[Giving myself 5 minutes to reply with a quick point—and failing!] Thank you for writing this. Here are some quick low confidence thoughts on the main argument you made.
I don’t think I understand why you attribute any issues from FTX to community building specifically. The FTX outcome was a convergence of many factors, and movement building doesn’t obviously seem to be the most important. So many other EA adjunct practices like philosophising, overconfidence, prioritisation or promoting earning to give could be similarly implicated etc.
I agree that community building can be net negative in some cases, but I think it is <1% likely it has been negative overall. I personally worry that posts like this could push us in the wrong direction. From my perspective, we have never sufficiently prioritised doing and testing our community building.
Without past EA movement building, most bad things that involved EA in this timeline would mostly still have happened in different timelines. There would very likely still have been cryptocurrency related frauds and failures and charismatic and smart people like SBF who surprised everyone who trusted them. However, many good things would not have happened, e.g., refer to posts/content about what EA has achieved. There would be ~<1% as many people working on or with EA concepts/ideas and that seems like a very bad thing.
So in general, I think the solution to what happened with FTX is about getting better processes for dealing with people when in the EA community, more so than trying to slow/change community building in any significant way. I appreciate your suggestions and agree with some, but not all. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage.
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.
[Giving myself 5 minutes to reply with a quick point—and failing!] Thank you for writing this. Here are some quick low confidence thoughts on the main argument you made.
I don’t think I understand why you attribute any issues from FTX to community building specifically. The FTX outcome was a convergence of many factors, and movement building doesn’t obviously seem to be the most important. So many other EA adjunct practices like philosophising, overconfidence, prioritisation or promoting earning to give could be similarly implicated etc.
I agree that community building can be net negative in some cases, but I think it is <1% likely it has been negative overall. I personally worry that posts like this could push us in the wrong direction. From my perspective, we have never sufficiently prioritised doing and testing our community building.
Without past EA movement building, most bad things that involved EA in this timeline would mostly still have happened in different timelines. There would very likely still have been cryptocurrency related frauds and failures and charismatic and smart people like SBF who surprised everyone who trusted them. However, many good things would not have happened, e.g., refer to posts/content about what EA has achieved. There would be ~<1% as many people working on or with EA concepts/ideas and that seems like a very bad thing.
So in general, I think the solution to what happened with FTX is about getting better processes for dealing with people when in the EA community, more so than trying to slow/change community building in any significant way. I appreciate your suggestions and agree with some, but not all. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage.
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.