The EA community has many excellent people—including many highly capable women—who are uninvolved in this scandal and could step up to serve in this capacity.
I am glad you felt okay to post this—being able to criticise leadership and think critically about the actions of the people we look up to is extremely important.
I personally would give Will the benefit of the doubt of his involvement in/knowledge about the specific details of the FTX scandal, but as you pointed out the fact remains that he and SBF were friends going back nearly a decade.
I also have questions about Will Macaskill’s ties with Elon Musk, his introduction of SBF to Elon Musk, his willingness to help SBF put up to 5 billion dollars towards the acquisition of Twitter alongside Musk, and the lack of engagement with the EA community about these actions. We talk a lot about being effective with our dollars and there are so many debates around how to spend even small amounts of money (eg. at EA events or on small EA projects), but it appears that helping SBF put up to 5 billion towards Twitter to buy in with a billionaire who recently advocated voting for the Republican party in the midterms didn’t require that same level of discussion/evaluation/scrutiny. (I understand that it wasn’t Will’s money and possibly SBF couldn’t have been talked into putting it towards other causes instead, but Will still made the introduction nonetheless.)
I personally would give Will the benefit of the doubt of his involvement in/knowledge about the specific details of the FTX scandal
Of course. This reads as almost bizarre: it would be a baby-eater-type conspiracy theory to think that Will (or anyone else in EA leadership) knew about this. That’s just not how things work in the world. The vast majority of people at Alameda/FTX didn’t know (inner circle may have been as small as four). I mean, maybe there’s a tiny chance that Sam phoned up someone a week ago and wanted a billion in secret, but you can see how ridiculous that sounds. I mean picture the conversation: “Hey [EA leader], turns out I fucked up. Can you wire me a billion? You’re down with me secretly trading with customer funds, right?”
In any case, I think that isn’t Kerry’s point. The point isn’t “Did Will know about concrete fraud,” but rather, “Was there reason to think fraud is unusually likely? And if so, did people take the types of precautions that you’d want to take if you thought you were dealing with someone capable of doing shady things?”
For comparison, think of Zuckerberg. If the Social Network movie is roughly accurate, then Zuckerberg acted in utterly despicable and unethical ways, lying to the Winklevoss twins repeatedly and stealing their idea (and then screwing over the guy played by Justin Timberlake). So anyone aware of this would’ve been faced with the choice to (1) not trust him at all and not invest in facebook or associate with him; (2) trust him like you’d trust any nice-seeming person without a suspicious history; (3) try to talk to him (e.g., give feedback, try to lecture or mentor, etc.) about how that was unacceptable, ask for concrete ways for him to change, maybe use leverage you have to set up good governance structures and accountability procedures or at least nudge things that way, etc. I’d say (2) is clearly stupid and immoral. (3) might be defensible depending on one’s judgment call (and subsequent execution), and (1) can certainly be appropriate. In the case of facebook, I don’t know if Zuckerberg got any feedback from anyone or how facebook set up its board or accountability procedures, but it looks like, so far, that Zuckerberg never ended up doing anything crazy illegal that destroyed billions in value. (Though maybe some would argue that social media isn’t good for the world and that other inventors could maybe have taken more precautions to make it less bad.)
I don’t think leadership needed to know how the sausage was made to be culpable to some degree. Many people are claiming that they warned leadership that SBF was not doing things above board and if true then has serious implications, even if they didn’t know exactly what SBF was up to.
Not I am not claiming that anyone, specific or otherwise, knew anything.
Thanks for your response. On reflection, I don’t think I said what I was trying to say very well in the paragraph you quoted, and I agree with what you’ve said.
My intent was not to suggest that Will or other FTX future fund advisors were directly involved (or that it’s reasonable to think so), but rather that there may have been things the advisors chose to ignore, such as Kerry’s mention of Sam’s unethical behaviour in the past. Thus, we might think that either Sam was incredibly charismatic and good at hiding things, or we might think there actually were some warning signs and those involved with him showed poor judgement of his character (or maybe some mix of both).
Facebook parent company fined in largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history
Oct. 27th, 2022
— A Washington state judge on Wednesday fined Facebook parent company Meta nearly $25 million for repeatedly and intentionally violating campaign finance disclosure law, in what is believed to be the largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history.
The penalty issued by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North was the maximum allowed for more than 800 violations of Washington's Fair Campaign Practices Act, passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same law.
Is Ben Delo a “disgraced crypto billionaire”? From Jess Riedel’s description, it wasn’t obvious to me whether the thing BitMEX got fined for was something seriously evil, versus something closer to “overlooked a garden-variety regulation and had to go pay a fine, as large businesses often do”.
(Conflict-of-interest notice: I work for MIRI, which received money from Open Phil in 2020 that came in part from Ben Delo.)
I’d prefer that the discussion focus on more concrete, less PR-ish things than questions of who is “fit to be the public face of the effective altruism movement”. The latter feels close to saying that Will isn’t allowed to voice his personal opinions in public if EAs think he fucked up.
I’d like to see EA do less PR-based distancing itself from people who have good ideas, and also less signal-boosting of people for reasons orthogonal to their idea quality (and ability to crisply, accurately, and honestly express those ideas). Think less “activist movement”, more “field of academic discourse”.
It seems like there’s this expectation of public figures to always have acted in a way that is correct given the information we have now—basically hindsight bias again.
One of the many wildly charismatic people you hang out with later turns out to be No Good? Well of course you shouldn’t have associated with them. One of the many rumours you might have heard turns out to be true and a big deal? Off course you should have acted on it.
I don’t think this is very fair or useful. I guess we might worry that the rest of the world will think like that but I don’t see why we should.
Will:
One item that should be a part of your reflections in the days and months to come is whether you are fit to be the public face of the effective altruism movement, given your knowledge of Sam’s unethical behavior in the past, ties to him going back to 2013, and your history of vouching for Ben Delo, another disgraced crypto billionaire.
The EA community has many excellent people—including many highly capable women—who are uninvolved in this scandal and could step up to serve in this capacity.
I am glad you felt okay to post this—being able to criticise leadership and think critically about the actions of the people we look up to is extremely important.
I personally would give Will the benefit of the doubt of his involvement in/knowledge about the specific details of the FTX scandal, but as you pointed out the fact remains that he and SBF were friends going back nearly a decade.
I also have questions about Will Macaskill’s ties with Elon Musk, his introduction of SBF to Elon Musk, his willingness to help SBF put up to 5 billion dollars towards the acquisition of Twitter alongside Musk, and the lack of engagement with the EA community about these actions. We talk a lot about being effective with our dollars and there are so many debates around how to spend even small amounts of money (eg. at EA events or on small EA projects), but it appears that helping SBF put up to 5 billion towards Twitter to buy in with a billionaire who recently advocated voting for the Republican party in the midterms didn’t require that same level of discussion/evaluation/scrutiny. (I understand that it wasn’t Will’s money and possibly SBF couldn’t have been talked into putting it towards other causes instead, but Will still made the introduction nonetheless.)
Of course. This reads as almost bizarre: it would be a baby-eater-type conspiracy theory to think that Will (or anyone else in EA leadership) knew about this. That’s just not how things work in the world. The vast majority of people at Alameda/FTX didn’t know (inner circle may have been as small as four). I mean, maybe there’s a tiny chance that Sam phoned up someone a week ago and wanted a billion in secret, but you can see how ridiculous that sounds. I mean picture the conversation: “Hey [EA leader], turns out I fucked up. Can you wire me a billion? You’re down with me secretly trading with customer funds, right?”
In any case, I think that isn’t Kerry’s point. The point isn’t “Did Will know about concrete fraud,” but rather, “Was there reason to think fraud is unusually likely? And if so, did people take the types of precautions that you’d want to take if you thought you were dealing with someone capable of doing shady things?”
For comparison, think of Zuckerberg. If the Social Network movie is roughly accurate, then Zuckerberg acted in utterly despicable and unethical ways, lying to the Winklevoss twins repeatedly and stealing their idea (and then screwing over the guy played by Justin Timberlake). So anyone aware of this would’ve been faced with the choice to (1) not trust him at all and not invest in facebook or associate with him; (2) trust him like you’d trust any nice-seeming person without a suspicious history; (3) try to talk to him (e.g., give feedback, try to lecture or mentor, etc.) about how that was unacceptable, ask for concrete ways for him to change, maybe use leverage you have to set up good governance structures and accountability procedures or at least nudge things that way, etc. I’d say (2) is clearly stupid and immoral. (3) might be defensible depending on one’s judgment call (and subsequent execution), and (1) can certainly be appropriate. In the case of facebook, I don’t know if Zuckerberg got any feedback from anyone or how facebook set up its board or accountability procedures, but it looks like, so far, that Zuckerberg never ended up doing anything crazy illegal that destroyed billions in value. (Though maybe some would argue that social media isn’t good for the world and that other inventors could maybe have taken more precautions to make it less bad.)
I don’t think leadership needed to know how the sausage was made to be culpable to some degree. Many people are claiming that they warned leadership that SBF was not doing things above board and if true then has serious implications, even if they didn’t know exactly what SBF was up to.
Not I am not claiming that anyone, specific or otherwise, knew anything.
Thanks for your response. On reflection, I don’t think I said what I was trying to say very well in the paragraph you quoted, and I agree with what you’ve said.
My intent was not to suggest that Will or other FTX future fund advisors were directly involved (or that it’s reasonable to think so), but rather that there may have been things the advisors chose to ignore, such as Kerry’s mention of Sam’s unethical behaviour in the past. Thus, we might think that either Sam was incredibly charismatic and good at hiding things, or we might think there actually were some warning signs and those involved with him showed poor judgement of his character (or maybe some mix of both).
Actually...
Facebook parent company fined in largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history
Oct. 27th, 2022
— A Washington state judge on Wednesday fined Facebook parent company Meta nearly $25 million for repeatedly and intentionally violating campaign finance disclosure law, in what is believed to be the largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history.The penalty issued by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North was the maximum allowed for more than 800violations of Washington's Fair Campaign Practices Act,passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same law.Is Ben Delo a “disgraced crypto billionaire”? From Jess Riedel’s description, it wasn’t obvious to me whether the thing BitMEX got fined for was something seriously evil, versus something closer to “overlooked a garden-variety regulation and had to go pay a fine, as large businesses often do”.
(Conflict-of-interest notice: I work for MIRI, which received money from Open Phil in 2020 that came in part from Ben Delo.)
I’d prefer that the discussion focus on more concrete, less PR-ish things than questions of who is “fit to be the public face of the effective altruism movement”. The latter feels close to saying that Will isn’t allowed to voice his personal opinions in public if EAs think he fucked up.
I’d like to see EA do less PR-based distancing itself from people who have good ideas, and also less signal-boosting of people for reasons orthogonal to their idea quality (and ability to crisply, accurately, and honestly express those ideas). Think less “activist movement”, more “field of academic discourse”.
I’d be interested to know why you thought it relevant to mention “women” specifically?
It seems like there’s this expectation of public figures to always have acted in a way that is correct given the information we have now—basically hindsight bias again.
One of the many wildly charismatic people you hang out with later turns out to be No Good? Well of course you shouldn’t have associated with them. One of the many rumours you might have heard turns out to be true and a big deal? Off course you should have acted on it.
I don’t think this is very fair or useful. I guess we might worry that the rest of the world will think like that but I don’t see why we should.