Thanks for your work, it’s my sense you work really really hard and have done for a long time. Thank you
Thanks for the emotional effort. I guess that at times your part within EA is pretty sad, tiring, stressful. I’m sad if that happens to you
I sense you screwed up in trusting SBF and in someone not being on top of where the money was moving in FTXFF. It was an error. Seems worth calling an L an L (a loss a loss). This has caused a little harm to me personally and I forgive you. Sounds fatuous but feels important to say. I’m pretty confident if our roles were reversed I would have screwed it up much worse. I think many people would have—given how long it took for billions of $ to figure this out.
I don’t know if the decision to step down is the right one. I acknowledge my prior is that you should but there is much more information than that that we don’t have. I will say that you are almost uniquely skilled at the job and often I guess that people who were pretty good but made some big errors are better than people who were generally bad or who are unskilled. I leave that up to you, but seems worth saying
I sense, on balance that the thing that most confuses/concerns me is this line from the Time article
“Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.””
While other things may have been bigger errors, this once seems most sort of “out of character” or “bad normsy”. And I know Naia well enough that this moves me a lot, even though it seems so out of character for you (maybe 30% that this is a broadly accurate account). This causes me consternation, I don’t understand and I think if this happened it was really bad and behaviour like it should not happen from any powerful EAs (or any EAs frankly).
Again, I find this very hard to think about, and my priors are that there should be consequences for this—perhaps it does imply you aren’t suitable for some of these roles. But I’m pretty open-minded to the idea that that isn’t the case—we just know your flaws where we don’t know most other peoples. The Copenhagen Theory of Leadership.
I don’t really know how to integrate all these things into a coherent view of the world, so I will just leave them here jagged and hungry for explanation.
Thanks for your work, I am optimistic about the future, I wish you well in whatever you go forward and do
I don’t know if the decision to step down is the right one. I acknowledge my prior is that you should but there is much more information than that that we don’t have. I will say that you are almost uniquely skilled at the job and often I guess that people who were pretty good but made some big errors are better than people who were generally bad or who are unskilled. I leave that up to you, but seems worth saying
I think it’s important to consider that the nature of being on the EVF board over the next few years is likely to be much different than it was pre-FTX. No matter the result of the CC inquiry, EVF needs to consider itself as on the CC’s radar for the next few years, and that means extra demands on trustees to handle corporate-governance type stuff. It sounds like a number of projects will spin off (which I think should happen), and the associated logistics will be a major source of board involvement. Plus there’s all the FTX fallout, for which Will is recused anyway.
So there are a number of reasons someone might decide to step down, including that the post-FTX role just takes too much of their time, or that they don’t have a comparative advantage in light of the new expected composition of the board’s workload.
This is an ancillary point, but IMO it would be very unfair to focus too much on what Will personally did or did not know about FTX. There were plenty of other opportunities for other people with far less personal involvement to partially figure this one out, and some did so before the site’s failure.
My own major redflag about FTX, for instance, was the employment of Dan Friedberg as their chief regulatory officer, a known liar and fraud-enabler from his involvement with the UltimateBet superusing scandal. Friedberg’s executive role at FTX was public record, while the tapes that confirmed the degree of his involvement in the thefts at UltimateBet were leaked in 2013 and were widely publicized in the poker community. Some prominent EAs are even former professional poker players (Igor Kurganov and Liv Boeree).
Even just a few months before FTX’s failure, enormous redflags were emerging everywhere. Due to the bankruptcy proceedings of crypto lender Voyager, it became public knowledge in July 2022 that Alameda Research owed them $377 million at the time of bankruptcy. The obvious conclusion was, that like Voyager’s other outstanding debtor Three Arrows Capital, Alameda was insolvent (which we now know was in fact the the case). All this was public record and easy to find if you paid a bit of attention to crypto (i.e it was reported in the crypto press), which surely many EAs did at the time.
tl;dr This idea that only a small caste of elite EAs with access to privileged information about FTX could have made some good educated guesses about the potential risks does not stack up: there was plenty in the public record, and I suggest that EA collectively was very happy to look the other way as long as the money was flowing and SBF seemed like a nice EA vegan boy. No doubt Will & other elite EAs deserve some blame, but it would be very easy to try to pin too much on them.
Given how badly and broadly FTX was missed by a variety of actors, it’s hard to assign much relative blame to anyone absent circumstances that distinguish their potential blame above the baseline:
Some people had access to significant non-public information that should have increased their assessment of the risk posed by FTX, above and beyond the publicly-available information.
Some people had a particularized duty to conduct due dilligence and form an assessment of FTX’s risk (or to supervise someone to whom this duty was delegated). This duty would accrue from, e.g., a senior leadership role in an organization receiving large amounts of FTX funding, In other words, it was some people’s job to think about FTX risk.
Your average EA met neither of these criteria. In contrast, I think these two criteria—special knowledge and special responsibility—are multiplicative (i.e., that the potential blame for someone meeting both criteria is much higher than for those who met only one).
Some people had access to significant non-public information that should have increased their assessment of the risk posed by FTX
Plausible. Also plausible that they also had access to info that decreased their assessment. Perhaps the extra info they had access to even suggested they should decrease their assessment overall. Or perhaps they didn’t have access to any significant/relevant extra info.
It was some people’s job to think about FTX risk
Agreed. But I think Benjamin_Todd offers a good reflection on this:
I’m unconvinced that there should have been much more scenario / risk planning. I think it was already obvious that FTX might fall 90% in a crypto bear market (e.g. here) – and if that was all that happened, things would probably be OK. What surprised people was the alleged fraud and that everything was so entangled it would all go to zero at once, and I’m skeptical additional risk surveying exercises would have ended up with a significant credence on these (unless a bunch of other things were different). There were already some risk surveying attempts and they didn’t get there (e.g. in early 2022, metaculus had a 1% chance of FTX making any default on customer funds over the year with ~40 forecasters).
Some quick thoughts:
Thanks for your work, it’s my sense you work really really hard and have done for a long time. Thank you
Thanks for the emotional effort. I guess that at times your part within EA is pretty sad, tiring, stressful. I’m sad if that happens to you
I sense you screwed up in trusting SBF and in someone not being on top of where the money was moving in FTXFF. It was an error. Seems worth calling an L an L (a loss a loss). This has caused a little harm to me personally and I forgive you. Sounds fatuous but feels important to say. I’m pretty confident if our roles were reversed I would have screwed it up much worse. I think many people would have—given how long it took for billions of $ to figure this out.
I don’t know if the decision to step down is the right one. I acknowledge my prior is that you should but there is much more information than that that we don’t have. I will say that you are almost uniquely skilled at the job and often I guess that people who were pretty good but made some big errors are better than people who were generally bad or who are unskilled. I leave that up to you, but seems worth saying
I sense, on balance that the thing that most confuses/concerns me is this line from the Time article
“Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.””
While other things may have been bigger errors, this once seems most sort of “out of character” or “bad normsy”. And I know Naia well enough that this moves me a lot, even though it seems so out of character for you (maybe 30% that this is a broadly accurate account). This causes me consternation, I don’t understand and I think if this happened it was really bad and behaviour like it should not happen from any powerful EAs (or any EAs frankly).
Again, I find this very hard to think about, and my priors are that there should be consequences for this—perhaps it does imply you aren’t suitable for some of these roles. But I’m pretty open-minded to the idea that that isn’t the case—we just know your flaws where we don’t know most other peoples. The Copenhagen Theory of Leadership.
I don’t really know how to integrate all these things into a coherent view of the world, so I will just leave them here jagged and hungry for explanation.
Thanks for your work, I am optimistic about the future, I wish you well in whatever you go forward and do
I think it’s important to consider that the nature of being on the EVF board over the next few years is likely to be much different than it was pre-FTX. No matter the result of the CC inquiry, EVF needs to consider itself as on the CC’s radar for the next few years, and that means extra demands on trustees to handle corporate-governance type stuff. It sounds like a number of projects will spin off (which I think should happen), and the associated logistics will be a major source of board involvement. Plus there’s all the FTX fallout, for which Will is recused anyway.
So there are a number of reasons someone might decide to step down, including that the post-FTX role just takes too much of their time, or that they don’t have a comparative advantage in light of the new expected composition of the board’s workload.
This is an ancillary point, but IMO it would be very unfair to focus too much on what Will personally did or did not know about FTX. There were plenty of other opportunities for other people with far less personal involvement to partially figure this one out, and some did so before the site’s failure.
My own major redflag about FTX, for instance, was the employment of Dan Friedberg as their chief regulatory officer, a known liar and fraud-enabler from his involvement with the UltimateBet superusing scandal. Friedberg’s executive role at FTX was public record, while the tapes that confirmed the degree of his involvement in the thefts at UltimateBet were leaked in 2013 and were widely publicized in the poker community. Some prominent EAs are even former professional poker players (Igor Kurganov and Liv Boeree).
Even just a few months before FTX’s failure, enormous redflags were emerging everywhere. Due to the bankruptcy proceedings of crypto lender Voyager, it became public knowledge in July 2022 that Alameda Research owed them $377 million at the time of bankruptcy. The obvious conclusion was, that like Voyager’s other outstanding debtor Three Arrows Capital, Alameda was insolvent (which we now know was in fact the the case). All this was public record and easy to find if you paid a bit of attention to crypto (i.e it was reported in the crypto press), which surely many EAs did at the time.
tl;dr This idea that only a small caste of elite EAs with access to privileged information about FTX could have made some good educated guesses about the potential risks does not stack up: there was plenty in the public record, and I suggest that EA collectively was very happy to look the other way as long as the money was flowing and SBF seemed like a nice EA vegan boy. No doubt Will & other elite EAs deserve some blame, but it would be very easy to try to pin too much on them.
Given how badly and broadly FTX was missed by a variety of actors, it’s hard to assign much relative blame to anyone absent circumstances that distinguish their potential blame above the baseline:
Some people had access to significant non-public information that should have increased their assessment of the risk posed by FTX, above and beyond the publicly-available information.
Some people had a particularized duty to conduct due dilligence and form an assessment of FTX’s risk (or to supervise someone to whom this duty was delegated). This duty would accrue from, e.g., a senior leadership role in an organization receiving large amounts of FTX funding, In other words, it was some people’s job to think about FTX risk.
Your average EA met neither of these criteria. In contrast, I think these two criteria—special knowledge and special responsibility—are multiplicative (i.e., that the potential blame for someone meeting both criteria is much higher than for those who met only one).
Plausible. Also plausible that they also had access to info that decreased their assessment. Perhaps the extra info they had access to even suggested they should decrease their assessment overall. Or perhaps they didn’t have access to any significant/relevant extra info.
Agreed. But I think Benjamin_Todd offers a good reflection on this:
I read almost all of the comments on the original EA Forum post linking to the Time article in question. If I recall correctly,Will made a quick comment that he would respond to these kinds of details when he would be at liberty to do so. (Edit: he made that point even more clearly in this shortform post he wrote a few months ago. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TeBBvwQH7KFwLT7w5/william_macaskill-s-shortform?commentId=ACDPftuESqkJP9RxP)
I assume he will address these concerns you’ve mentioned here at the same time he provides a fuller retrospective on the FTX collapse and its fallout.