said that, I still agree with you that we should be careful with movement building, expect and mitigate downside risks, and keeping evaluating it and trying to do it better.
Just as an FYI—I probably won’t respond to any more comments because of time constraints.