I think FTXFF not making sure all money went via them was a big miscalculation at least.
And I think our prior should be be removal, so we should want reasons not to do that. I sense that normy institutional folks would look at this and think that the EVF board is a bit fishy.
I’m not exactly sure who made what decisions, and I’m not sure what Nick and Will expressed behind the scenes or what they tried to do, but as far as we can see publicly, Nick and Will definitely went along with and followed through on a strategy that definitely did enable Sam to run the “FTX Future Fund” (note: FTX prominently in the name) in a very prominent way that was very connected to EA, as well as orient a lot of his public branding and public persona to EA in a highly visible way. I think Nick and Will, and their strong reputation within the EA community, were critical in making this happen.
Contrast this to how Dustin relates to Open Philanthropy (note: not named Asana Philanthropy Fund) and you’ll see it was very clear Sam was using EA to burnish his own personal popularity. Unfortunately, no one except me (as far as I know) seemed particularly (publicly) concerned about that.
Sorry, but that really doesn’t seem like “promoting Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA”, and more like “went with the general flow of letting Sam’s projects go ahead”.
I agree the Elon Musk thing was sketchy and arguably a bad decision, but that also wasn’t public and not related to SBF’s EA activities.
To be clear, I also got the vibe that Sam was a poster child, but I don’t think I can point to Nick and Will pushing that, and since those are the people we’re talking about sacking, I think that’s pretty relevant.
I agree the Elon Musk thing was sketchy and arguably a bad decision, but that also wasn’t public and not related to SBF’s EA activities.
Whether it was “sketchy and arguably a bad decision” isn’t the primary issue. Peter Wildeford pointed out that Will vouched for SBF. Vouching = staking your reputation to guarantee that someone has integrity/can be trusted.
(Many of the things you say in your comment seem reasonable to me as well, but I feel like we can’t just skip over the vouching part even if it was non-public. If he vouched towards Musk he probably did the same in lots of other contexts, or conveyed trust in Sam in less explicit ways, at least.)
Again it’s very unclear what kind of role they had in this sort of thing, but I see EA as at least partially about what kind of outcomes you achieve with your actions and the outcome they achieved is that Sam very much was elevated as EA’s poster child and I think Nick and Will’s actions and reputation was a very much necessary part of that.
Okay, but you started with “promoted Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA”, and now we’re at “took actions that may have generally contributed to Sam being promoted although I can’t point to any in particular”.
I’m being fussy about this because I find it upsetting that people are making specific claims of bad behaviour for people that are not in fact true or justified. There’s enough heat at the moment without that.
I see EA as at least partially about what kind of outcomes you achieve with your actions
I think EA is independent of whether we choose to assess people for their ex ante behaviour or ex post outcomes. I think there are arguments for both, but I don’t think it’s at all obvious that ex post is all or primarily what matters.
I think the core problem for me is it is very unclear what Will and Nick specifically did or didn’t do. There’s a general cloud / “fog of war” here.
So all I can do is gesture to the “Will + Nick --> [BLACK BOX] --> SBF as poster child of EA” chain and make some inferences about BLACK BOX and argue that had Will + Nick not been involved this overall chain likely would not have worked as well as it did.
I think it’s totally fair for you to question BLACK BOX and suggest Will and Nick didn’t do anything. Unfortunately we will just never know.
I think it’s totally fair for you to question BLACK BOX and suggest Will and Nick didn’t do anything. Unfortunately we will just never know.
There are probably ways to gather some evidence, like asking Will and Nick directly, looking for and asking possible witnesses, basically investigating. Personally, I’d like to hear more from them, but I’d guess they have some good reasons to avoid commenting further publicly (e.g. see Will’s shortform).
EDIT: Per discussion below I’m retracting this as maybe too cute and misleading, given that there’s substantial uncertainty around exactly what happened.
Isn’t this a bit much hindsight? Conditional that you trust that nothing fraudulent is going on, you might just think “what route the money takes is an ops question that I leave to FTX ops staff to figure out” and not worry about it further. The only reason to get personally involved in insisting that the money flows a particular way seems like when you’re already suspicious that something might be really wrong?
What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don’t even know if they had any ops staff, there is no-one listed here.)
No I think charities should ensure their grant funding goes via them, not via defunct phone stores. And if their ops folks can’t manage that I probably hold the charity leadership accountable.
Will was an unpaid adviser, right? While the extent of his involvement is unclear to me, it’s not obvious he in particular should have been expected to monitor the organization’s ops.
I suspect they were told at a high level that the payments were made through various entities for tax/accounting reasons and didn’t dig into the nature of each of those entities. Indeed, there almost certainly were good tax reasons to structure certain payments other than through the 501c3. I don’t think I would downgrade them for not independently investigating each of the grantor entities. There’s just no ex ante reason to think one of them would be a chain of defunct phone stores. . .
Why? Because it looks bad? That’s a reason, but I continue to believe that we’d be better off in the long run if we didn’t make decisions primarily because of optics.
While I wouldn’t privilege optics, impacts to effectiveness that happen through optical mechanisms are just as real as those that occur through other mechanisms. Not saying you are suggesting this, but we need to be careful not to discount an impact because it occurs through such a mechanism.
I won’t start the discussion here, but I continue to think that we’d be better off systematically if we took the rule of de-privileging optics-based reasoning even if it’s better in individual situations. I appreciate that this is controversial.
To be clear I’m not unpersuaded by that argument you make. I find it plausible. How much to care about optics is a spectrum and I think it’s clear we should care some, but probably care less than most groups. I think there are some clear areas though where we could achieve significant benefit with not much cost by doing some things though. I also think we should make these trade-offs intentionally, whereas we currently seem to have some sort of unawareness that leads to bad decisions.
I liked your high-trust post, but my take would be that the community might already be in a low-trust state right now, and the actions we need to take to move back to the ‘good actors/high trust’ quadrant[1] where we can do the most good may not be the same ones we would take if we were inthat state.
I’m not really thinking about the FTX situation when referring to lack of awareness around optics, but more the Bostrom apology controversy and the Wytham Abbey controversy.
I think FTXFF not making sure all money went via them was a big miscalculation at least.
And I think our prior should be be removal, so we should want reasons not to do that. I sense that normy institutional folks would look at this and think that the EVF board is a bit fishy.
The other clear mistake was promoting Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA.
Did Nick and Will do that? This is actually a genuine question, I don’t recall them doing that, but maybe they did.
I’m not exactly sure who made what decisions, and I’m not sure what Nick and Will expressed behind the scenes or what they tried to do, but as far as we can see publicly, Nick and Will definitely went along with and followed through on a strategy that definitely did enable Sam to run the “FTX Future Fund” (note: FTX prominently in the name) in a very prominent way that was very connected to EA, as well as orient a lot of his public branding and public persona to EA in a highly visible way. I think Nick and Will, and their strong reputation within the EA community, were critical in making this happen.
Contrast this to how Dustin relates to Open Philanthropy (note: not named Asana Philanthropy Fund) and you’ll see it was very clear Sam was using EA to burnish his own personal popularity. Unfortunately, no one except me (as far as I know) seemed particularly (publicly) concerned about that.
Will also vouched for SBF to Elon Musk in a bid to invest in Twitter.
Wow “Asana Philanthropy Fund” makes the comparison so sharp.
Sorry, but that really doesn’t seem like “promoting Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA”, and more like “went with the general flow of letting Sam’s projects go ahead”.
I agree the Elon Musk thing was sketchy and arguably a bad decision, but that also wasn’t public and not related to SBF’s EA activities.
To be clear, I also got the vibe that Sam was a poster child, but I don’t think I can point to Nick and Will pushing that, and since those are the people we’re talking about sacking, I think that’s pretty relevant.
Whether it was “sketchy and arguably a bad decision” isn’t the primary issue. Peter Wildeford pointed out that Will vouched for SBF. Vouching = staking your reputation to guarantee that someone has integrity/can be trusted.
(Many of the things you say in your comment seem reasonable to me as well, but I feel like we can’t just skip over the vouching part even if it was non-public. If he vouched towards Musk he probably did the same in lots of other contexts, or conveyed trust in Sam in less explicit ways, at least.)
Again it’s very unclear what kind of role they had in this sort of thing, but I see EA as at least partially about what kind of outcomes you achieve with your actions and the outcome they achieved is that Sam very much was elevated as EA’s poster child and I think Nick and Will’s actions and reputation was a very much necessary part of that.
Okay, but you started with “promoted Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA”, and now we’re at “took actions that may have generally contributed to Sam being promoted although I can’t point to any in particular”.
I’m being fussy about this because I find it upsetting that people are making specific claims of bad behaviour for people that are not in fact true or justified. There’s enough heat at the moment without that.
I think EA is independent of whether we choose to assess people for their ex ante behaviour or ex post outcomes. I think there are arguments for both, but I don’t think it’s at all obvious that ex post is all or primarily what matters.
I think the core problem for me is it is very unclear what Will and Nick specifically did or didn’t do. There’s a general cloud / “fog of war” here.
So all I can do is gesture to the “Will + Nick --> [BLACK BOX] --> SBF as poster child of EA” chain and make some inferences about BLACK BOX and argue that had Will + Nick not been involved this overall chain likely would not have worked as well as it did.
I think it’s totally fair for you to question BLACK BOX and suggest Will and Nick didn’t do anything. Unfortunately we will just never know.
There are probably ways to gather some evidence, like asking Will and Nick directly, looking for and asking possible witnesses, basically investigating. Personally, I’d like to hear more from them, but I’d guess they have some good reasons to avoid commenting further publicly (e.g. see Will’s shortform).
Yeah just from a kind of brier score perspective they should take a huge loss on that.
EDIT: Per discussion below I’m retracting this as maybe too cute and misleading, given that there’s substantial uncertainty around exactly what happened.
Isn’t this a bit much hindsight? Conditional that you trust that nothing fraudulent is going on, you might just think “what route the money takes is an ops question that I leave to FTX ops staff to figure out” and not worry about it further. The only reason to get personally involved in insisting that the money flows a particular way seems like when you’re already suspicious that something might be really wrong?
What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don’t even know if they had any ops staff, there is no-one listed here.)
No I think charities should ensure their grant funding goes via them, not via defunct phone stores. And if their ops folks can’t manage that I probably hold the charity leadership accountable.
Happy to be wrong, but I’m pretty confident.
Will was an unpaid adviser, right? While the extent of his involvement is unclear to me, it’s not obvious he in particular should have been expected to monitor the organization’s ops.
I suspect they were told at a high level that the payments were made through various entities for tax/accounting reasons and didn’t dig into the nature of each of those entities. Indeed, there almost certainly were good tax reasons to structure certain payments other than through the 501c3. I don’t think I would downgrade them for not independently investigating each of the grantor entities. There’s just no ex ante reason to think one of them would be a chain of defunct phone stores. . .
Why? Because it looks bad? That’s a reason, but I continue to believe that we’d be better off in the long run if we didn’t make decisions primarily because of optics.
While I wouldn’t privilege optics, impacts to effectiveness that happen through optical mechanisms are just as real as those that occur through other mechanisms. Not saying you are suggesting this, but we need to be careful not to discount an impact because it occurs through such a mechanism.
I won’t start the discussion here, but I continue to think that we’d be better off systematically if we took the rule of de-privileging optics-based reasoning even if it’s better in individual situations. I appreciate that this is controversial.
To be clear I’m not unpersuaded by that argument you make. I find it plausible. How much to care about optics is a spectrum and I think it’s clear we should care some, but probably care less than most groups. I think there are some clear areas though where we could achieve significant benefit with not much cost by doing some things though. I also think we should make these trade-offs intentionally, whereas we currently seem to have some sort of unawareness that leads to bad decisions.
I don’t think we had unawareness, I think we had a lot of trust. And I’m very sad that it’s been damaged, and I think we should fight to keep it.
I liked your high-trust post, but my take would be that the community might already be in a low-trust state right now, and the actions we need to take to move back to the ‘good actors/high trust’ quadrant[1] where we can do the most good may not be the same ones we would take if we were in that state.
Taken from this comment.
I’m not really thinking about the FTX situation when referring to lack of awareness around optics, but more the Bostrom apology controversy and the Wytham Abbey controversy.
See also my answer to this Q in the other thread