Like others, I appreciate your openness about your role in the FTX debacle, no matter how limited that role was, and your readiness to consider seriously how this impacts your philosophy from the ground up. I am a long-time lurker on this forum who has a lot of admiration for the commitment shown to their cause by EA advocates, but who also has a lot of disregard for the politics of EA, which I consider to be frankly naive and inadequate to the actual nature of the problems EA seeks to address.
With regard to the collapse of FTX, it seems that only a handful people in the EA movement had a critique of wealth that would lead them to question whether the means by which Bankman-Fried acquired his wealth were entirely ethical, and (assuming that one agreed that those means were ethically questionable) whether the willingness of Bankman-Fried and his colleagues to use those means to create their wealth might lead them to make further questionable decisions in future.
I would be interested to hear from you or other EA advocates on this forum whether recent events have caused you to question not just whether Sam Bankman-Fried’s behaviour in this instance was ethical, but more broadly whether the same events have caused any of you to reconsider your views about the ethical status of the super-wealthy in general, and what EA’s collective view of such individuals should be. I recognise that my politics are probably not shared by most (if any!) contributors to this forum, but now might be a good time to have that conversation.
Will,
Like others, I appreciate your openness about your role in the FTX debacle, no matter how limited that role was, and your readiness to consider seriously how this impacts your philosophy from the ground up. I am a long-time lurker on this forum who has a lot of admiration for the commitment shown to their cause by EA advocates, but who also has a lot of disregard for the politics of EA, which I consider to be frankly naive and inadequate to the actual nature of the problems EA seeks to address.
With regard to the collapse of FTX, it seems that only a handful people in the EA movement had a critique of wealth that would lead them to question whether the means by which Bankman-Fried acquired his wealth were entirely ethical, and (assuming that one agreed that those means were ethically questionable) whether the willingness of Bankman-Fried and his colleagues to use those means to create their wealth might lead them to make further questionable decisions in future.
I would be interested to hear from you or other EA advocates on this forum whether recent events have caused you to question not just whether Sam Bankman-Fried’s behaviour in this instance was ethical, but more broadly whether the same events have caused any of you to reconsider your views about the ethical status of the super-wealthy in general, and what EA’s collective view of such individuals should be. I recognise that my politics are probably not shared by most (if any!) contributors to this forum, but now might be a good time to have that conversation.