Did Nick and Will massively miscalculate? I think the evidence is still not clear. At the moment it seems more to me that “some people on the EA Forum think they massively miscalculated”, and removing board members for that reason seems a bit witch-hunty to me.
I don’t think it’s witchhunty at all. The fact is we really have very little knowledge about how Will and Nick are involved with FTX. I really don’t think they did any fraud or condoned any fraud, and I do genuinely feel bad for them, and I want to hope for the best when it comes to their character. I’m pretty substantially unsure if Will/Nick/others made any ex ante mistakes, but they definitely made severe ex post mistakes and lost a lot of trust in the community as a result.
I think this means three things:
1.) I think Nathan is right about the prior. If we’re unsure bout whether they made severe ex ante mistakes, we should remove them. I’d only keep them if I was sure they did not make severe ex ante mistakes. I think this applies more forcefully the more severe the mistake was and the situation with FTX makes me suspect that any mistakes could’ve been about as severe as you would get.
2.) I think in order to be on EVF’s board it’s a mandatory job requirement you to maintain the trust of the community and removing people over this makes sense.
3.) I think a traditional/”normie” board would’ve 100% removed Will and Nick back in November. Though I don’t think that we should always do what a traditional board would do, it strikes me that EA in general is lacking in good governance best practice and would benefit from going in the traditional direction at least on some axes when it comes to better governance (though which axes and how much I’m still unsure).
Obviously speaking very much only for myself here purely personally, definitely not speaking on behalf of Rethink Priorities in any means.
A “normie” board would have at least put Will and Nick on a leave of absence. Putting people on a leave of absence when something happens that significantly affects the community’s trust and it is not possible to presently address that concern due to legal/other reasons is standard operating procedure for most larger organizations. It does not imply misconduct or maladministration by those who are placed on leave.
Or maybe not. Part of the problem is that the board was too small already, and I assume it was poorly positioned to sideline 2 of the 5 members while dealing with the reputational and other upheavels caused by FTX crisis, the (now-realized) possibility of Charity Commission involvement, and the management of massive clawback litigation.
It appears Will and Nick have recused themselves from FTX decision-making, so they’re probably de facto on a leave of absence anyway. If true, I furthermore think that not making this leave of absence official I think is just getting all the costs of declaring a leave of absence without any of the benefits.
Saying they have been recused since November implies that they weren’t recused from decision-making regarding FTX prior to November. If this is true (and I’m hesitant because I don’t know all the facts), they were likely not following proper process prior to November.
I cannot comment to how FTX issues were handled prior to November. It’s entirely possible that Will and Nick recused themselves too. I’m also not sure what kind of FTX concerns were discussed.
Recusing themselves from FTX decision-making is significantly weaker than being on leave of absence. The latter implies that they are still part of decision-making for non-FTX related issues which I assume exist. (And technically recusing from decision-making also doesn’t mean recusing from discussion, so they could have still been involved in discussions regarding FTX, though I’d assume that they also recused themselves from that). I think it’s a significant difference.
Isn’t the whole point of recusing people so that you have something you can do when you don’t want to remove them? I think I’m just very differently calibrated from everyone else, but my reaction to hearing that they were recused was “seems okay, but perhaps driven by public image more than anything else”, so actually getting rid of them seems even more unnecessary to me.
I think Nathan is right about the prior. If we’re unsure bout whether they made severe ex ante mistakes, we should remove them.
Same question as to Nathan: why? Mostly because of optics?
I think in order to be on EVF’s board it’s a mandatory job requirement you to maintain the trust of the community and removing people over this makes sense.
I think you can flip this around. “Hey, we don’t have any concrete evidence that you did anything wrong, but there’s just a general sentiment going around that you’re tainted now, so we’re getting rid of you.” That sits badly with me.
Though I don’t think that we should always do what a traditional board would do, it strikes me that EA in general is lacking in good governance best practice and would benefit from going in the traditional direction at least on some axes
I think I agree with this, where there is a good argument for doing it the traditional way. I think just saying “well, traditional folks do it so maybe it’s good” is not an argument I want to endorse in generality. And I don’t see the actual argument here.
To be clear, I do think that them recusing themselves was sensible, I’m unconvinced that doing more is justified except for optics.
Optics is one reason and it is a good reason. Optics matters and I don’t think we should be so dismissive towards optics concerns.
Another related reason I mentioned is the trust element—regardless of whether it sits badly, it still is a fact of the matter that community trust is needed to do this job, and while Will + Nick are presumably good people they are lacking in the trust department at the moment, which suggests they should find a different job. I imagine there’s a lot of very useful things for them to do in the EA movement and I’m not suggesting by any means casting them out of EA entirely. Just really doubtful they are the right people for the EVF board at this moment. This kind of reasoning happens all the time in all sorts of boards.
However, the element I worry much more about is that of bad decision making and basic risk management. Essentially if there’s someone and you think there’s a 20% chance they just make catastrophically bad decisions, I don’t know why you’d want them involved in the sorts of things they make catastrophically bad decisions about, even if there’s an 80% chance that they’re fine.
Although it’s difficult to know, especially without inside knowledge, I also suspect that Nick and Will leaving the board (plus bringing in some people with more nonprofit administration experience in their stead) would reduce the risk of more intrusive and distracting involvement by the Charity Commission over the medium run. Appeasement of one’s regulator is a valid reason for asking a board member to resign and is not “optics.”
Essentially if there’s someone and you think there’s a 20% chance they just make catastrophically bad decisions, I don’t know why you’d want them involved in the sorts of things they make catastrophically bad decisions about, even if there’s an 80% chance that they’re fine.
I’m struggling to articulate what I disagree with here. This is one of those things where in a sense, yes, it’s totally reasonable to use this kind of statistical reasoning to make inferences about people (“many people who are in a situation like that did make some bad judgements, so I’m going to increase my expectation that you made bad judgements despite not having direct evidence”), but I feel like we often have norms against doing this partly because it can be very unfair. We can have the situation where something bad happens to or around you, and then people add insult to injury by treating you as if it might have been your fault.
I don’t quite know where I’m going here, but I think there’s something there.
I think the crux is that I just don’t think the question of who should be on the EVF board is a matter of fairness. I think it’s a matter of what maximizes the likelihood that EVF achieves its objectives in the light of various risk.
To be clear I still think Will and Nick are great people and I want them to be a part of the EA community, potentially even still in roles of great power and influence. Casting them out of EA entirely on statistical reasoning would be unfair and I think that’s a matter of where the fairness matters. I just don’t think EVF Board is the right place for them right now.
The “traditional way” of corporate governance is in significant part based on lessons learned from past mistakes, so I think at least a weak presumption in favor of following that approach is warranted. Otherwise, the only way to learn those lessons will be to make the same painful mistakes. If we only follow the traditional approach when we would independently reach that outcome via reasoning, we’re not assigning any weight to that body of experience.
2022 definitely seemed to be a big year for EA making some painful mistakes in order to learn why some parts of the traditional scheme are the way they are. In more ways than just SBF/FTX unfortunately. I think 2023 is the year we pay the price for that, but hopefully we will learn and be stronger.
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 it’s very reasonable to remove Will, and much less clear whether to remove Nick. I would like to see some nuanced distinction between the two of them. My personal take is that Nick did an okay job and should probably stay on the relevant boards. Honestly I feel pretty frustrated by the lack of distinction between Will and Nick in this discussion.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to generally be lumping them together. They were both on the Future Fund. They were both informed about bad things SBF had done. Nick ran the team while Will was only an advisor; OTOH Will spoke more favorably about SBF in public. You might see a lot of nuance between the two here, but I think most of us just see basic facts like this and the main debate is around questions like “Should leadership have seen this coming?” “Should leaders be removed when they cause a lot of ex post harm?” “Shouldn’t community leaders be elected anyway?”
I’m confused about how that would be done. Is there a procedure for removing board members? What’s the procedure for replacing members of either board if one were to resign? Who gets to decide? Are there limits on the board size or tenure?
I’m not asking the above to be provocative—internal company structure/dynamics is definitely not something I’m super knowledgeable about, so I’d be very curious to know.
In the UK, non-profits can be either member-based or not. I believe EVF is not member-based.
That means the board is accountable to itself. Only the board can appoint and remove Trustees.
This is one of the reasons why term limits are considered good practice. Based on the tenure of some EVF Trustees, it looks like term limits have not been implemented.
A UK charity can put rules in their governing documents on how to remove trustees. I don’t think EVFs governing documents are public, so we probably don’t know.
I haven’t thought about it much but removing people from boards after a massive miscalculation seems reasonable.
Like our prior should be to replace at least Nick and Will right?
Did Nick and Will massively miscalculate? I think the evidence is still not clear. At the moment it seems more to me that “some people on the EA Forum think they massively miscalculated”, and removing board members for that reason seems a bit witch-hunty to me.
I don’t think it’s witchhunty at all. The fact is we really have very little knowledge about how Will and Nick are involved with FTX. I really don’t think they did any fraud or condoned any fraud, and I do genuinely feel bad for them, and I want to hope for the best when it comes to their character. I’m pretty substantially unsure if Will/Nick/others made any ex ante mistakes, but they definitely made severe ex post mistakes and lost a lot of trust in the community as a result.
I think this means three things:
1.) I think Nathan is right about the prior. If we’re unsure bout whether they made severe ex ante mistakes, we should remove them. I’d only keep them if I was sure they did not make severe ex ante mistakes. I think this applies more forcefully the more severe the mistake was and the situation with FTX makes me suspect that any mistakes could’ve been about as severe as you would get.
2.) I think in order to be on EVF’s board it’s a mandatory job requirement you to maintain the trust of the community and removing people over this makes sense.
3.) I think a traditional/”normie” board would’ve 100% removed Will and Nick back in November. Though I don’t think that we should always do what a traditional board would do, it strikes me that EA in general is lacking in good governance best practice and would benefit from going in the traditional direction at least on some axes when it comes to better governance (though which axes and how much I’m still unsure).
Obviously speaking very much only for myself here purely personally, definitely not speaking on behalf of Rethink Priorities in any means.
A “normie” board would have at least put Will and Nick on a leave of absence. Putting people on a leave of absence when something happens that significantly affects the community’s trust and it is not possible to presently address that concern due to legal/other reasons is standard operating procedure for most larger organizations. It does not imply misconduct or maladministration by those who are placed on leave.
Or maybe not. Part of the problem is that the board was too small already, and I assume it was poorly positioned to sideline 2 of the 5 members while dealing with the reputational and other upheavels caused by FTX crisis, the (now-realized) possibility of Charity Commission involvement, and the management of massive clawback litigation.
It appears Will and Nick have recused themselves from FTX decision-making, so they’re probably de facto on a leave of absence anyway. If true, I furthermore think that not making this leave of absence official I think is just getting all the costs of declaring a leave of absence without any of the benefits.
Saying they have been recused since November implies that they weren’t recused from decision-making regarding FTX prior to November. If this is true (and I’m hesitant because I don’t know all the facts), they were likely not following proper process prior to November.
I cannot comment to how FTX issues were handled prior to November. It’s entirely possible that Will and Nick recused themselves too. I’m also not sure what kind of FTX concerns were discussed.
Recusing themselves from FTX decision-making is significantly weaker than being on leave of absence. The latter implies that they are still part of decision-making for non-FTX related issues which I assume exist. (And technically recusing from decision-making also doesn’t mean recusing from discussion, so they could have still been involved in discussions regarding FTX, though I’d assume that they also recused themselves from that). I think it’s a significant difference.
Isn’t the whole point of recusing people so that you have something you can do when you don’t want to remove them? I think I’m just very differently calibrated from everyone else, but my reaction to hearing that they were recused was “seems okay, but perhaps driven by public image more than anything else”, so actually getting rid of them seems even more unnecessary to me.
They obviously have incredibly clear and blatant conflicts of interest? Not sure how you could possibly think it is purely a public image concern.
Another option besides recusal and removing someone is a leave of absence.
Same question as to Nathan: why? Mostly because of optics?
I think you can flip this around. “Hey, we don’t have any concrete evidence that you did anything wrong, but there’s just a general sentiment going around that you’re tainted now, so we’re getting rid of you.” That sits badly with me.
I think I agree with this, where there is a good argument for doing it the traditional way. I think just saying “well, traditional folks do it so maybe it’s good” is not an argument I want to endorse in generality. And I don’t see the actual argument here.
To be clear, I do think that them recusing themselves was sensible, I’m unconvinced that doing more is justified except for optics.
Optics is one reason and it is a good reason. Optics matters and I don’t think we should be so dismissive towards optics concerns.
Another related reason I mentioned is the trust element—regardless of whether it sits badly, it still is a fact of the matter that community trust is needed to do this job, and while Will + Nick are presumably good people they are lacking in the trust department at the moment, which suggests they should find a different job. I imagine there’s a lot of very useful things for them to do in the EA movement and I’m not suggesting by any means casting them out of EA entirely. Just really doubtful they are the right people for the EVF board at this moment. This kind of reasoning happens all the time in all sorts of boards.
However, the element I worry much more about is that of bad decision making and basic risk management. Essentially if there’s someone and you think there’s a 20% chance they just make catastrophically bad decisions, I don’t know why you’d want them involved in the sorts of things they make catastrophically bad decisions about, even if there’s an 80% chance that they’re fine.
Although it’s difficult to know, especially without inside knowledge, I also suspect that Nick and Will leaving the board (plus bringing in some people with more nonprofit administration experience in their stead) would reduce the risk of more intrusive and distracting involvement by the Charity Commission over the medium run. Appeasement of one’s regulator is a valid reason for asking a board member to resign and is not “optics.”
I’m struggling to articulate what I disagree with here. This is one of those things where in a sense, yes, it’s totally reasonable to use this kind of statistical reasoning to make inferences about people (“many people who are in a situation like that did make some bad judgements, so I’m going to increase my expectation that you made bad judgements despite not having direct evidence”), but I feel like we often have norms against doing this partly because it can be very unfair. We can have the situation where something bad happens to or around you, and then people add insult to injury by treating you as if it might have been your fault.
I don’t quite know where I’m going here, but I think there’s something there.
I think the crux is that I just don’t think the question of who should be on the EVF board is a matter of fairness. I think it’s a matter of what maximizes the likelihood that EVF achieves its objectives in the light of various risk.
To be clear I still think Will and Nick are great people and I want them to be a part of the EA community, potentially even still in roles of great power and influence. Casting them out of EA entirely on statistical reasoning would be unfair and I think that’s a matter of where the fairness matters. I just don’t think EVF Board is the right place for them right now.
The “traditional way” of corporate governance is in significant part based on lessons learned from past mistakes, so I think at least a weak presumption in favor of following that approach is warranted. Otherwise, the only way to learn those lessons will be to make the same painful mistakes. If we only follow the traditional approach when we would independently reach that outcome via reasoning, we’re not assigning any weight to that body of experience.
2022 definitely seemed to be a big year for EA making some painful mistakes in order to learn why some parts of the traditional scheme are the way they are. In more ways than just SBF/FTX unfortunately. I think 2023 is the year we pay the price for that, but hopefully we will learn and be stronger.
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
I think it’s very reasonable to remove Will, and much less clear whether to remove Nick. I would like to see some nuanced distinction between the two of them. My personal take is that Nick did an okay job and should probably stay on the relevant boards. Honestly I feel pretty frustrated by the lack of distinction between Will and Nick in this discussion.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to generally be lumping them together. They were both on the Future Fund. They were both informed about bad things SBF had done. Nick ran the team while Will was only an advisor; OTOH Will spoke more favorably about SBF in public. You might see a lot of nuance between the two here, but I think most of us just see basic facts like this and the main debate is around questions like “Should leadership have seen this coming?” “Should leaders be removed when they cause a lot of ex post harm?” “Shouldn’t community leaders be elected anyway?”
I’m confused about how that would be done. Is there a procedure for removing board members? What’s the procedure for replacing members of either board if one were to resign? Who gets to decide? Are there limits on the board size or tenure?
I’m not asking the above to be provocative—internal company structure/dynamics is definitely not something I’m super knowledgeable about, so I’d be very curious to know.
In the UK, non-profits can be either member-based or not. I believe EVF is not member-based. That means the board is accountable to itself. Only the board can appoint and remove Trustees.
This is one of the reasons why term limits are considered good practice. Based on the tenure of some EVF Trustees, it looks like term limits have not been implemented.
A UK charity can put rules in their governing documents on how to remove trustees. I don’t think EVFs governing documents are public, so we probably don’t know.