...I am confused and somewhat worried by the degree to which voters on this post seem to feel that it’s not an important heuristic to try to construct your community regulatory process in a way that doesn’t revolve around people’s sex lives, except in so far as the sex itself is per se a bad thing (eg nonconsensual or under conditions where positive consent could not reasonably be determined).
It’s not about the sex in and of itself, it’s about the conflict of interest and favouritism. Romantic love interest is enough for that too. EA could probably learn a lot from how mainstream orgs deal with this.
Yes—I almost can’t believe I am reading a senior EA figure suggesting that every major financial institution has an unreasonably prurient interest in the sex lives of their risk-holding employees. EA has just taken a bath because it was worse at financial risk assessment than it thought it was. The response here seems to be to double-down on the view that a sufficiently intelligent rationalist can derive—from first principles—better risk management than the lessons embedded in professional organisations. We have ample evidence that this approach did not work in the case of FTX funding, and that real people are really suffering because EA leaders made the wrong call here.
Now is the time to eat a big plate of epistemically humble crow, and accept that this approach failed horribly. Conspiracy theorising about ‘voting rings’ is a pretty terrible look.
I feel like people are mischarachterizing what Eliezer is saying. It sounds to me like he’s saying the following.
“Sure, the fact that the two were dating or having sex makes it even more obvious that something was amiss, but the real problem was obviously that Alameda and FTX were entangled from the very start with Sam having had total control of Alameda before he started FTX, and there were no checks and balances and so on, so why are you weirdos focusing on the sex part so much and ignore all the other blatant issues?!”
That seems like a very charitable reading of the comment
“who EAs are fucking is none of EA’s business. There are very limited exceptions to this rule like … none of which are being suggested here.”
I’d suggest that given the high stakes of the situation at the moment it is especially important not to inadvertently give the impression that EA leadership think they have privileged insight into financial risk management that they actually don’t. If EY has merely mangled his argument (as you suggest) it would be very sensible for him to edit his comment to reflect that, and apologise for implying that vote rigging was the only reason he could have been down voted.
That seems like a very charitable reading of the comment
I was commenting on his overall stance from his comments throughout the threads here, not only on that particular first comment. I agree that the part you cite doesn’t sound defensible. I considered his further comments to be admissions of “Okay, you all have a point, but …” (If I’m right with my interpretation, he could’ve been more clear about the part of “sorry, you all have a point and the initial comment was too crude.”)
Edit: FWIW, I thought the info/arguments you gave about why it’s common practice in finance to carefully monitor romantic or sexual conflicts of interests were compelling, and your point about how EAs maybe shouldn’t think they can do better based on first-principles reasoning also seems wise.
I’m under the impression that mainstream orgs deal with this rather poorly, by having the relationships still happen, but be Big Dark Forbidden Secrets instead of things that people are allowed to actually know about and take into account. But they Pretend to be acting with Great Propriety which is all that matters for the great kayfabe performance in front of those who’d perform pearl-clutching otherwise. People falsifying their romantic relationships to conform to ideas about required public image is part of our present culture of everything being fake; so what loves you forbid from being known and spoken of, by way of trying to forbid the loves themselves, you should forbid very hesitantly.
I think our current culture is better, even in light of current events, because I don’t think the standard culture would have actually prevented this bad outcome (unless almost any minor causal perturbance would’ve prevented it). It would mean that SBF/C’s relationship was just coming out now even though they’d previously supposedly properly broken up before setting up the two companies, or something—if we learned even that much!
One thing that people in mainstream orgs do, if they want to act with integrity, is resign from roles/go work somewhere else when they want to start a relationship that would create a conflict of interest whilst both are in their current positions (or if they value their job(s) more, give up on the idea of the relationship).
The first half of this comment is tangential at best. It’s also a bit odd to me how much you are defending “our current culture” when someone posted on the forum just yesterday expressing concerns about said culture.
...by not saying anything in favor of protecting some aspect of our current culture, when somebody else has just recently expressed concerns about it? That’s a rule?
...I am confused and somewhat worried by the degree to which voters on this post seem to feel that it’s not an important heuristic to try to construct your community regulatory process in a way that doesn’t revolve around people’s sex lives, except in so far as the sex itself is per se a bad thing (eg nonconsensual or under conditions where positive consent could not reasonably be determined).
It’s not about the sex in and of itself, it’s about the conflict of interest and favouritism. Romantic love interest is enough for that too. EA could probably learn a lot from how mainstream orgs deal with this.
Yes—I almost can’t believe I am reading a senior EA figure suggesting that every major financial institution has an unreasonably prurient interest in the sex lives of their risk-holding employees. EA has just taken a bath because it was worse at financial risk assessment than it thought it was. The response here seems to be to double-down on the view that a sufficiently intelligent rationalist can derive—from first principles—better risk management than the lessons embedded in professional organisations. We have ample evidence that this approach did not work in the case of FTX funding, and that real people are really suffering because EA leaders made the wrong call here.
Now is the time to eat a big plate of epistemically humble crow, and accept that this approach failed horribly. Conspiracy theorising about ‘voting rings’ is a pretty terrible look.
I feel like people are mischarachterizing what Eliezer is saying. It sounds to me like he’s saying the following.
“Sure, the fact that the two were dating or having sex makes it even more obvious that something was amiss, but the real problem was obviously that Alameda and FTX were entangled from the very start with Sam having had total control of Alameda before he started FTX, and there were no checks and balances and so on, so why are you weirdos focusing on the sex part so much and ignore all the other blatant issues?!”
That seems like a very charitable reading of the comment
“who EAs are fucking is none of EA’s business. There are very limited exceptions to this rule like … none of which are being suggested here.”
I’d suggest that given the high stakes of the situation at the moment it is especially important not to inadvertently give the impression that EA leadership think they have privileged insight into financial risk management that they actually don’t. If EY has merely mangled his argument (as you suggest) it would be very sensible for him to edit his comment to reflect that, and apologise for implying that vote rigging was the only reason he could have been down voted.
I was commenting on his overall stance from his comments throughout the threads here, not only on that particular first comment. I agree that the part you cite doesn’t sound defensible. I considered his further comments to be admissions of “Okay, you all have a point, but …” (If I’m right with my interpretation, he could’ve been more clear about the part of “sorry, you all have a point and the initial comment was too crude.”)
Edit: FWIW, I thought the info/arguments you gave about why it’s common practice in finance to carefully monitor romantic or sexual conflicts of interests were compelling, and your point about how EAs maybe shouldn’t think they can do better based on first-principles reasoning also seems wise.
I’m under the impression that mainstream orgs deal with this rather poorly, by having the relationships still happen, but be Big Dark Forbidden Secrets instead of things that people are allowed to actually know about and take into account. But they Pretend to be acting with Great Propriety which is all that matters for the great kayfabe performance in front of those who’d perform pearl-clutching otherwise. People falsifying their romantic relationships to conform to ideas about required public image is part of our present culture of everything being fake; so what loves you forbid from being known and spoken of, by way of trying to forbid the loves themselves, you should forbid very hesitantly.
I think our current culture is better, even in light of current events, because I don’t think the standard culture would have actually prevented this bad outcome (unless almost any minor causal perturbance would’ve prevented it). It would mean that SBF/C’s relationship was just coming out now even though they’d previously supposedly properly broken up before setting up the two companies, or something—if we learned even that much!
One thing that people in mainstream orgs do, if they want to act with integrity, is resign from roles/go work somewhere else when they want to start a relationship that would create a conflict of interest whilst both are in their current positions (or if they value their job(s) more, give up on the idea of the relationship).
The first half of this comment is tangential at best. It’s also a bit odd to me how much you are defending “our current culture” when someone posted on the forum just yesterday expressing concerns about said culture.
...are you suggesting that nobody ought to dare to defend aspects of our current culture once somebody has expressed concerns about them?
I’m suggesting that you show some humility.
...by not saying anything in favor of protecting some aspect of our current culture, when somebody else has just recently expressed concerns about it? That’s a rule?
I would have expected the opposite corner of the two axis voting (because I think people don’t like the language)