I don’t think this is a fair comment, and aspects of it reads more of a personal attack rather than an attack of ideas. This feels especially the case given the above post has significantly more substance and recommendations to it, but this one comment just focuses in on Zoe Cremer. It worries me a bit that it was upvoted as much as it was.
For the record, I think some of Zoe’s recommendations could plausibly be net negative and some are good ideas; as with everything, it requires further thinking through and then skillful implementation. But I think the amount of flack she’s taken for this has been disproportionate and sends the wrong signal to others about dissenting.
I think this aspect of the comment is particularly harsh, which is in and of itself likely counterproductive. But on top of that, it’s not the type that should be made lightly or without a lot of evidence that that is the person’s agenda (bold for emphasis):
- I think part of Cremer’s reaction after FTX is not epistemically virtuous; “I was a vocal critic of EA”—“there is an EA-related scandal”—“I claim to be vindicated in my criticism” is not sound reasoning, when the criticisms are mostly tangentially related to the scandal. It will get you a lot of media attention, in particular if you present yourself as some sort of virtuous insider who was critical of the leaders and saw this coming, but I hope upon closer scrutiny people are actually able to see through this.
This discussion here made me curious, so I went to Zoe’s twitter to check out what she’s posted recently. (Maybe she also said things in other places, in which case I lack info.) The main thing I see her taking credit for (by retweeting other people’s retweets saying Zoe “called it”) is this tweet from last August:
EA is to me to be unwilling to implement institutional safeguards against fuck-ups. They mostly happily rely on a self-image of being particularly well-intentioned, intelligent, precautious. That’s not good enough for an institution that prizes itself in understanding tail-risk.
That seems legitimate to me. (We can debate whether institutional safeguards would have been the best action against FTX in particular, but the more general point of “EAs have a blind spot around tail risks due to an elated self-image of the movement” seems to have gotten a “+1″ score with the FTX collapse (and EAs not having seen it coming despite some concerning signs).
There’s also a tweet by a journalist that she retweeted:
3) Critics (eg @CarlaZoeC@LukaKemp) warned that EA should decentralize funding so it doesn’t become a closed validation loop where the people in SBF’s inner circle get millions to promote his & their vision for EA while others don’t. But EA funding remained overcentralized.
That particular wording sounds suspiciously like it was tailored to the events with hindsight, in which case retweeting without caveats is potentially slightly suboptimal. But knowing what we know now, I’d indeed be worried about a hypothetical world where FTX hadn’t collapsed! Where Sam’s vision of things and his attitude to risks gets to have such a huge degree of influence within EA. (That said, it’s not like we can just wish money into existence from diversified sources of funding – in Zoe’s document, I saw very little discussion of the costs of cutting down on “centralized” funding.)
In any case, I agree with Jan’s point that it would be a massive overreaction to now consider all of Zoe’s criticisms vindicated. In fact, without a more detailed analysis, I think it would even be premature to say that she got some important details exactly right (especially when it comes to suggestions for change).
Even so, I think it’s important to concede that Zoe gets significant credit here at least directionally, and that’s an argument for people to (re-)engage with her suggestions if they haven’t already done so or if there’s a chance they may have been a bit closed off to them the last time.
(My own view remains skeptical, though, as I explained here.)
3) Critics (eg @CarlaZoeC@LukaKemp) warned that EA should decentralize funding so it doesn’t become a closed validation loop where the people in SBF’s inner circle get millions to promote his & their vision for EA while others don’t. But EA funding remained overcentralized
I think the FTX regranting program was the single biggest push to decentralize funding EA has ever seen, and it’s crazy to me that anyone could look at what FTX Foundation was doing and say that the key problem is that the funding decisions were getting more, rather than less, centralized. (I would be interested in hearing from those who had some insight into the program whether this seems incorrect or overstated.)
That said, first, I was a regrantor, so I am biased, and even aside from the tremendous damage caused by the foundation needing to back out and the possibility of clawbacks, the fact that at least some of the money which was being regranted was stolen makes the whole thing completely unacceptable. However, it was unacceptable in ways that have nothing to do with being overly centralized.
This seems right within longtermism, but, AFAIK, the vast majority of FTX’s grantmaking was longtermist. This decision to focus on longtermism seemed very centralized and might otherwise have shaped the direction and composition of EA disproportionately towards longtermism.
If FTX’s decentralised model had been proven successful for long-termism, I suspect it would have influenced the way funding was handled for other cause areas as well.
In case my wording was confusing, I meant that a community shift towards longtermism seems to have been decided by a small number of individuals (FTX founders). I’m not talking about centralization within causes, but centralization in deciding prioritization between causes.
Also, I’m skeptical that global health and poverty or animal welfare would shift towards very decentralized regranting without a massive increase in available funding first, because
some of the large cost-effective charities that get funded are still funding-constrained, and so the bars to beat seem better defined, and
there already are similar experiments on a smaller scale through the EA Funds.
Yeah, I got that, I was just mentioning an effect that might have partially offset it.
I agree that a small number of individuals decided that the funds should focus on long-terminal, although this is partially offset by how the EA movement was shifting that direction anyway.
I think you lack part of the context where Zoe seems to claim to media the suggested reforms would help
- this Economist piece, mentioning Zoe about 19 times - WP - this New Yorker piece, with Zoe explaining “My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.” -this twitter thread
- this New Yorker piece, with Zoe explaining “My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.””My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.”
To be fair, this seems like a reasonable statement on Zoe’s part:
If we had incentivised whistle-blowers to come forward around shady things happening at FTX, would we have known about FTX fraud sooner and been less reliant on FTX funding? Very plausibly yes. She says “likely” which is obviously not particularly specific, but this would fit my definition of likely.
If EA had diversified our portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors, this would have also (quite obviously) mean the crash had less impact on EA overall, so this also seems true.
Basically, as othercomments have stated, you do little to actually say why these proposed reforms are, as you initially said, bad or would have no impact. I think if you’re going to make a statement like:
“it seems clear proposed reforms would not have prevented or influenced the FTX fiasco”
You need to actually provide some evidence or reasoning for this, as clearly lots of people don’t believe it’s clear. Additionally, if it feels unfair to call Zoe “not epistemically virtuous” when you’re making quite bold claims, without any reasoning laid out, then saying it would be too time-intensive to explain your thinking.
For example, you say here that you’re concerned about what democratisation actually looks like, which is a fair point and useful object-level argument, but this seems more like a question of implementation rather than the actual idea is necessarily bad.
If we had incentivised whistle-blowers to come forward around shady things happening at FTX, would we have known about FTX fraud sooner and been less reliant on FTX funding? Very plausibly yes. She says “likely” which is obviously not particularly specific, but this would fit my definition of likely.
Why do you think so? Whistleblowers inside of FTX would have been protected under US law, and US institution like SEC offer them multi-million dollar bounties. Why would EA scheme create stronger incentive?
Also: even if the possible whistleblowers inside of FTX were EAs, whistleblowing about fraud at FTX not directed toward authorities like SEC, but toward some EA org scheme, would have been particularly bad idea. The EA scheme would not be equipped to deal with this and would need to basically immediately forward it to authorities, leading to immediate FTX collapse. Main difference would be putting EAs in the centre of the happenings?
If EA had diversified our portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors, this would have also (quite obviously) mean the crash had less impact on EA overall, so this also seems true.
I think the ‘diversified our portfolio’ frame is subtly misleading, because it’s usually associated with investments or holdings, but here it is applied to ‘donors’. You can’t diversify donations the same way. Also: assume you recruit donors uniformly, no matter how wealthy they are. Most of the wealth will be with the wealthiest minority , basically because how the wealth distribution looks like. Attempt to diversify donation portfolio toward smaller donors … would look like GWWC?
Only real option how to have much less FTX money in EA was to not accept that much FTX funding. Which was a tough call at the time, in part because FTX FF seemed like the biggest step toward decentralized distribution of funding, and a big step toward diversifying from OP.
Only real option how to have much less FTX money in EA was to not accept that much FTX funding. Which was a tough call at the time, in part because FTX FF seemed like the biggest step toward decentralized distribution of funding, and a big step toward diversifying from OP.
And even then, decisions about accepting funding are made by individuals and individual organizations. Would there be someone to kick you out of EA if you accept “unapproved” funding? The existing system is, in a sense, fairly democratic in that everyone gets to decide whether they want to take the money or not. I don’t see how Cremer’s proposal could be effective without a blacklist to enforce community will against anyone who chose to take the money anyway, and that gives whoever maintains the blacklist great power (which is contrary to Cremer’s stated aims).
The reality, perhaps unfortunate, is that charities need donors more than donors need specific charities or movements.
Also: assume you recruit donors uniformly, no matter how wealthy they are. Most of the wealth will be with the wealthiest minority , basically because how the wealth distribution looks like. Attempt to diversify donation portfolio toward smaller donors … would look like GWWC?
It depends on how you define wealthiest minority, but if you mean billionaires, the majority of philanthropy is not from billionaires. EA has been unusually successful with billionaires. That means if EA mean reverts, perhaps by going mainstream, the majority of EA funding will not be from billionaires. CEA deprioritized GWWC for several years-I think if they had continued to prioritize it, funding would have gotten at least somewhat more diversified. Also, I find that talking with midcareer professionals it’s much easier to mention donations rather than switching their career. So I think that more emphasis on donations from people of modest means could help EA diversify with respect to age.
If we had incentivised whistle-blowers to come forward around shady things happening at FTX, would we have known about FTX fraud sooner and been less reliant on FTX funding? Very plausibly yes. She says “likely” which is obviously not particularly specific, but this would fit my definition of likely.
Why do you believe this? To me, FTX fits more in the reference class of financial firms than EA orgs, and I don’t see how EA whistleblower protections would have helped FTX employees whistleblow (I believe that most FTX employees were not EAs, for example). And it seems much more likely to me that an FTX employee would be able to whistle-blow than an EA at a non-FTX org.
Also, my current best guess is that only the top 4 at FTX/Alameda knew about the fraud, and I have not come across anyone who seems like they might have been a whistleblower (I’d love to be corrected on this though!)
I’ve honestly been pretty surprised there has not been more public EA discussion post-FTX of adopting a number of Cremer’s proposed institutional reforms, many of which seem to me obviously worth doing … Also, insofar as she’d be willing (and some form of significant compensation is clearly merited), integrally engaging Cremer in whatever post-FTX EA institutional reform process emerges would be both directly helpful and a public show of good faith efforts at rectification.
I think it’s fine for a comment to engage with just a part of the original post. Also, if a posts advocates for giving someone some substantial power, it seems fair to comment on media presence of the person.
Have you seen any actual in detail analysis how would the proposal influenced FTX? I did not. I’m sceptical of the helpfulness—for example, with whistleblower protections... - Many EA orgs have whistleblower protection. Empirically, it seems it had zero impact on FTX, and the damage to the orgs seems independent of this. - There are already laws and incentives for reporting wire fraud. If there was someone in the know from within FTX considering whistleblowing, if I understand SEC and CFTC comments, they would have been eligible for both protection and bounty in millions of dollars- and possibly avoided other bad things happening them, such as going to jail. Why would some EA bounty create stronger incentive? - My impression is the original whistleblowing protection proposal was implicitly directed toward “EA charities”, not “companies of EA funders”.
But I think the amount of flack she’s taken for this has been disproportionate and sends the wrong signal to others about dissenting.
Can you link to something specific? I haven’t found any specific critical post or comment mentioning her on the forum since Nov.
In contrast, after a Google News search, I think the opposite is closer to reality: media coverage of Zoe’s criticism is uncritically positive, and who is taking flack is MacAskill. While I’m sometimes critical of Will, the narrative that he is at fault for not implementing Zoe’s proposals seems completely unfair to me.
I don’t think this is a fair comment, and aspects of it reads more of a personal attack rather than an attack of ideas. This feels especially the case given the above post has significantly more substance and recommendations to it, but this one comment just focuses in on Zoe Cremer. It worries me a bit that it was upvoted as much as it was.
For the record, I think some of Zoe’s recommendations could plausibly be net negative and some are good ideas; as with everything, it requires further thinking through and then skillful implementation. But I think the amount of flack she’s taken for this has been disproportionate and sends the wrong signal to others about dissenting.
I think this aspect of the comment is particularly harsh, which is in and of itself likely counterproductive. But on top of that, it’s not the type that should be made lightly or without a lot of evidence that that is the person’s agenda (bold for emphasis):
This discussion here made me curious, so I went to Zoe’s twitter to check out what she’s posted recently. (Maybe she also said things in other places, in which case I lack info.) The main thing I see her taking credit for (by retweeting other people’s retweets saying Zoe “called it”) is this tweet from last August:
That seems legitimate to me. (We can debate whether institutional safeguards would have been the best action against FTX in particular, but the more general point of “EAs have a blind spot around tail risks due to an elated self-image of the movement” seems to have gotten a “+1″ score with the FTX collapse (and EAs not having seen it coming despite some concerning signs).
There’s also a tweet by a journalist that she retweeted:
That particular wording sounds suspiciously like it was tailored to the events with hindsight, in which case retweeting without caveats is potentially slightly suboptimal. But knowing what we know now, I’d indeed be worried about a hypothetical world where FTX hadn’t collapsed! Where Sam’s vision of things and his attitude to risks gets to have such a huge degree of influence within EA. (That said, it’s not like we can just wish money into existence from diversified sources of funding – in Zoe’s document, I saw very little discussion of the costs of cutting down on “centralized” funding.)
In any case, I agree with Jan’s point that it would be a massive overreaction to now consider all of Zoe’s criticisms vindicated. In fact, without a more detailed analysis, I think it would even be premature to say that she got some important details exactly right (especially when it comes to suggestions for change).
Even so, I think it’s important to concede that Zoe gets significant credit here at least directionally, and that’s an argument for people to (re-)engage with her suggestions if they haven’t already done so or if there’s a chance they may have been a bit closed off to them the last time.
(My own view remains skeptical, though, as I explained here.)
I think the FTX regranting program was the single biggest push to decentralize funding EA has ever seen, and it’s crazy to me that anyone could look at what FTX Foundation was doing and say that the key problem is that the funding decisions were getting more, rather than less, centralized. (I would be interested in hearing from those who had some insight into the program whether this seems incorrect or overstated.)
That said, first, I was a regrantor, so I am biased, and even aside from the tremendous damage caused by the foundation needing to back out and the possibility of clawbacks, the fact that at least some of the money which was being regranted was stolen makes the whole thing completely unacceptable. However, it was unacceptable in ways that have nothing to do with being overly centralized.
This seems right within longtermism, but, AFAIK, the vast majority of FTX’s grantmaking was longtermist. This decision to focus on longtermism seemed very centralized and might otherwise have shaped the direction and composition of EA disproportionately towards longtermism.
If FTX’s decentralised model had been proven successful for long-termism, I suspect it would have influenced the way funding was handled for other cause areas as well.
In case my wording was confusing, I meant that a community shift towards longtermism seems to have been decided by a small number of individuals (FTX founders). I’m not talking about centralization within causes, but centralization in deciding prioritization between causes.
Also, I’m skeptical that global health and poverty or animal welfare would shift towards very decentralized regranting without a massive increase in available funding first, because
some of the large cost-effective charities that get funded are still funding-constrained, and so the bars to beat seem better defined, and
there already are similar experiments on a smaller scale through the EA Funds.
Yeah, I got that, I was just mentioning an effect that might have partially offset it.
I agree that a small number of individuals decided that the funds should focus on long-terminal, although this is partially offset by how the EA movement was shifting that direction anyway.
Yes, that seems correct.
I think you lack part of the context where Zoe seems to claim to media the suggested reforms would help
- this Economist piece, mentioning Zoe about 19 times
- WP
- this New Yorker piece, with Zoe explaining “My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.”
-this twitter thread
To be fair, this seems like a reasonable statement on Zoe’s part:
If we had incentivised whistle-blowers to come forward around shady things happening at FTX, would we have known about FTX fraud sooner and been less reliant on FTX funding? Very plausibly yes. She says “likely” which is obviously not particularly specific, but this would fit my definition of likely.
If EA had diversified our portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors, this would have also (quite obviously) mean the crash had less impact on EA overall, so this also seems true.
Basically, as other comments have stated, you do little to actually say why these proposed reforms are, as you initially said, bad or would have no impact. I think if you’re going to make a statement like:
You need to actually provide some evidence or reasoning for this, as clearly lots of people don’t believe it’s clear. Additionally, if it feels unfair to call Zoe “not epistemically virtuous” when you’re making quite bold claims, without any reasoning laid out, then saying it would be too time-intensive to explain your thinking.
For example, you say here that you’re concerned about what democratisation actually looks like, which is a fair point and useful object-level argument, but this seems more like a question of implementation rather than the actual idea is necessarily bad.
Why do you think so? Whistleblowers inside of FTX would have been protected under US law, and US institution like SEC offer them multi-million dollar bounties. Why would EA scheme create stronger incentive?
Also: even if the possible whistleblowers inside of FTX were EAs, whistleblowing about fraud at FTX not directed toward authorities like SEC, but toward some EA org scheme, would have been particularly bad idea. The EA scheme would not be equipped to deal with this and would need to basically immediately forward it to authorities, leading to immediate FTX collapse. Main difference would be putting EAs in the centre of the happenings?
I think the ‘diversified our portfolio’ frame is subtly misleading, because it’s usually associated with investments or holdings, but here it is applied to ‘donors’. You can’t diversify donations the same way. Also: assume you recruit donors uniformly, no matter how wealthy they are. Most of the wealth will be with the wealthiest minority , basically because how the wealth distribution looks like. Attempt to diversify donation portfolio toward smaller donors … would look like GWWC?
Only real option how to have much less FTX money in EA was to not accept that much FTX funding. Which was a tough call at the time, in part because FTX FF seemed like the biggest step toward decentralized distribution of funding, and a big step toward diversifying from OP.
And even then, decisions about accepting funding are made by individuals and individual organizations. Would there be someone to kick you out of EA if you accept “unapproved” funding? The existing system is, in a sense, fairly democratic in that everyone gets to decide whether they want to take the money or not. I don’t see how Cremer’s proposal could be effective without a blacklist to enforce community will against anyone who chose to take the money anyway, and that gives whoever maintains the blacklist great power (which is contrary to Cremer’s stated aims).
The reality, perhaps unfortunate, is that charities need donors more than donors need specific charities or movements.
It depends on how you define wealthiest minority, but if you mean billionaires, the majority of philanthropy is not from billionaires. EA has been unusually successful with billionaires. That means if EA mean reverts, perhaps by going mainstream, the majority of EA funding will not be from billionaires. CEA deprioritized GWWC for several years-I think if they had continued to prioritize it, funding would have gotten at least somewhat more diversified. Also, I find that talking with midcareer professionals it’s much easier to mention donations rather than switching their career. So I think that more emphasis on donations from people of modest means could help EA diversify with respect to age.
Why do you believe this? To me, FTX fits more in the reference class of financial firms than EA orgs, and I don’t see how EA whistleblower protections would have helped FTX employees whistleblow (I believe that most FTX employees were not EAs, for example). And it seems much more likely to me that an FTX employee would be able to whistle-blow than an EA at a non-FTX org.
Also, my current best guess is that only the top 4 at FTX/Alameda knew about the fraud, and I have not come across anyone who seems like they might have been a whistleblower (I’d love to be corrected on this though!)
I was reacting mostly to this part of the post
I think it’s fine for a comment to engage with just a part of the original post. Also, if a posts advocates for giving someone some substantial power, it seems fair to comment on media presence of the person.
Overall, to me, it seem you advocate for double-standard / selective demand for rigour.
Post-FTX discussion of Zoe’s proposals seems mostly on the level ‘Implement Carla Zoe Cremer’s Recommendations’ or ‘very annoyed this all had to happen before a rethink, given that 10 months earlier, I sat in his office proposing whistleblower protections, transparency over funding sources, bottom-up control over risky donations’ or similar high level supportive comments, never going into details of the proposals, and without any realistic analysis of what would have happened. I expressed the opposite sentiment, clearly marking it as my belief.
Have you seen any actual in detail analysis how would the proposal influenced FTX? I did not. I’m sceptical of the helpfulness—for example, with whistleblower protections...
- Many EA orgs have whistleblower protection. Empirically, it seems it had zero impact on FTX, and the damage to the orgs seems independent of this.
- There are already laws and incentives for reporting wire fraud. If there was someone in the know from within FTX considering whistleblowing, if I understand SEC and CFTC comments, they would have been eligible for both protection and bounty in millions of dollars- and possibly avoided other bad things happening them, such as going to jail. Why would some EA bounty create stronger incentive?
- My impression is the original whistleblowing protection proposal was implicitly directed toward “EA charities”, not “companies of EA funders”.
Can you link to something specific? I haven’t found any specific critical post or comment mentioning her on the forum since Nov.
In contrast, after a Google News search, I think the opposite is closer to reality: media coverage of Zoe’s criticism is uncritically positive, and who is taking flack is MacAskill. While I’m sometimes critical of Will, the narrative that he is at fault for not implementing Zoe’s proposals seems completely unfair to me.