[Edit after months: While I still believe these are valid questions, I now think I was too hostile, overconfident, and not genuinely curious enough.]
One additional thing I’d be curious about:
You played the role of a messenger between SBF and Elon Musk in a bid for SBF to invest up to 15 billion of (presumably mostly his) wealth in an acquisition of Twitter. The stated reason for that bid was to make Twitter better for the world. This has worried me a lot over the last weeks. It could have easily been the most consequential thing EAs have ever done and there has—to my knowledge- never been a thorough EA debate that signalled that this would be a good idea.
What was the reasoning behind the decision to support SBF by connecting him to Musk?
How many people from FTXFF or EA at large were consulted to figure out if that was a good idea?
Do you think that it still made sense at the point you helped with the potential acquisition to regard most of the wealth of SBF as EA resources? If not, why did you not inform the EA community?
It could have easily been the most consequential thing EAs have ever done and there has—to my knowledge- never been a thorough EA debate that signalled that this would be a good idea.
I don’t think EAs should necessary require a community-wide debate before making major decisions, including investment decisions; sometimes decisions should be made fast, and often decisions don’t benefit a ton from “the whole community weighs in” over “twenty smart advisors weighed in”.
But regardless, seems interesting and useful for EAs to debate this topic so we can form more models of this part of the strategy space—maybe we should be doing more to positively affect the world’s public fora. And I’d personally love to know more about Will’s reasoning re Twitter.
often decisions don’t benefit a ton from “the whole community weighs in” over “twenty smart advisors weighed in”.
I don’t think this is true? Especially for decisions in the billions of dollars? Why do you think 20 smart advisors can spot all the problems that thousands of community members will, or even the major ones?
For nearly a decade now, we’ve been putting a huge amount of work into putting the details of our reasoning out in public, and yet I am hard-pressed to think of cases (especially in more recent years) where a public comment from an unexpected source raised novel important considerations, leading to a change in views. This isn’t because nobody has raised novel important considerations, and it certainly isn’t because we haven’t changed our views. Rather, it seems to be the case that we get a large amount of valuable and important criticism from a relatively small number of highly engaged, highly informed people. Such people tend to spend a lot of time reading, thinking and writing about relevant topics, to follow our work closely, and to have a great deal of context. They also tend to be people who form relationships of some sort with us beyond public discourse.
The feedback and questions we get from outside of this set of people are often reasonable but familiar, seemingly unreasonable, or difficult for us to make sense of. [...]
Regardless of the underlying reasons, we have put a lot of effort over a long period of time into public discourse, and have reaped very little of this particular kind of benefit (though we have reaped other benefits—more below). I’m aware that this claim may strike some as unlikely and/or disappointing, but it is my lived experience, and I think at this point it would be hard to argue that it is simply explained by a lack of effort or interest in public discourse.
[Edit after months: While I still believe these are valid questions, I now think I was too hostile, overconfident, and not genuinely curious enough.] One additional thing I’d be curious about:
You played the role of a messenger between SBF and Elon Musk in a bid for SBF to invest up to 15 billion of (presumably mostly his) wealth in an acquisition of Twitter. The stated reason for that bid was to make Twitter better for the world. This has worried me a lot over the last weeks. It could have easily been the most consequential thing EAs have ever done and there has—to my knowledge- never been a thorough EA debate that signalled that this would be a good idea.
What was the reasoning behind the decision to support SBF by connecting him to Musk? How many people from FTXFF or EA at large were consulted to figure out if that was a good idea? Do you think that it still made sense at the point you helped with the potential acquisition to regard most of the wealth of SBF as EA resources? If not, why did you not inform the EA community?
Source for claim about playing a messenger: https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1575603591431102464?s=20&t=lYY65-TpZuifcbQ2j2EQ5w
I don’t think EAs should necessary require a community-wide debate before making major decisions, including investment decisions; sometimes decisions should be made fast, and often decisions don’t benefit a ton from “the whole community weighs in” over “twenty smart advisors weighed in”.
But regardless, seems interesting and useful for EAs to debate this topic so we can form more models of this part of the strategy space—maybe we should be doing more to positively affect the world’s public fora. And I’d personally love to know more about Will’s reasoning re Twitter.
I don’t think this is true? Especially for decisions in the billions of dollars? Why do you think 20 smart advisors can spot all the problems that thousands of community members will, or even the major ones?
See Holden Karnofsky’s Some Thoughts on Public Discourse: