That’s fair but next time I strongly recommend you include context and thoughts so lurkers don’t latch onto what you say as proof that leaders or anyone else did anything unreasonable. Lilly’s comment is:
“I am also eager to see what the investigation concludes, but I’m pretty convinced at this point that EA leaders made big mistakes....
...I cannot wrap my head around why—knowing what it appears they knew then—anyone thought it was a good idea to put this guy on a pedestal; to elevate him as a moral paragon and someone to emulate; to tie EA’s reputation so closely to his. It really feels like they should’ve (at least) known not to do that.”
This comment has a negative connotation, and is arguably the opposite connotation of the comment you wrote just now. So when you jump in to provide examples of that without context, it appears you support the negative conclusion.
Additionally, maybe this is a cultural difference, but “put someone on a pedestal” is only used negatively where I am from. It’s about putting someone in a position above that where they’d naturally belong. I argue that if you think his treatment was normal, you also don’t think he was “put on a pedestal” in a colloquial interpretation.
Here’s a slightly different point I couldn’t quite word well before: From my perspective, I am not even sure that anything EA did about him was anything they didn’t do about other prominent people to the extent it made sense. Like, I don’t pay that much attention and suck at names tbh, but I still know with high confidence that essentially everything people name as proof that SBF was unjustly elevated, anything an EA leader did toward/about SBF, they also did toward/about many others they have respected over the years. I just don’t see it as unusual or bad (yet) at all. If ppl think that things like named above count as “putting someone on a pedestal” and “tying EA’s rep to theirs” (implied=bad), then there are dozens, maybe 100+ who could be counted as such[1]. I honestly wonder if it just looks like SBF was boosted a lot because he is a billionaire (who wanted to be boosted) and the general public think that is so cool. And EAs do too, like I think maybe EAs forget about other names who got boosted over the years but maybe who just didn’t stick in our consciousness or public consciousness because they got little media fanfare? If the public had wanted to hear about something other than billionaires, wouldn’t other peeople have been mentioned much more? If people wanted to hear about the founding of Givewell, wouldn’t Karnofsky and Hassenfeld been boosted more than SBF? But we live in bugged world where people want to hear about billionaires instead (and the public or at least journalistic consciousness may have been tying him to EA no matter what) and I think that would have shaped almost any person’s way of talking, including other electable leaders—leaders we might want to tell ourselves wouldn’t have done as Will did, but I’ll probably never feel confident of that.
So, yeah, I suppose the crux is that people think “I or [other leaders we can elect now] wouldn’t have spoken well of Sam if [we] had known what was said in 2018 or 2019 about Sam.” But CEA did at least do an internal investigation into CEA/Alameda in 2019 and yet here we are. So I find it a little weird to say that.
Especially expecting that Sam is quite manipulative and EA leaders are just a bunch of high-trust humans (who I wouldn’t change if I could press a button btw, because whatever way they think about things is literally why the movement got started). To me, idk, saying EA leaders made mistakes feel a bit like “you guys shouldn’t be the way you are as people, you should expect some people to try to grift” and I disagree with that.
Maybe we shouldn’t have such high-trust people in leadership? I’m not sold. Actually I’m not even sold we can find people who would have noticed and investigated SBF’s actual financial fraud who have anything close to a typical human psychology (Gladwell’s book “Talking toStrangers” has a great section about Bernie Madoff’s reception in this regard, but I digress). IDK. I feel so bad thinking that these people I know try so, so hard are being told they made mistakes which basically amount to them being kind and excited about a person, one person among many others they have been kind and excited about. Maybe this time it wasn’t deserved, but, sigh, Will and the others are philosophers and altruists, not psychologists and business moguls who might be primed to spot a manipulative person or reputational risk. It feels like to me, as of right now, adding a new person(s) into the mix with more expertise in spotting manipulators and hazards, makes more sense than removing “EA leaders” including Nick or even Will from their posts.
But I will wait to see from the investigation! I worry that submitting lists of things without context to show that “SBF was put on a pedestal” (whether or not you view that term with negative connotation), will lead to entrenched opinions, more upset, and possibly even morenews pieces being written, which may not be right in the longrun.
Like, there are 153 eps of 80K podcast, the 80K website profiles have been rotated many times throughout the years, there have been so many people shouted-out by Will at various times in his talks and interviews—especially EAG talks, there are for sure dozens of prominent EAs who people bring up repeatedly again and again in conversation etc, there are lots of EAs who news profiles have done features on, lots of non-leader EAs and non-EAs who get invited to private discussions between leaders. I could go on
I regret posting my comments for several reasons. I’m sorry to anyone I upset.
Specifically, I regret not putting more effort into ensuring that my first comment is not going to be misinterpreted, and ensuring to put things into context, e.g., that “putting SBF on a pedestal”, if meaning something like “holding SBF up as a role model”, was—certainlyfor those who didn’t know him well in person!—in the vast majority of instances reasonable and understandable at the time, and I would have easily done the same! (Some things like e.g. tying EA’s reputation to SBF to such a close extent were perhaps not super wise but much of this is probably hindsight bias).
I feel also bad about mentioning the flyers, mostly because I got important information wrong which is a grave mistake in such a situation, and partly because my phrasing was too harsh/critical (if the person who created those flyers is ever reading this, I’m sorry, you had good intentions and it wasn’t a big deal at all!).
I wrote the comment because I was disconcerted by the original comment (and its initial high Karma count) which seemed to seriously question whether we “elevated [SBF] as a moral paragon and someone to emulate “, or “tied EA’s reputation closely to his”, and asked for specific examples. I still feel like it’s a no-brainer that EAs, in general, obviously and understandably elevated SBF as a role model and someone worth emulating! Seriously questioning this still strikes me as defensive motivated reasoning and concerning. Many people seemed to agree with the commenter which made me worry that EAs would refuse to learn any lessons from this whole scandal which might risk repeating a similar monumental catastrophe. (Me being upset[1] is not meant to be an excuse but if anything a further reason why I should have written this comment differently. As a general rule, it’s simply bad to write comments when one is upset because it clouds one’s judgment and reduces compassion, and this is an obvious mistake which I should not have made.)
So why did the FTX scandal happen? One simplistic perspective is (ignoring many other, more important causal factors!): someone with dark triad/malevolent traits got more and more power and ended up doing something extremely bad. Other people did not realize that this person is malevolent, or suspected it and didn’t speak up (e.g., because of fear, miscalculation, or motivated reasoning, or opportunism). I’ve seen that story before and it really shaped my outlook on life.
That’s why I wanted to make the following argument: let’s not put too much faith in the character judgment of the people who championed SBF (and have known him very well) going forward, to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Let’s not be like “oh well, there is nothing we can learn from this, no need to change anything”. That does seem like a very important point to me and I stand by that.
Now, importantly, I wasn’t trying to imply that any EA leader knew about the fraud or did something illegal. I also wasn’t trying to imply that mistakes like ‘suboptimal character judgment’ are even remotely comparable to the mistakes that SBF made. Of course, it’s not even close. In some sense, it’s a minor mistake that probably more than 95% of people would have made (because lots of things would have to come together to not make such mistakes). In fact, in my experience, many amazing people don’t have great character judgment.
But on the other hand, it’s still substantial and worth keeping in mind and should be factored in when making, e.g., board decisions (as board members appoint executive directors and those should have good character) or when trusting these people’s character judgment in the future. (Also, I feel like some comments seemed to suggest that being naive and overly trusting is just cute but not worth worrying about which I don’t agree with.)
As I also wrote in the original comment, I’m not even sure that EA leaders, including Will, made any mistakes ex ante given the enormous uncertainty and complexity of the whole situation and all the important trade-offs involved. I do think that it’s plausible though that some mistakes were made, including significant ones.
I also regret having singled out Will and I’m sorry if this comment upset anyone. I worry that others may have interpreted my comment as trying to put all the blame on him which I really didn’t want to. I did it, because, to my knowledge, Will was really the EA leader who championed SBF the most and had the closest personal connection to him (aside from people like Caroline, etc., of course). And generally, I think it’s valuable to give specific examples when possible. It’s important to note that many others were involved in this too and could have stepped in!
To be perfectly clear, I think EA leaders, including Will, have done tremendous good and worked very hard to make the world a better place. I don’t want to belittle their extraordinary contributions.
Last, I worry that my comment was interpreted as taking the side of EA critics which is not the case. I think that much criticism of EA and EA leaders in the media has been unfair and exaggerated.
There is more I could write about all of this but this issue is emotionally taxing and I already spent several days on this comment, and I’m trying to move on. (Several days for just writing this crappy comment? Yeah, most of this was just feeling guilty without being able to do anything else productive. This ties to the general issue of how much time to put into comments. FWIW, in the months before writing the comments in March, I was actively challenging myself to write comments more quickly (and often). In hindsight, this could have been a mistake since I may lack the necessary verbal intelligence to pull this off.)
I do think it’s plausible that (some!) EA leaders made substantial mistakes. Spotting questionable behavior or character is hard but not impossible, especially if you have known them for 10 years and work very closely with them and basically were in a mentee-mentor relationship (like e.g. Will, is my impression). I don’t fault other people, e.g. those who rarely or never interacted with SBF, for not having done more.
Either people ignored warning signs → clear mistake. Or they didn’t notice anything even though others had noticed signs (like e.g. Habryka)-> suboptimal character judgment. I think the ability to spot such people and don’t let them into positions of power is extremely important.
Of course, the crucial question is what could have been done even if you know 100% that SBF is not at all trustworthy. It’s plausible to me that not much could have been done because SBF already accumulated so much power. So it’s plausible that no one made substantial mistakes. On the other hand, no one forced Will to write Musk and vouch for SBF which perhaps wasn’t wise if you have concerns about SBF. On the other hand, it’s perhaps also reasonable to gamble on SBF given the inevitable uncertainty about other’s character and the large possible upsides. Perhaps I’m just suffering from hindsight bias.
Also, just to be clear, I agree that much of the criticism against EAs and EA leaders we see in the media is unfairly exaggerated. I’m wary of contributing to what I perceive as others unjustly piling-on a movement of moral activists, probably fueled by do-gooder derogation, and so on (as Geoffrey mentions in his comment.)
Why have I been so upset? The usual. The ideals of EA are very close to my heart so it made me very sad to see so many people (outside of EA) hate on EA ideals and to ridicule so many important values and concepts. That’s a terrible sign for the long-term trajectory of humanity and it has reduced the global level of good-will, cooperation, and trust. It made many people more cynical about the very ideas of altruism and truth-seeking itself.
That’s fair but next time I strongly recommend you include context and thoughts so lurkers don’t latch onto what you say as proof that leaders or anyone else did anything unreasonable. Lilly’s comment is:
This comment has a negative connotation, and is arguably the opposite connotation of the comment you wrote just now. So when you jump in to provide examples of that without context, it appears you support the negative conclusion.
Additionally, maybe this is a cultural difference, but “put someone on a pedestal” is only used negatively where I am from. It’s about putting someone in a position above that where they’d naturally belong. I argue that if you think his treatment was normal, you also don’t think he was “put on a pedestal” in a colloquial interpretation.
Here’s a slightly different point I couldn’t quite word well before: From my perspective, I am not even sure that anything EA did about him was anything they didn’t do about other prominent people to the extent it made sense. Like, I don’t pay that much attention and suck at names tbh, but I still know with high confidence that essentially everything people name as proof that SBF was unjustly elevated, anything an EA leader did toward/about SBF, they also did toward/about many others they have respected over the years. I just don’t see it as unusual or bad (yet) at all. If ppl think that things like named above count as “putting someone on a pedestal” and “tying EA’s rep to theirs” (implied=bad), then there are dozens, maybe 100+ who could be counted as such[1]. I honestly wonder if it just looks like SBF was boosted a lot because he is a billionaire (who wanted to be boosted) and the general public think that is so cool. And EAs do too, like I think maybe EAs forget about other names who got boosted over the years but maybe who just didn’t stick in our consciousness or public consciousness because they got little media fanfare? If the public had wanted to hear about something other than billionaires, wouldn’t other peeople have been mentioned much more? If people wanted to hear about the founding of Givewell, wouldn’t Karnofsky and Hassenfeld been boosted more than SBF? But we live in bugged world where people want to hear about billionaires instead (and the public or at least journalistic consciousness may have been tying him to EA no matter what) and I think that would have shaped almost any person’s way of talking, including other electable leaders—leaders we might want to tell ourselves wouldn’t have done as Will did, but I’ll probably never feel confident of that.
So, yeah, I suppose the crux is that people think “I or [other leaders we can elect now] wouldn’t have spoken well of Sam if [we] had known what was said in 2018 or 2019 about Sam.” But CEA did at least do an internal investigation into CEA/Alameda in 2019 and yet here we are. So I find it a little weird to say that.
Especially expecting that Sam is quite manipulative and EA leaders are just a bunch of high-trust humans (who I wouldn’t change if I could press a button btw, because whatever way they think about things is literally why the movement got started). To me, idk, saying EA leaders made mistakes feel a bit like “you guys shouldn’t be the way you are as people, you should expect some people to try to grift” and I disagree with that.
Maybe we shouldn’t have such high-trust people in leadership? I’m not sold. Actually I’m not even sold we can find people who would have noticed and investigated SBF’s actual financial fraud who have anything close to a typical human psychology (Gladwell’s book “Talking toStrangers” has a great section about Bernie Madoff’s reception in this regard, but I digress). IDK. I feel so bad thinking that these people I know try so, so hard are being told they made mistakes which basically amount to them being kind and excited about a person, one person among many others they have been kind and excited about. Maybe this time it wasn’t deserved, but, sigh, Will and the others are philosophers and altruists, not psychologists and business moguls who might be primed to spot a manipulative person or reputational risk. It feels like to me, as of right now, adding a new person(s) into the mix with more expertise in spotting manipulators and hazards, makes more sense than removing “EA leaders” including Nick or even Will from their posts.
But I will wait to see from the investigation! I worry that submitting lists of things without context to show that “SBF was put on a pedestal” (whether or not you view that term with negative connotation), will lead to entrenched opinions, more upset, and possibly even more news pieces being written, which may not be right in the longrun.
Like, there are 153 eps of 80K podcast, the 80K website profiles have been rotated many times throughout the years, there have been so many people shouted-out by Will at various times in his talks and interviews—especially EAG talks, there are for sure dozens of prominent EAs who people bring up repeatedly again and again in conversation etc, there are lots of EAs who news profiles have done features on, lots of non-leader EAs and non-EAs who get invited to private discussions between leaders. I could go on
ETA July:
I regret posting my comments for several reasons. I’m sorry to anyone I upset.
Specifically, I regret not putting more effort into ensuring that my first comment is not going to be misinterpreted, and ensuring to put things into context, e.g., that “putting SBF on a pedestal”, if meaning something like “holding SBF up as a role model”, was—certainly for those who didn’t know him well in person!—in the vast majority of instances reasonable and understandable at the time, and I would have easily done the same! (Some things like e.g. tying EA’s reputation to SBF to such a close extent were perhaps not super wise but much of this is probably hindsight bias).
I feel also bad about mentioning the flyers, mostly because I got important information wrong which is a grave mistake in such a situation, and partly because my phrasing was too harsh/critical (if the person who created those flyers is ever reading this, I’m sorry, you had good intentions and it wasn’t a big deal at all!).
I wrote the comment because I was disconcerted by the original comment (and its initial high Karma count) which seemed to seriously question whether we “elevated [SBF] as a moral paragon and someone to emulate “, or “tied EA’s reputation closely to his”, and asked for specific examples. I still feel like it’s a no-brainer that EAs, in general, obviously and understandably elevated SBF as a role model and someone worth emulating! Seriously questioning this still strikes me as defensive motivated reasoning and concerning. Many people seemed to agree with the commenter which made me worry that EAs would refuse to learn any lessons from this whole scandal which might risk repeating a similar monumental catastrophe. (Me being upset[1] is not meant to be an excuse but if anything a further reason why I should have written this comment differently. As a general rule, it’s simply bad to write comments when one is upset because it clouds one’s judgment and reduces compassion, and this is an obvious mistake which I should not have made.)
So why did the FTX scandal happen? One simplistic perspective is (ignoring many other, more important causal factors!): someone with dark triad/malevolent traits got more and more power and ended up doing something extremely bad. Other people did not realize that this person is malevolent, or suspected it and didn’t speak up (e.g., because of fear, miscalculation, or motivated reasoning, or opportunism). I’ve seen that story before and it really shaped my outlook on life.
That’s why I wanted to make the following argument: let’s not put too much faith in the character judgment of the people who championed SBF (and have known him very well) going forward, to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Let’s not be like “oh well, there is nothing we can learn from this, no need to change anything”. That does seem like a very important point to me and I stand by that.
Now, importantly, I wasn’t trying to imply that any EA leader knew about the fraud or did something illegal. I also wasn’t trying to imply that mistakes like ‘suboptimal character judgment’ are even remotely comparable to the mistakes that SBF made. Of course, it’s not even close. In some sense, it’s a minor mistake that probably more than 95% of people would have made (because lots of things would have to come together to not make such mistakes). In fact, in my experience, many amazing people don’t have great character judgment.
But on the other hand, it’s still substantial and worth keeping in mind and should be factored in when making, e.g., board decisions (as board members appoint executive directors and those should have good character) or when trusting these people’s character judgment in the future. (Also, I feel like some comments seemed to suggest that being naive and overly trusting is just cute but not worth worrying about which I don’t agree with.)
As I also wrote in the original comment, I’m not even sure that EA leaders, including Will, made any mistakes ex ante given the enormous uncertainty and complexity of the whole situation and all the important trade-offs involved. I do think that it’s plausible though that some mistakes were made, including significant ones.
I also regret having singled out Will and I’m sorry if this comment upset anyone. I worry that others may have interpreted my comment as trying to put all the blame on him which I really didn’t want to. I did it, because, to my knowledge, Will was really the EA leader who championed SBF the most and had the closest personal connection to him (aside from people like Caroline, etc., of course). And generally, I think it’s valuable to give specific examples when possible. It’s important to note that many others were involved in this too and could have stepped in!
To be perfectly clear, I think EA leaders, including Will, have done tremendous good and worked very hard to make the world a better place. I don’t want to belittle their extraordinary contributions.
Last, I worry that my comment was interpreted as taking the side of EA critics which is not the case. I think that much criticism of EA and EA leaders in the media has been unfair and exaggerated.
There is more I could write about all of this but this issue is emotionally taxing and I already spent several days on this comment, and I’m trying to move on. (Several days for just writing this crappy comment? Yeah, most of this was just feeling guilty without being able to do anything else productive. This ties to the general issue of how much time to put into comments. FWIW, in the months before writing the comments in March, I was actively challenging myself to write comments more quickly (and often). In hindsight, this could have been a mistake since I may lack the necessary verbal intelligence to pull this off.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
[Original comment.]
Thanks, these are good points.
I do think it’s plausible that (some!) EA leaders made substantial mistakes. Spotting questionable behavior or character is hard but not impossible, especially if you have known them for 10 years and work very closely with them and basically were in a mentee-mentor relationship (like e.g. Will, is my impression). I don’t fault other people, e.g. those who rarely or never interacted with SBF, for not having done more.
Either people ignored warning signs → clear mistake. Or they didn’t notice anything even though others had noticed signs (like e.g. Habryka)-> suboptimal character judgment. I think the ability to spot such people and don’t let them into positions of power is extremely important.
Of course, the crucial question is what could have been done even if you know 100% that SBF is not at all trustworthy. It’s plausible to me that not much could have been done because SBF already accumulated so much power. So it’s plausible that no one made substantial mistakes. On the other hand, no one forced Will to write Musk and vouch for SBF which perhaps wasn’t wise if you have concerns about SBF. On the other hand, it’s perhaps also reasonable to gamble on SBF given the inevitable uncertainty about other’s character and the large possible upsides. Perhaps I’m just suffering from hindsight bias.
Also, just to be clear, I agree that much of the criticism against EAs and EA leaders we see in the media is unfairly exaggerated. I’m wary of contributing to what I perceive as others unjustly piling-on a movement of moral activists, probably fueled by do-gooder derogation, and so on (as Geoffrey mentions in his comment.)
Why have I been so upset? The usual. The ideals of EA are very close to my heart so it made me very sad to see so many people (outside of EA) hate on EA ideals and to ridicule so many important values and concepts. That’s a terrible sign for the long-term trajectory of humanity and it has reduced the global level of good-will, cooperation, and trust. It made many people more cynical about the very ideas of altruism and truth-seeking itself.