I am also eager to see what the investigation concludes, but I’m pretty convinced at this point that EA leaders made big mistakes.
It’s not obvious to me (yet) that they should’ve known not to take Sam’s money—non-profits accept donations from dubious characters all the time. Even if EA leaders thought Sam was sketchy (which it appears some did), it’s not clear to me they should’ve known Sam was don’t-take-money-from-this-person bad. This is a line non-profits walk all the time, and many have erred on the side of taking money from people they shouldn’t have taken money from.
But 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.
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
I always find this claim a bit confusing: did we actually do those things? Are there some specific examples of doing this?
I can think of… the 80k interview and that’s about it? I guess engaging with the FTX Foundation was somewhat positive but I don’t think it was putting him on a pedestal. In fact when I look back I feel like a lot of the content linking Sam to EA came from people talking to Sam. I may well just not be remembering stuff though!
I don’t deny that Sam was perceived in that way, but it’s not clear to me that this was something that was done (even accidentally) by “EA leaders”.
ETA July: I regret posting the following comment for several reasons, partly because I got crucial information wrong and failed to put things into context and prevent misunderstandings. Please consider reading my longer explanation at the top of my follow-up comment here. I’m sorry to anyone I upset.
At EAG London 2022, they [ETA: this was an individual without consent of the organizers] distributed hundreds of stickers depicting Sam on a bean bag with the text “what would SBF do?”. To my knowledge, never before were flyers depicting individual EAs at EAG distributed. (Also, such behavior seems generally unusual to me, like, imagine going to a conference and seeing hundreds of flyers and stickers all depicting one guy. Doesn’t that seem a tad culty?)
On the 80k website, they had several articles mentioning SBF as someone highly praiseworthy and worth emulating.
Will vouched for SBF “very much” when talking to Elon Musk.
Sam was invited to many discussions between EA leaders.
There are probably more examples.
Generally, almost everyone was talking about how great Sam is and how much good he has achieved and how, as a good EA, one should try to be more like him.
At EAG London 2022, they distributed hundreds of flyers and stickers depicting Sam on a bean bag with the text “what would SBF do?”.
These were not an official EAG thing — they were printed by an individual attendee.
To my knowledge, never before were flyers depicting individual EAs at EAG distributed. (Also, such behavior seems generally unusual to me, like, imagine going to a conference and seeing hundreds of flyers and stickers all depicting one guy. Doesn’t that seem a tad culty?
When I see agreevotes [racking up quickly on contextless statements] like above, I always feel weird. Do people agree that that counts as pedestalling by leaders? Or they agree that all that happened? IDK, but I feel weird because I actually think I disagree (with all those people I guess) that these are fair for the point being made:
At EAG London 2022, they distributed hundreds of flyers and stickers depicting Sam on a bean bag with the text “what would SBF do?”.
I was at EAGL 22, but I never saw this, so it was not a universal handout. However I remember ppl talking about it, and it was not by EA leaders or offical conference ppl. It was (if I heard correctly) some kind of joke by some attendee(s). I still believe this because EAG conference staff are pretty serious about making the event professional, so even if they thought it was secretly funny I’d have a hard time believing they would do that. Worth noting I think this was also a meta-injoke about claims of EA being a cult, obviously by riffing on the WWJD and giving “glorious leader” vibes. (Trying to avoid sounding harsh, but to whoever likes this type of thing, here’s a reason not to do rogue, injoke stuff like that at an official event. Now we are dealing with it as submitted evidence of potential leadership corruption a year later, and unfortunately it did make EA look more like a cult even though that was actually the punchline not the truth. I imagine some attendees at the time felt icky about it too. Expect the injoke to make it to the outgroup, and anticipate how it will look. Save it for the unofficial afterparty, at most please.)
On the 80k website, they had several articles mentioning SBF as someone highly praiseworthy and worth emulating.
Honestly that just seems normal to me, idk. I have met a couple other people who have profiles on that website. They weren’t being put on a pedestal, and 80K couldn’t be fairly seen as tying 80k (let alone EA’s) rep to theirs (because they aren’t billionaires who would assume that). But it did make sense to list Sam as a notable example for earning-to-give, which is a recommended career path. It isn’t like this was unwarranted use. Bad luck IMO. Seems like maybe what we are seeing in this instance is that if you want to use a billionaire like a normal example of something in a different talking point you are trying to make, society won’t “let” you in the long run, because the billionaire’s rep is actually bigger than yours and bigger than the rep of the point you are trying to make. So the billionaire’s rep will swallow yours up whether you meant it to or not. EAs would do well to keep this lesson in mind for future prominent people even if those people are angels-on-earth. Still bad luck I say, I mean keep in mind SBF was likely trying to actively fool people (including himself methinks) as to his competence. [Edit: And as Ubuntu adds below, they aren’t really EA leaders who had heard anything negative about SBF. Hence bad luck/big oof moment.]
Will vouched for SBF “very much” when talking to Elon Musk.
This was discussed elsewhere better than I can (I will hunt for the link and edit in shortly [Edit: I didn’t want to dig for it so I just made this section longer]), but essentially anybody would do this for their friend or trusted acquaintance when they think something will be mutually beneficial, it was not a professional EA capacity and it was also in private text messages, not public. That it was shared publicly was tbh pretty uncool. I mean it’s obvious Macaskill misjudged Sam’s character/potential, but he actually wasn’t trying to recommend Sam publicly there, and this sounds more like “person-to-person, I think it’s very much worth you guys having a conversation! You care about the same stuff and I know that stuff is why you both are interested in Twitter! Give it a go!” than “I, an EA leader, vouch for Sam, also an EA leader” type of exchange. Will got duped but I’m pretty unclear he was acting inappropriately here in his own personal life. I mean when you have two fabulously wealthy acquaintances, and one wants to do a business deal with the other, you introduce them, and yes you vouch for the first if you know them reasonably well just so they give each other the time of day. There’s no expectation that a deal will move forward without due diligence occurring, or that your vouch will become law. Musk knows that Will is not a finance professional, so he should know that Will can only vouch character. And no harm, no foul. But if there was harm for the EA brand here, it was by Musk making the private messages public which like, huh I’d never have expected that if I was Will. It looks to me like Musk did so for a bit of clout to show he is hard-to-dupe.[I was incorrectly pairing this with another Elon text but the rest stands]. I don’t think he wanted to make a dig atMacaskillfor vouching tbh. Musk’s financial professional (Michael Grimes) vouched for SBF too with about the same level of confidence. If I were Musk I’d prefer that people I like and respect (which it sounds like Will is one) keep trying to make connections for me when they believe the connections are of potential high value, and I/Musk would still always do my own due diligence. So it feels kind of weird to me that EAs are against Will having tried to connection-make when maybe even Musk wouldn’t be so hard on him?
[Edit: I now realize that maybe some people are upset that Will was cool with arranging for “possibly EA money” to be spent on Twitter. To that, it’s worth noting that EA doesn’t own it’s donor’s money, helping out your major donors and acquaintances in their goals is prosocial and normal, there are EAs who view social coordination and combatting misinformation as important cause areas, and it would have been a business move not a donation]
Sam was invited to many discussions between EA leaders.
Sounds normal for a truly-massive donor who at least understood the movement or was thought to, and who people roughly enjoyed talking to as well. Again, keep in mind that SBF was likely actively trying to fool people here. I wonder if anyone reading this can say “No, having Sam involved in discussion would have just absolutely been a hard-no from me. No way he could convince me that he, a huge donor, deserves a seat at the table. And if anybody felt he gave them good input in the past… their opinions wouldn’t matter, I’d have said ‘No, don’t invite him.’ In fact even if he gave me good input over the years in my leadership, controlled half my funding, and he was possibly expecting an invite, I would definitely still never have invited him.” [This sounds so strong that it almost looks like I’m strawmanning the other side, I’m giving so little wiggle-room. But I do genuinely think to be able to judge leaders harshly here, you have to believe a claim as watertight as that quote would have been said by other experienced leaders, because I’m only confident a claim as watertight as that keeps competent actors and the rest from inviting Sam.] IDK I just find it quite surprising that readers are acting like disengaging with Sam, a major donor, was so black and white and easy. The majority of people got sucked in… it’s easy to say what should have happened now.
Generally, almost everyone was talking about how great Sam is and how much good he has achieved and how, as a good EA, one should try to be more like him.
This perhaps yes. Lot of injokes and stuff in EA culture about SBF generally, too. But how much of this was grassroots in origination, because having a heckin billionaire in your extended crew is cool and interesting, vs how much of this was done by leaders publicly? Should people really not have felt excited and expressed it within their ingroup based on what they thought?
There are probably more examples.
I’d be interested to see them. In general I feel like what I’m seeing listed here is pretty human and normal and I wouldn’t call it putting him on a pedestal, or tying EA’s rep to his (intentionally or even in ways ppl necessarily could have anticipated would end up very entangled), or elevating him as moral paragon publicly.
(ETA: Sorry for not engaging with everything you wrote. I’m short on time and I’ll try to elaborate on my views in a week or so.)
Just to clarify my position: I think it’s clear that we put SBF on a pedestal and promoted him as someone worth emulating, I don’t really know what to say to someone who disagrees with this. (Perhaps you interpret the phrase “put someone on a pedestal” differently; yes, we didn’t built statues of SBF, I agree.)
But I also think that basically almost all of this has been completely understandable. I mean, guy makes 10B dollars and wants to donate it all? One needs to be deranged to not try to emulate him, to not want to learn from him and to not paint him as highly morally praiseworthy. I certainly tried emulating that and learning from SBF (with little success obviously). At the time, I didn’t think that we went too far. I even thought the sticker thing was kinda funny (if weird and inadvisable), but I didn’t really give it much thought at all at the time.
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.
+1 to basically all of this and thanks for adding context to the stickers thing.
I also want to add—Again, Beckstead, MacAskill and Karnofsky are not 80k. So going back to the original claim that we’re discussing (and others like it I guess):
But 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.
Well, “they” are not 80k, so I’m really not surprised 80k featured SBF positively on their website. “EA leaders” are not a single shadowy entity, they’re a group of individuals who get packaged together in a variety of combinations when people realise there are no adults in the room.
Sounds like an individual attendee might have done this. I don’t see this as a big deal. I don’t think that we should be so concerned about possible bad PR that we kill off any sense of fun in the community. I suspect that doing so will cost us members rather than gain us members.
Some specific examples of EA leaders putting SBF on a pedestal that I found with a bit of brief digging:
At the time FTX blew up, SBF was featured on 80k’s homepage. Also, if you clicked “start here” on that homepage (the first link aside from a subscription form) you were brought to an article that featured SBF as one of three individual profiles.
Both of these mentions linked to a more in depth profile of SBF that had been created in 2014 and regularly updated, and clearly “puts him on a pedestal” (“This approach — where he donates a significant proportion of his income to organisations aiming to make the world a better place as effectively as possible — is allowing Sam to have a pretty staggering impact.”)
When Will wrote about how the EA Funding situation had changed, he praised SBF not just for his donations but also his personal virtue “I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call.”
In Will’s appearance on the 80k podcast, he uses SBF as the exemplar of earning to give, and says convincing SBF to pursue ETG was “really the important impact.” He also uses SBF to illustrate “fat tails” of impact. On another 80k podcast, 80k staff talks about SBF to illustrate the impact of their 1:1 team.
In a talk at EAG London 2021, Ben Todd argues “that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high.” (Ben also mentions SBF in a variety of posts discussing EA’s funding levels, but that seems to me like an unavoidable part of discussing that issue and less like putting him on a pedestal.)
All those examples come from the period after concerns about SBF had been raised to EA leaders. Prior to that, there are plenty more examples especially for 80k (e.g. SBF was on the 80k homepage from late 2014 to late 2017.)
As far as I can tell, EA leaders started promoting SBF in 2014 or so, seeing him as a great example of altruistic career choice in general, and of ETG (a counterintuitive model of altruistic career choice that originated in EA) specifically. Then leaders kept promoting SBF despite the warnings they got from Alameda co-founders, and continued to do so until FTX blew up.
Yes, the Corolla comment looks less innocent if the speaker has significant reasons to believe Sam was ethically shady. If you know someone is ethically shady but decide to work them with anyway, you need to be extra careful not to make statements that a reasonable person could read as expressing a belief in that person’s good ethics.
I mean, that’s not how I read it. The whole paragraph is:
Heavily considering what you show as well as what you do, especially if you’re in a position of high visibility. “Signalling” is often very important! For example, the funding situation means I now take my personal giving more seriously, not less. I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call. And, even though it won’t be the right choice for most of us, we can still celebrate those people who do make very intense moral commitments, like the many kidney donors in EA, or a Christian EA I heard about recently who lives in a van on the campus of the tech company he works for, giving away everything above $3000 per year.
I can see how some people might read it that way though.
Yes, I think that him, e.g. being interviewed by 80K didn’t make much of a difference. I think that EA’s reputation would inevitably be tied to his to an extent given how much money they donated and the context in which that occurred. People often overrate how much you can influence perceptions by framing things differently.
I agree with what others have said re: pedestal, so am not going to produce more quotes or anecdotes. I stand by the claim, though.
I think people may have been inclined to put SBF on a pedestal because earning to give was the main thing people criticized about early EA. People were otherwise pretty supportive of early EA ideas; I mean, it’s hard not to support finding more cost-effective global health charities. When SBF emerged, I think this was a bit of a “see, we told you so” moment for EAs who had been around for a long time, especially because SBF had explicitly chosen to earn to give because of EA. So it wasn’t just: “look this guy is earning to give and has billions of dollars!” The subtext was also: “EA is really onto something with its thinking and advice.” He became a poster boy for the idea that we can actually intellectualize our way to making the world better (so fuck the haters).
I think a more plausible defense of senior EAs is not that this pedestal thing didn’t happen, but that (as @Stefan_Schubert suggests) it may not have made that much of a difference. EAs might well have rallied around SBF even if senior people hadn’t promoted him. And this is definitely possible, but I wonder if things would’ve played out pretty differently if senior EAs had been like “look, we’ll take your money, and we’ll recommend some great people to work for you, but we don’t want to personally serve on the board of FTX Foundation/vouch for you/have you on our podcast, etc because we have heard rumors about X, Y, and Z, and think they pose reputational risks to EA.”
Lastly: it looks like the three former Alameda employees accused SBF of having “inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates” around the beginning of the #MeToo movement. Alameda launched in the fall of 2017 and the confrontation with Sam occurred in April of 2018. The NYT published its article about Harvey Weinstein on October 5th, 2017, and dozens of men were accused of harassment between then and February 2018. The fact that SBF’s alleged inappropriate sexual behavior occurred around the height of the #MeToo movement doesn’t make me think EA leaders had less of a reason to worry about the reputational risks of promoting him.
Hm I wouldn’t have thought of your second paragraph. I’m not sure I agree that was an intention, but interesting.
IDK, CEA did do an investigation in 2019 into CEA/Alameda relations, according to the news article, so I’m not sure (yet!) they behaved unreasonably here given the nature of the complaints made. (I’m also not sure they behaved reasonably). Somebody tried a bit to actually figure things out at least. And I prefer that than just saying “Hey, SBF, check out these rumors. Rather than try to figure out which side is right, we will do some sort of average thing where we take your money and help you out in some ways but not others, and possibly leave a lot of value on the table or keep a lot of risk, not sure which, but oh well”. That doesn’t seem like the optimal outcome for either possible situation.
I’m reminded of split and commit. If I see something that looks like a 10-ft alligator on my property, but it might also be a log, is it an optimal strategy to continue the yardwork anyway but give it a wide berth? Or am I going to investigate further to see whether it is an alligator (and if so call animal control and have it removed) or if it is a log (and if so I can mow my grass right up to the base, even take a rest on it if I want). It’s not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. [1]
Anyway, it looks possible that people thought about this to the extent it seemed reasonable at the time, given the scale of the complaints made (which the article admits never implied anything like what happened or even implied fraud for sure—perhaps lazy accounting that they’d hopefully grow out of as they professionalized, yes). They came to the wrong conclusions, but I might be okay with this tbh. (but we’ll see how reasonable the conclusion was)
Were the claims about inappropriate sexual relationships either by the women themselves, or at least about nonconsensual relationships? Without commenting on how appropriate the relationships were otherwise, I’m not in favor of consensual relationships (consensual meaning, the women themselves would say they were consensual) being branded part of lumped in with episodes of harassment and the #metoo movement. You can’t really create a #metoo moment for someone else.
[Edit: Maybe if I try to make the analogy better, maybe 2019 CEA investigated to the extent they could (I very much doubt they were allowed to feel the actual shape of the alligator/see many of Alameda’s internal documents) and (reasonably?) decided that SBF was not either an alligator or a log, but an alligator statue (that people keep complaining is an alligator), or a dead alligator (that people were right to complain about before but it looks like things have changed), or a crippled alligator you aren’t worried about, or an otherwise-chill alligator protecting it’s babies which you don’t want to move. IDK. But then in 2022 we all learned that this was wrong too, and he was actually a frickin T-Rex pretending (excellently) to be an [alligator statue etc]. Because actually the fiasco that ended up happening was way out of scale with what even the complainants said, and the Time piece notes that in multiple places. Nobody expected a sneaky T-Rex!]
How was he to know that was going to be made public? That’s not “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,” that’s “I think these two should talk and it seems like that comes down to how much I vouch for him. And honestly I do vouch for him in this context [given what I know at this point].”
@Michael_PJ offered a comment about “content linking Sam to EA.” That last sentence is hard to read as anything but.
One should know that conversations with someone as famous and unfiltered as Elon Musk about the year’s most-talked about acquisition could go public. There are also other non-public boosts like the quote at the end of the article. But even if not, the private vouch still goes to @lilly ’s point about why anyone would boost/vouch for SBF “knowing what it appears they knew then.”
Maybe he knew there was a chance his text would end up being publicly revealed in court (I wouldn’t, but okay), but that’s quite different from public promotion. And I wouldn’t consider this “content linking Sam to EA” either, and anyway the context of Michael_PJ using those words was the thing I quoted—that’s the relevant thing we’re discussing here. And again, the quote at the end of the article doesn’t read to me as “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” (although granted maybe “friend” was unnecessary for a simple “thanks for hosting”). And if I was him, I think I’d have vouched for SBF to Musk too: “You’re both cut-throat businessmen, both insanely good at making money, both very dedicated to making the long-term future go well...I think you’ll get on just fine.”
I think that’s a good example of “why would people do this given what they knew?”, I’m not sure it’s an example of pedestalising etc. I’m being a bit fussy here because I do think I’ve seen the specific claim that there was lots of public promotion of Sam and I’m just not sure if it’s true.
I do think I’ve seen the specific claim that there was lots of public promotion of Sam
Fuss away. E.g.
Jack Lewars “to avoid putting single donors on a huge pedestal inside and outside the community” and again “putting [SBF] on a pedestal and making them symbolic of EA”
Gideon Futerman “making and encouraging Will (and I guess until recently to a lesser extent SBF) the face of EA”
tcheasdfjkl “while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly”
Peter S. Park “But making SBF the face of the EA movement was a really bad decision”
Devon Fritz “EA decided to hold up and promote SBF as a paragon of EA values and on of the few prominent faces in the EA community”
Dean Abele “I don’t know if I should stay in EA. I would feel very sad if [Will] publicly praised someone who turned out to be morally bankrupt. Of course, everyone makes mistakes. But still, some trust has been lost.”
Peter Wildeford “The other clear mistake was promoting Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA.” [This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]
David_Althaus “I think it’s clear that we put SBF on a pedestal and promoted him as someone worth emulating, I don’t really know what to say to someone who disagrees with this.”
Habryka “Some part of EA leadership ended up endorsing SBF very publicly and very strongly despite having very likely heard about the concerns, and without following up on them (In my model of the world Will fucked up really hard here)” and again “[Will] was the person most responsible for entangling EA with FTX by publicly endorsing SBF multiple times”
Jonas Vollmer “while Nick took SBF’s money, he didn’t give SBF a strong platform or otherwise promote him a lot...So...Will should be removed”
Also the 80k interview was done by 80k...has anyone claimed that Rob Wiblin or anyone at 80k knew Sam was “sketchy”? Apparently Rob wasn’t even corrected about Sam’s non-frugality—he sounds kind of out of the loop.
I agree with you’re first half. I wonder if a startup or even a non-EA non-profit would be so self-flagellating for taking his money, even given they had heard some troubling reports. If not, I think EAs should chill out on thinking we could have been expected to do a deep investigation [Edit: apparently CEA did one on CEA/Alameda relations in 2019 but no comment yet on how it went] or hold-off on taking money. I mean everyone else had his expected net worth wrong too (Billionaire lists for example, and FTX’s own investors who should have been much more interested in internals than donation recipients). [Some data/insider info on how much big charities like WWF or Doctors Without Borders investigate donors would be great here, but without seeing that I’m assuming it was normal to accept money from SBF]
But as for the idea he was framed as a moral paragon by leaders, idk. I never got that vibe. Was I missing it? It seems more like he was framed, by news outlets and everyman EAs, and maaaybe some EA leaders on occasion but I actually don’t even remember this except for from Sam’s promos himself, as more of a cool-but-humble industrious guy than a moral leader or rep of the movement itself if anything. I mean did he ever speak at an EAG or something? What would it even look like if EA leaders were tying EA’s rep to his? Maybe he was mentioned some (usually non-EA) places as a notable personality in the movement.? But that doesn’t to me say “this guy’s put on a pedestal by leaders” and “emulate this guy” (in fact EAs wanted people to not emulate him and try direct work first). I honestly wonder if I missed something.
My weakly-held take is: You can’t help it if cool-seeming billionaires get fans, and it is hard to help it if those cool billionaires get associations with the things they fund and themselves talk about. Ex: Elon who people associate with AI safety even though he has never worked on it himself. Associations in the eyes of the public, and news outlets/bloggers/Twitter bumping those associations are gonna happen. I’m not sure EA leaders did anything to boost (or stem!) this effect (fine with being proven wrong though). I do hope/demand that next time, EA leaders are more protective of the EA brand and do try to stem this potential association effect. Like “Hey buddy, we already weren’t gonna put you on a pedestal for being associated with our brand, but actually you don’t get to do that either. Please keep involvement with us out of your public talks and self-promotion. We want to be known for the work we do, not who funds us” Dustin does this (keeps EA out of his professional brand). And most wealthy people prefer to donate discretely so it was maybe a red flag that SBF leaned right into being associated with EA, and would be a red flag in future too. Idk.
[Edit: You might consider the last part negligence, that EA leaders didn’t give SBF a slap on the wrist for EA-associating. If so maybe you still aren’t happy with leadership. But I just want to flag that if that is what happened that is still much better than leaders actively boosting him (could be wrong that the latter happened though) and would likely warrant different response. I guess I view the former as “mistakes of medium-size (but small for most leaders due to diffuse responsibility if there was no one whose job it clearly was to talk to Sam about this), passively made, not-unusual-behavior” whereas I’d view active pedestalling or active tying-EA-rep-with-SBF to be “big mistakes, actively made, unusual behavior”]
I am also eager to see what the investigation concludes, but I’m pretty convinced at this point that EA leaders made big mistakes.
It’s not obvious to me (yet) that they should’ve known not to take Sam’s money—non-profits accept donations from dubious characters all the time. Even if EA leaders thought Sam was sketchy (which it appears some did), it’s not clear to me they should’ve known Sam was don’t-take-money-from-this-person bad. This is a line non-profits walk all the time, and many have erred on the side of taking money from people they shouldn’t have taken money from.
But 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.
I always find this claim a bit confusing: did we actually do those things? Are there some specific examples of doing this?
I can think of… the 80k interview and that’s about it? I guess engaging with the FTX Foundation was somewhat positive but I don’t think it was putting him on a pedestal. In fact when I look back I feel like a lot of the content linking Sam to EA came from people talking to Sam. I may well just not be remembering stuff though!
I don’t deny that Sam was perceived in that way, but it’s not clear to me that this was something that was done (even accidentally) by “EA leaders”.
ETA July: I regret posting the following comment for several reasons, partly because I got crucial information wrong and failed to put things into context and prevent misunderstandings. Please consider reading my longer explanation at the top of my follow-up comment here. I’m sorry to anyone I upset.
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At EAG London 2022, they [ETA: this was an individual without consent of the organizers] distributed hundreds of stickers depicting Sam on a bean bag with the text “what would SBF do?”. To my knowledge, never before were flyers depicting individual EAs at EAG distributed. (Also, such behavior seems generally unusual to me, like, imagine going to a conference and seeing hundreds of flyers and stickers all depicting one guy. Doesn’t that seem a tad culty?)
On the 80k website, they had several articles mentioning SBF as someone highly praiseworthy and worth emulating.
Will vouched for SBF “very much” when talking to Elon Musk.
Sam was invited to many discussions between EA leaders.
There are probably more examples.
Generally, almost everyone was talking about how great Sam is and how much good he has achieved and how, as a good EA, one should try to be more like him.
These were not an official EAG thing — they were printed by an individual attendee.
Yeah it was super weird.
Ah thanks, I didn’t know that! Sorry, could have noticed my confusion here. I edited the above comment.
When I see agreevotes [racking up quickly on contextless statements] like above, I always feel weird. Do people agree that that counts as pedestalling by leaders? Or they agree that all that happened? IDK, but I feel weird because I actually think I disagree (with all those people I guess) that these are fair for the point being made:
I was at EAGL 22, but I never saw this, so it was not a universal handout. However I remember ppl talking about it, and it was not by EA leaders or offical conference ppl. It was (if I heard correctly) some kind of joke by some attendee(s). I still believe this because EAG conference staff are pretty serious about making the event professional, so even if they thought it was secretly funny I’d have a hard time believing they would do that. Worth noting I think this was also a meta-injoke about claims of EA being a cult, obviously by riffing on the WWJD and giving “glorious leader” vibes. (Trying to avoid sounding harsh, but to whoever likes this type of thing, here’s a reason not to do rogue, injoke stuff like that at an official event. Now we are dealing with it as submitted evidence of potential leadership corruption a year later, and unfortunately it did make EA look more like a cult even though that was actually the punchline not the truth. I imagine some attendees at the time felt icky about it too. Expect the injoke to make it to the outgroup, and anticipate how it will look. Save it for the unofficial afterparty, at most please.)
Honestly that just seems normal to me, idk. I have met a couple other people who have profiles on that website. They weren’t being put on a pedestal, and 80K couldn’t be fairly seen as tying 80k (let alone EA’s) rep to theirs (because they aren’t billionaires who would assume that). But it did make sense to list Sam as a notable example for earning-to-give, which is a recommended career path. It isn’t like this was unwarranted use. Bad luck IMO. Seems like maybe what we are seeing in this instance is that if you want to use a billionaire like a normal example of something in a different talking point you are trying to make, society won’t “let” you in the long run, because the billionaire’s rep is actually bigger than yours and bigger than the rep of the point you are trying to make. So the billionaire’s rep will swallow yours up whether you meant it to or not. EAs would do well to keep this lesson in mind for future prominent people even if those people are angels-on-earth. Still bad luck I say, I mean keep in mind SBF was likely trying to actively fool people (including himself methinks) as to his competence. [Edit: And as Ubuntu adds below, they aren’t really EA leaders who had heard anything negative about SBF. Hence bad luck/big oof moment.]
This was discussed elsewhere better than I can (I will hunt for the link and edit in shortly [Edit: I didn’t want to dig for it so I just made this section longer]), but essentially anybody would do this for their friend or trusted acquaintance when they think something will be mutually beneficial, it was not a professional EA capacity and it was also in private text messages, not public. That it was shared publicly was tbh pretty uncool. I mean it’s obvious Macaskill misjudged Sam’s character/potential, but he actually wasn’t trying to recommend Sam publicly there, and this sounds more like “person-to-person, I think it’s very much worth you guys having a conversation! You care about the same stuff and I know that stuff is why you both are interested in Twitter! Give it a go!” than “I, an EA leader, vouch for Sam, also an EA leader” type of exchange. Will got duped but I’m pretty unclear he was acting inappropriately here in his own personal life. I mean when you have two fabulously wealthy acquaintances, and one wants to do a business deal with the other, you introduce them, and yes you vouch for the first if you know them reasonably well just so they give each other the time of day. There’s no expectation that a deal will move forward without due diligence occurring, or that your vouch will become law. Musk knows that Will is not a finance professional, so he should know that Will can only vouch character. And no harm, no foul. But if there was harm for the EA brand here, it was by Musk making the private messages public which like, huh I’d never have expected that if I was Will.
It looks to me like Musk did so for a bit of clout to show he is hard-to-dupe.[I was incorrectly pairing this with another Elon text but the rest stands].I don’t think he wanted to make a dig at Macaskill for vouching tbh. Musk’s financial professional (Michael Grimes) vouched for SBF too with about the same level of confidence. If I were Musk I’d prefer that people I like and respect (which it sounds like Will is one) keep trying to make connections for me when they believe the connections are of potential high value, and I/Musk would still always do my own due diligence. So it feels kind of weird to me that EAs are against Will having tried to connection-make when maybe even Musk wouldn’t be so hard on him?[Edit: I now realize that maybe some people are upset that Will was cool with arranging for “possibly EA money” to be spent on Twitter. To that, it’s worth noting that EA doesn’t own it’s donor’s money, helping out your major donors and acquaintances in their goals is prosocial and normal, there are EAs who view social coordination and combatting misinformation as important cause areas, and it would have been a business move not a donation]
Sounds normal for a truly-massive donor who at least understood the movement or was thought to, and who people roughly enjoyed talking to as well. Again, keep in mind that SBF was likely actively trying to fool people here. I wonder if anyone reading this can say “No, having Sam involved in discussion would have just absolutely been a hard-no from me. No way he could convince me that he, a huge donor, deserves a seat at the table. And if anybody felt he gave them good input in the past… their opinions wouldn’t matter, I’d have said ‘No, don’t invite him.’ In fact even if he gave me good input over the years in my leadership, controlled half my funding, and he was possibly expecting an invite, I would definitely still never have invited him.” [This sounds so strong that it almost looks like I’m strawmanning the other side, I’m giving so little wiggle-room. But I do genuinely think to be able to judge leaders harshly here, you have to believe a claim as watertight as that quote would have been said by other experienced leaders, because I’m only confident a claim as watertight as that keeps competent actors and the rest from inviting Sam.] IDK I just find it quite surprising that readers are acting like disengaging with Sam, a major donor, was so black and white and easy. The majority of people got sucked in… it’s easy to say what should have happened now.
This perhaps yes. Lot of injokes and stuff in EA culture about SBF generally, too. But how much of this was grassroots in origination, because having a heckin billionaire in your extended crew is cool and interesting, vs how much of this was done by leaders publicly? Should people really not have felt excited and expressed it within their ingroup based on what they thought?
I’d be interested to see them. In general I feel like what I’m seeing listed here is pretty human and normal and I wouldn’t call it putting him on a pedestal, or tying EA’s rep to his (intentionally or even in ways ppl necessarily could have anticipated would end up very entangled), or elevating him as moral paragon publicly.
(ETA: Sorry for not engaging with everything you wrote. I’m short on time and I’ll try to elaborate on my views in a week or so.)
Just to clarify my position: I think it’s clear that we put SBF on a pedestal and promoted him as someone worth emulating, I don’t really know what to say to someone who disagrees with this. (Perhaps you interpret the phrase “put someone on a pedestal” differently; yes, we didn’t built statues of SBF, I agree.)
But I also think that basically almost all of this has been completely understandable. I mean, guy makes 10B dollars and wants to donate it all? One needs to be deranged to not try to emulate him, to not want to learn from him and to not paint him as highly morally praiseworthy. I certainly tried emulating that and learning from SBF (with little success obviously). At the time, I didn’t think that we went too far. I even thought the sticker thing was kinda funny (if weird and inadvisable), but I didn’t really give it much thought at all at the time.
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.)
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[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.
+1 to basically all of this and thanks for adding context to the stickers thing.
I also want to add—Again, Beckstead, MacAskill and Karnofsky are not 80k. So going back to the original claim that we’re discussing (and others like it I guess):
Well, “they” are not 80k, so I’m really not surprised 80k featured SBF positively on their website. “EA leaders” are not a single shadowy entity, they’re a group of individuals who get packaged together in a variety of combinations when people realise there are no adults in the room.
Sounds like an individual attendee might have done this. I don’t see this as a big deal. I don’t think that we should be so concerned about possible bad PR that we kill off any sense of fun in the community. I suspect that doing so will cost us members rather than gain us members.
[Edit: Okay it sounds like the stickers were done by attendees. That’s much less surprising.]
Woah what’s the story behind the stickers, what the hell? Is this a dank memes thing? I assume it’s meant to be funny but I don’t get it.
I still genuinely don’t know if the signed Huel thing was meant to be a joke.
Some specific examples of EA leaders putting SBF on a pedestal that I found with a bit of brief digging:
At the time FTX blew up, SBF was featured on 80k’s homepage. Also, if you clicked “start here” on that homepage (the first link aside from a subscription form) you were brought to an article that featured SBF as one of three individual profiles.
Both of these mentions linked to a more in depth profile of SBF that had been created in 2014 and regularly updated, and clearly “puts him on a pedestal” (“This approach — where he donates a significant proportion of his income to organisations aiming to make the world a better place as effectively as possible — is allowing Sam to have a pretty staggering impact.”)
When Will wrote about how the EA Funding situation had changed, he praised SBF not just for his donations but also his personal virtue “I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call.”
In Will’s appearance on the 80k podcast, he uses SBF as the exemplar of earning to give, and says convincing SBF to pursue ETG was “really the important impact.” He also uses SBF to illustrate “fat tails” of impact. On another 80k podcast, 80k staff talks about SBF to illustrate the impact of their 1:1 team.
In a talk at EAG London 2021, Ben Todd argues “that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high.” (Ben also mentions SBF in a variety of posts discussing EA’s funding levels, but that seems to me like an unavoidable part of discussing that issue and less like putting him on a pedestal.)
All those examples come from the period after concerns about SBF had been raised to EA leaders. Prior to that, there are plenty more examples especially for 80k (e.g. SBF was on the 80k homepage from late 2014 to late 2017.)
As far as I can tell, EA leaders started promoting SBF in 2014 or so, seeing him as a great example of altruistic career choice in general, and of ETG (a counterintuitive model of altruistic career choice that originated in EA) specifically. Then leaders kept promoting SBF despite the warnings they got from Alameda co-founders, and continued to do so until FTX blew up.
Yes, the Corolla comment looks less innocent if the speaker has significant reasons to believe Sam was ethically shady. If you know someone is ethically shady but decide to work them with anyway, you need to be extra careful not to make statements that a reasonable person could read as expressing a belief in that person’s good ethics.
I mean, that’s not how I read it. The whole paragraph is:
I can see how some people might read it that way though.
Yes, I think that him, e.g. being interviewed by 80K didn’t make much of a difference. I think that EA’s reputation would inevitably be tied to his to an extent given how much money they donated and the context in which that occurred. People often overrate how much you can influence perceptions by framing things differently.
I agree with what others have said re: pedestal, so am not going to produce more quotes or anecdotes. I stand by the claim, though.
I think people may have been inclined to put SBF on a pedestal because earning to give was the main thing people criticized about early EA. People were otherwise pretty supportive of early EA ideas; I mean, it’s hard not to support finding more cost-effective global health charities. When SBF emerged, I think this was a bit of a “see, we told you so” moment for EAs who had been around for a long time, especially because SBF had explicitly chosen to earn to give because of EA. So it wasn’t just: “look this guy is earning to give and has billions of dollars!” The subtext was also: “EA is really onto something with its thinking and advice.” He became a poster boy for the idea that we can actually intellectualize our way to making the world better (so fuck the haters).
I think a more plausible defense of senior EAs is not that this pedestal thing didn’t happen, but that (as @Stefan_Schubert suggests) it may not have made that much of a difference. EAs might well have rallied around SBF even if senior people hadn’t promoted him. And this is definitely possible, but I wonder if things would’ve played out pretty differently if senior EAs had been like “look, we’ll take your money, and we’ll recommend some great people to work for you, but we don’t want to personally serve on the board of FTX Foundation/vouch for you/have you on our podcast, etc because we have heard rumors about X, Y, and Z, and think they pose reputational risks to EA.”
Lastly: it looks like the three former Alameda employees accused SBF of having “inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates” around the beginning of the #MeToo movement. Alameda launched in the fall of 2017 and the confrontation with Sam occurred in April of 2018. The NYT published its article about Harvey Weinstein on October 5th, 2017, and dozens of men were accused of harassment between then and February 2018. The fact that SBF’s alleged inappropriate sexual behavior occurred around the height of the #MeToo movement doesn’t make me think EA leaders had less of a reason to worry about the reputational risks of promoting him.
Hm I wouldn’t have thought of your second paragraph. I’m not sure I agree that was an intention, but interesting.
IDK, CEA did do an investigation in 2019 into CEA/Alameda relations, according to the news article, so I’m not sure (yet!) they behaved unreasonably here given the nature of the complaints made. (I’m also not sure they behaved reasonably). Somebody tried a bit to actually figure things out at least. And I prefer that than just saying “Hey, SBF, check out these rumors. Rather than try to figure out which side is right, we will do some sort of average thing where we take your money and help you out in some ways but not others, and possibly leave a lot of value on the table or keep a lot of risk, not sure which, but oh well”. That doesn’t seem like the optimal outcome for either possible situation.
I’m reminded of split and commit. If I see something that looks like a 10-ft alligator on my property, but it might also be a log, is it an optimal strategy to continue the yardwork anyway but give it a wide berth? Or am I going to investigate further to see whether it is an alligator (and if so call animal control and have it removed) or if it is a log (and if so I can mow my grass right up to the base, even take a rest on it if I want). It’s not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. [1]
Anyway, it looks possible that people thought about this to the extent it seemed reasonable at the time, given the scale of the complaints made (which the article admits never implied anything like what happened or even implied fraud for sure—perhaps lazy accounting that they’d hopefully grow out of as they professionalized, yes). They came to the wrong conclusions, but I might be okay with this tbh. (but we’ll see how reasonable the conclusion was)
Were the claims about inappropriate sexual relationships either by the women themselves, or at least about nonconsensual relationships? Without commenting on how appropriate the relationships were otherwise, I’m not in favor of consensual relationships (consensual meaning, the women themselves would say they were consensual) being
branded part oflumped in with episodes of harassment and the #metoo movement. You can’t really create a #metoo moment for someone else.[Edit: Maybe if I try to make the analogy better, maybe 2019 CEA investigated to the extent they could (I very much doubt they were allowed to feel the actual shape of the alligator/see many of Alameda’s internal documents) and (reasonably?) decided that SBF was not either an alligator or a log, but an alligator statue (that people keep complaining is an alligator), or a dead alligator (that people were right to complain about before but it looks like things have changed), or a crippled alligator you aren’t worried about, or an otherwise-chill alligator protecting it’s babies which you don’t want to move. IDK. But then in 2022 we all learned that this was wrong too, and he was actually a frickin T-Rex pretending (excellently) to be an [alligator statue etc]. Because actually the fiasco that ended up happening was way out of scale with what even the complainants said, and the Time piece notes that in multiple places. Nobody expected a sneaky T-Rex!]
There is the whole vouching for SBF as prospective purchaser of Twitter:
You vouch for him?
Very much so! Very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well.
How was he to know that was going to be made public? That’s not “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,” that’s “I think these two should talk and it seems like that comes down to how much I vouch for him. And honestly I do vouch for him in this context [given what I know at this point].”
@Michael_PJ offered a comment about “content linking Sam to EA.” That last sentence is hard to read as anything but.
One should know that conversations with someone as famous and unfiltered as Elon Musk about the year’s most-talked about acquisition could go public. There are also other non-public boosts like the quote at the end of the article. But even if not, the private vouch still goes to @lilly ’s point about why anyone would boost/vouch for SBF “knowing what it appears they knew then.”
Maybe he knew there was a chance his text would end up being publicly revealed in court (I wouldn’t, but okay), but that’s quite different from public promotion. And I wouldn’t consider this “content linking Sam to EA” either, and anyway the context of Michael_PJ using those words was the thing I quoted—that’s the relevant thing we’re discussing here. And again, the quote at the end of the article doesn’t read to me as “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” (although granted maybe “friend” was unnecessary for a simple “thanks for hosting”). And if I was him, I think I’d have vouched for SBF to Musk too: “You’re both cut-throat businessmen, both insanely good at making money, both very dedicated to making the long-term future go well...I think you’ll get on just fine.”
I think that’s a good example of “why would people do this given what they knew?”, I’m not sure it’s an example of pedestalising etc. I’m being a bit fussy here because I do think I’ve seen the specific claim that there was lots of public promotion of Sam and I’m just not sure if it’s true.
Fuss away. E.g.
Jack Lewars “to avoid putting single donors on a huge pedestal inside and outside the community” and again “putting [SBF] on a pedestal and making them symbolic of EA”
Gideon Futerman “making and encouraging Will (and I guess until recently to a lesser extent SBF) the face of EA”
tcheasdfjkl “while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly”
Peter S. Park “But making SBF the face of the EA movement was a really bad decision”
Devon Fritz “EA decided to hold up and promote SBF as a paragon of EA values and on of the few prominent faces in the EA community”
Dean Abele “I don’t know if I should stay in EA. I would feel very sad if [Will] publicly praised someone who turned out to be morally bankrupt. Of course, everyone makes mistakes. But still, some trust has been lost.”
Peter Wildeford “The other clear mistake was promoting Sam so heavily as the poster child of EA.” [This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]
David_Althaus “I think it’s clear that we put SBF on a pedestal and promoted him as someone worth emulating, I don’t really know what to say to someone who disagrees with this.”
Habryka “Some part of EA leadership ended up endorsing SBF very publicly and very strongly despite having very likely heard about the concerns, and without following up on them (In my model of the world Will fucked up really hard here)” and again “[Will] was the person most responsible for entangling EA with FTX by publicly endorsing SBF multiple times”
Jonas Vollmer “while Nick took SBF’s money, he didn’t give SBF a strong platform or otherwise promote him a lot...So...Will should be removed”
Also the 80k interview was done by 80k...has anyone claimed that Rob Wiblin or anyone at 80k knew Sam was “sketchy”? Apparently Rob wasn’t even corrected about Sam’s non-frugality—he sounds kind of out of the loop.
I agree with you’re first half. I wonder if a startup or even a non-EA non-profit would be so self-flagellating for taking his money, even given they had heard some troubling reports. If not, I think EAs should chill out on thinking we could have been expected to do a deep investigation [Edit: apparently CEA did one on CEA/Alameda relations in 2019 but no comment yet on how it went] or hold-off on taking money. I mean everyone else had his expected net worth wrong too (Billionaire lists for example, and FTX’s own investors who should have been much more interested in internals than donation recipients). [Some data/insider info on how much big charities like WWF or Doctors Without Borders investigate donors would be great here, but without seeing that I’m assuming it was normal to accept money from SBF]
But as for the idea he was framed as a moral paragon by leaders, idk. I never got that vibe. Was I missing it? It seems more like he was framed, by news outlets and everyman EAs, and maaaybe some EA leaders on occasion but I actually don’t even remember this except for from Sam’s promos himself, as more of a cool-but-humble industrious guy than a moral leader or rep of the movement itself if anything. I mean did he ever speak at an EAG or something? What would it even look like if EA leaders were tying EA’s rep to his? Maybe he was mentioned some (usually non-EA) places as a notable personality in the movement.? But that doesn’t to me say “this guy’s put on a pedestal by leaders” and “emulate this guy” (in fact EAs wanted people to not emulate him and try direct work first). I honestly wonder if I missed something.
My weakly-held take is: You can’t help it if cool-seeming billionaires get fans, and it is hard to help it if those cool billionaires get associations with the things they fund and themselves talk about. Ex: Elon who people associate with AI safety even though he has never worked on it himself. Associations in the eyes of the public, and news outlets/bloggers/Twitter bumping those associations are gonna happen. I’m not sure EA leaders did anything to boost (or stem!) this effect (fine with being proven wrong though). I do hope/demand that next time, EA leaders are more protective of the EA brand and do try to stem this potential association effect. Like “Hey buddy, we already weren’t gonna put you on a pedestal for being associated with our brand, but actually you don’t get to do that either. Please keep involvement with us out of your public talks and self-promotion. We want to be known for the work we do, not who funds us” Dustin does this (keeps EA out of his professional brand). And most wealthy people prefer to donate discretely so it was maybe a red flag that SBF leaned right into being associated with EA, and would be a red flag in future too. Idk.
[Edit: You might consider the last part negligence, that EA leaders didn’t give SBF a slap on the wrist for EA-associating. If so maybe you still aren’t happy with leadership. But I just want to flag that if that is what happened that is still much better than leaders actively boosting him (could be wrong that the latter happened though) and would likely warrant different response. I guess I view the former as “mistakes of medium-size (but small for most leaders due to diffuse responsibility if there was no one whose job it clearly was to talk to Sam about this), passively made, not-unusual-behavior” whereas I’d view active pedestalling or active tying-EA-rep-with-SBF to be “big mistakes, actively made, unusual behavior”]