Putting things in perspective: what is and isn’t the FTX crisis, for EA?
In thinking about the effect of the FTX crisis on EA, it’s easy to fixate on one aspect that is really severely damaged, and then to doomscroll about that, or conversely to focus on an aspect that is more lightly affected, and therefore to think all will be fine across the board. Instead, we should realise that both of these things can be true for different facets of EA. So in this comment, I’ll now list some important things that are, in my opinion, badly damaged, and some that aren’t, or that might not be.
What in EA is badly damaged:
The brand “effective altruism”, and maybe to an unrecoverable extent (but note that most new projects have not been naming themselves after EA anyway.)
The publishability of research on effective altruism (philosophers are now more sceptical about it).
The “innocence” of EA (EAs appear to have defrauded ~4x what they ever donated). EA, in whatever capacity it continues to exist, will be harshly criticised for this, as it should be, and will have to be much more thick-skinned in future.
The amount of goodwill among promoters of EA (they have lost funds on FTX, regranters have been embarrassed by the disappearance of promised funds, others have to content with clawbacks.), as well as the level of trust within EA, generally.
Abundant funding for EA projects that are merely plausibly-good.
What in EA is only damaged mildly, or not at all:
The rough amount of people who people want to doing good, effectively
The social network that has been built up around doing good, effectively, (i.e. “the real EA community is the friends we made along the way”)
The network of major organisations that are working on EA-related problems.
The knowledge that we have accumulated, through research and otherwise, about how to do good effectively.
The availability of good amounts of funding for clearly-good EA projects.
What in EA might be badly damaged:
The viability of “utilitarianism” as a public philosophy, absent changes (although Sam seems to have misapplied utilitarianism, this doesn’t redeem utilitarianism as a public philosophy, because we would also expect it to be applied imperfectly in future, and it is bad that its misapplication can be so catastrophic).
The current approach to building a community to do good, effectively (it is not clear whether a movement is even the right format for EA, going forward)
The EA “pitch”. (Can we still promote EA in good conscience? To some of us, the phrase “effective altruism” is now revolting. Does the current pitch still ring true, that joining this community will enable one to act as a stronger force for good? I would guess that many will prefer to pitch more specific things that are of interest to them, e.g. antimalarials, AI safety, whatever.)
Given all of this, what does that say about how big of a deal the FTX crisis is for EA? Well, I think it’s the biggest crisis that EA has ever had (modulo the possible issue of AI capabilities advances). What’s more, I also can’t think of a bigger scandal in the 223-year history of utilitarianism. On the other hand, the FTX crisis is not even the most important change in EA’s funding situation, so far. For me, most important was when Moskovitz entered the fold, changing the number of EA billionaires went from zero to one. When I look over the list above, I think that much more of the value of the EA community resides in its institutions and social network than in its brand. The main ways that a substantial chunk of value could be lost is if enough trust or motivation was lost, that it became hard to run projects, or recruit new talent. But I think that even though some goodwill and trust is lost, it can be rebuilt, and people’s motivation is intact. And I think that whatever happens to the exact strategy of outreach currently used by the EA community, we will be able to find ways to attract top talent to work on important problems. So my gut feeling would be that maybe 10% of what we’ve created is undone by this crisis. Or that we’re set back by a couple of years, compared to where we would be if FTX was not started. Which is bad, but it’s not everything.
I also can’t think of a bigger scandal in the 223-year history of utilitarianism
I feel like there’s been a lot here, though not as “one sudden shock”.
Utilitarianism being a key strain of thought in early England, which went on to colonize the world and do many questionable things. I’m not sure how close that link is, but it’s easy to imagine a lot of things (just by it being such a big deal).
Not exactly the same, but I believe that a lot of “enlightenment thinking” and similar got a ton of heat. The French Revolution, for example. Much later, arguably, a lot of WW1 and WW2 can be blamed on some of this thinking (atheism too, of course). I think the counter-enlightenment and similar jump on this.
Peter Singer got into a ton of heat for his utilitarian beliefs (though of course, the stakes were smaller)
Really, every large ideology I could think of have some pretty massive scandals associated with it. The political left, political right, lots of stuff. FTX is take compared to a lot of that. (Still really bad of course).
I think the FTX stuff a bigger deal than Peter Singer’s views on disability, and for me to be convinced about the England and enlightenment examples, you’d have to draw a clearer line between the philosophy and the wrongful actions (cf. in the FTX case, we have a self-identified utilitarian doing various wrongs for stated utilitarian reasons).
I agree that every large ideology has had massive scandals, in some cases ranging up to purges, famines, wars, etc. I think the problem for us, though, is that there aren’t very many people who take utilitarianism or beneficentrism seriously as an action-guiding principle—there are only ~10k effective altruists, basically. What happens if you scale that up to 100k and beyond? My claim would be that we need to tweak the product before we scale it, in order to make sure these catastrophes don’t scale with the size of the movement.
That’s an interesting take. I think that for me, it doesn’t feel that way, but this would be a long discussion, and my guess is that we both probably have fairly deep and different intuitions on this.
(Also, honestly, it seems like only a handful of people are really in charge of community growth decisions to me, and I don’t think I could do much to change direction there anyway, so I’m less focused on trying to change that)
Putting things in perspective: what is and isn’t the FTX crisis, for EA?
In thinking about the effect of the FTX crisis on EA, it’s easy to fixate on one aspect that is really severely damaged, and then to doomscroll about that, or conversely to focus on an aspect that is more lightly affected, and therefore to think all will be fine across the board. Instead, we should realise that both of these things can be true for different facets of EA. So in this comment, I’ll now list some important things that are, in my opinion, badly damaged, and some that aren’t, or that might not be.
What in EA is badly damaged:
The brand “effective altruism”, and maybe to an unrecoverable extent (but note that most new projects have not been naming themselves after EA anyway.)
The publishability of research on effective altruism (philosophers are now more sceptical about it).
The “innocence” of EA (EAs appear to have defrauded ~4x what they ever donated). EA, in whatever capacity it continues to exist, will be harshly criticised for this, as it should be, and will have to be much more thick-skinned in future.
The amount of goodwill among promoters of EA (they have lost funds on FTX, regranters have been embarrassed by the disappearance of promised funds, others have to content with clawbacks.), as well as the level of trust within EA, generally.
Abundant funding for EA projects that are merely plausibly-good.
What in EA is only damaged mildly, or not at all:
The rough amount of people who people want to doing good, effectively
The social network that has been built up around doing good, effectively, (i.e. “the real EA community is the friends we made along the way”)
The network of major organisations that are working on EA-related problems.
The knowledge that we have accumulated, through research and otherwise, about how to do good effectively.
“Existential risk”, as a brand
The “AI safety” research community in general
The availability of good amounts of funding for clearly-good EA projects.
What in EA might be badly damaged:
The viability of “utilitarianism” as a public philosophy, absent changes (although Sam seems to have misapplied utilitarianism, this doesn’t redeem utilitarianism as a public philosophy, because we would also expect it to be applied imperfectly in future, and it is bad that its misapplication can be so catastrophic).
The current approach to building a community to do good, effectively (it is not clear whether a movement is even the right format for EA, going forward)
The EA “pitch”. (Can we still promote EA in good conscience? To some of us, the phrase “effective altruism” is now revolting. Does the current pitch still ring true, that joining this community will enable one to act as a stronger force for good? I would guess that many will prefer to pitch more specific things that are of interest to them, e.g. antimalarials, AI safety, whatever.)
Given all of this, what does that say about how big of a deal the FTX crisis is for EA? Well, I think it’s the biggest crisis that EA has ever had (modulo the possible issue of AI capabilities advances). What’s more, I also can’t think of a bigger scandal in the 223-year history of utilitarianism. On the other hand, the FTX crisis is not even the most important change in EA’s funding situation, so far. For me, most important was when Moskovitz entered the fold, changing the number of EA billionaires went from zero to one. When I look over the list above, I think that much more of the value of the EA community resides in its institutions and social network than in its brand. The main ways that a substantial chunk of value could be lost is if enough trust or motivation was lost, that it became hard to run projects, or recruit new talent. But I think that even though some goodwill and trust is lost, it can be rebuilt, and people’s motivation is intact. And I think that whatever happens to the exact strategy of outreach currently used by the EA community, we will be able to find ways to attract top talent to work on important problems. So my gut feeling would be that maybe 10% of what we’ve created is undone by this crisis. Or that we’re set back by a couple of years, compared to where we would be if FTX was not started. Which is bad, but it’s not everything.
I feel like there’s been a lot here, though not as “one sudden shock”.
Utilitarianism being a key strain of thought in early England, which went on to colonize the world and do many questionable things. I’m not sure how close that link is, but it’s easy to imagine a lot of things (just by it being such a big deal).
Not exactly the same, but I believe that a lot of “enlightenment thinking” and similar got a ton of heat. The French Revolution, for example. Much later, arguably, a lot of WW1 and WW2 can be blamed on some of this thinking (atheism too, of course). I think the counter-enlightenment and similar jump on this.
Peter Singer got into a ton of heat for his utilitarian beliefs (though of course, the stakes were smaller)
Really, every large ideology I could think of have some pretty massive scandals associated with it. The political left, political right, lots of stuff. FTX is take compared to a lot of that. (Still really bad of course).
I think the FTX stuff a bigger deal than Peter Singer’s views on disability, and for me to be convinced about the England and enlightenment examples, you’d have to draw a clearer line between the philosophy and the wrongful actions (cf. in the FTX case, we have a self-identified utilitarian doing various wrongs for stated utilitarian reasons).
I agree that every large ideology has had massive scandals, in some cases ranging up to purges, famines, wars, etc. I think the problem for us, though, is that there aren’t very many people who take utilitarianism or beneficentrism seriously as an action-guiding principle—there are only ~10k effective altruists, basically. What happens if you scale that up to 100k and beyond? My claim would be that we need to tweak the product before we scale it, in order to make sure these catastrophes don’t scale with the size of the movement.
That’s an interesting take. I think that for me, it doesn’t feel that way, but this would be a long discussion, and my guess is that we both probably have fairly deep and different intuitions on this.
(Also, honestly, it seems like only a handful of people are really in charge of community growth decisions to me, and I don’t think I could do much to change direction there anyway, so I’m less focused on trying to change that)
What makes you say this? Anything public you can point to?
Fwiw I’m not sure it badly damages the publishability. It might lead to more critical papers, though.
It’s what global priorities researchers tell me is happening.
Some discussion on one of the main philosophy discussion fora:
https://dailynous.com/2022/11/18/ftx-moral-philosophy-public-philosophy/