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.
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.