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).
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: