This is a good start. But in my opinion, the questions we need to wrestle with are more structural.
For instance, when EA (as a collection of institutions and individuals) was considering taking donations from a single donor to the extent SBF offered, what due diligence did we attempt to go through of the business practices of Alameda and FTX? Was this failure a case of blind trust, a coordination failure (surely Sequoia Capital did their due diligence…), or a known, calculated risk?
I see a lot of attempts to clarify that fraud is bad. But if we actually believe that, what attempts have there been to actually check whether fraud was occurring until this week? If we were genuinely caught off-guard, what did we previously believe about the actual business of FTX?
It seems like at the very least our baseline expectation should have featured a much higher degree of skepticism than seems to have been brought to the whole endeavor of entrusting a decent chunk of the financing and reputation of the entire EA movement to an offshore crypto business.
I agree. A common trope in EA is that we don’t just give money to any charity because it “feels good”, we want it to be effective so we investigate and analyze deeply before giving. In same vain, if we want to prevent bad things from happening we need to implement well structured institutions and perform due diligence, even if it “feels less good” than trusting without verifying does.
This is a good start. But in my opinion, the questions we need to wrestle with are more structural.
For instance, when EA (as a collection of institutions and individuals) was considering taking donations from a single donor to the extent SBF offered, what due diligence did we attempt to go through of the business practices of Alameda and FTX? Was this failure a case of blind trust, a coordination failure (surely Sequoia Capital did their due diligence…), or a known, calculated risk?
I see a lot of attempts to clarify that fraud is bad. But if we actually believe that, what attempts have there been to actually check whether fraud was occurring until this week? If we were genuinely caught off-guard, what did we previously believe about the actual business of FTX?
It seems like at the very least our baseline expectation should have featured a much higher degree of skepticism than seems to have been brought to the whole endeavor of entrusting a decent chunk of the financing and reputation of the entire EA movement to an offshore crypto business.
I agree. A common trope in EA is that we don’t just give money to any charity because it “feels good”, we want it to be effective so we investigate and analyze deeply before giving. In same vain, if we want to prevent bad things from happening we need to implement well structured institutions and perform due diligence, even if it “feels less good” than trusting without verifying does.
Yes, we need to apply similarly rigorous analysis to our (major) sources of funding as we do to the destinations of that funding.
Yup, I agree. This post was written as a more personal response to a disorienting situation.
Let the investigations and reevaluations ensue.