I think the reason this hasn’t been proposed in a forum post yet is because it would be movement suicide. Suppose you are Moskovitz, and CEA comes to you and says they want you to hand over all of your personal financial records, all kinds of Facebook business records, etc, to some random law firm or whoever to do the audit. What do you think? How do you feel? Obviously you aren’t going to do it—that’s an insane invasion of your personal privacy, and would reveal a lot of confidential information about your Facebooks business in violation of business norms if not legal agreements. Probably you are going to feel insulted. Certainly you can find plenty of other non-EA charities that would be happy to take your money and say “thank you” no questions asked. You’ll probably just do that.
The reality of the situation is that if Moscovitz is another SBF, then EA is screwed. We can’t mitigate the risk by seriously investigating Moscovitz. The mitigation strategies available are to see to our own governance better—be prepared to loose funding—take any opportunities to diversify funding sources, build up savings (“endowments”) to see us through hard times, document our activities so that if we have to shut down for a few years due to lack of funding, people can pick up the pieces and restart when funding becomes available again.
I don’t think it has to be that burdensome to be useful, just some independent investigation into relevant information, ideally with some help from Moskovitz with some of the relevant documents/information. That said I would bet actual real money that Moskovitz won’t stop donating to EA if he faces some audit, provided it doesn’t require some sort of serious breach of contract of the sort you mention. I think he would understand given the circumstances and my impression is that he genuinely cares about this stuff quite a lot. If you want to arrange something feel free to DM me. The bigger risk, which I considered bringing up, might be putting off future donors who are less committed if they expect to face similar scrutiny. I’m not sure how to feel about this one, except I kind of bite the bullet that, if the result of ensuring that it is less likely that something like SBF happens again means no one person donates nearly as much to us as he did, that might well be worth it. I tend to lean steering over rowing on these things, and whether it’s hindsight bias or not recent events make me feel fairly vindicated in this.
if the result of ensuring that it is less likely that something like SBF happens again means no one person donates nearly as much to us as he did, that might well be worth it.
That’s the key question, and I don’t think you’ve answered it. Would SBF have been less likely to take people’s money if there were a light touch EA audit of major donors in place? Or would he have still taken people’s money, but not donated it to EA charities? Or would he have still taken the money, still donated it to EA charities, and we would feel even more foolish because we thought we had prevented this possibility? Any of those three stories sound plausible to me, but ultimately I do think it sounds strange to require an audit of someone’s business accounts before they buy bednets to save lives
SBF specifically might have been less likely to commit fraud, if some of this fraud was motivated by wanting to earn to give, but in general I don’t think it would actively prevent most people from committing this fraud. That’s not what I take the point of an audit like this to be.
I also think if we look, find nothing, and then later it turns out there was harder to spot wrongdoing, that won’t be worse than if we don’t even try and the same wrongdoing comes up. If the concern is that it will cause us to be overconfident, I would want to see an example of what we would be doing differently from what we are doing now if we were overconfident.
Finally, I think the point “ultimately I do think it sounds strange to require an audit of someone’s business accounts before they buy bednets to save lives” proves too much. I think EA’s involvement with SBF was bad, and it would have been worth some effort to try to avoid that. I think this is true even if SBF still engaged in fraud, and still donated money some other place. You could have raised identical points to defend not doing this in the case of SBF, which maybe you also think it wouldn’t have made sense to do, but at the very least in retrospect there was a cost to not doing so. Given this cost, it doesn’t seem particularly odd to me at all.
Sure, I don’t think that’s a crazy position, I just disagree with it pretty strongly. Insofar as movement building and community health are valid EA cause areas (and at least we often treat them as such) this strikes me as highish on the list of most impactful things, not just in hindsight but also in expectation, people working on this cause area could have done.
I think the reason this hasn’t been proposed in a forum post yet is because it would be movement suicide. Suppose you are Moskovitz, and CEA comes to you and says they want you to hand over all of your personal financial records, all kinds of Facebook business records, etc, to some random law firm or whoever to do the audit. What do you think? How do you feel? Obviously you aren’t going to do it—that’s an insane invasion of your personal privacy, and would reveal a lot of confidential information about your Facebooks business in violation of business norms if not legal agreements. Probably you are going to feel insulted. Certainly you can find plenty of other non-EA charities that would be happy to take your money and say “thank you” no questions asked. You’ll probably just do that.
The reality of the situation is that if Moscovitz is another SBF, then EA is screwed. We can’t mitigate the risk by seriously investigating Moscovitz. The mitigation strategies available are to see to our own governance better—be prepared to loose funding—take any opportunities to diversify funding sources, build up savings (“endowments”) to see us through hard times, document our activities so that if we have to shut down for a few years due to lack of funding, people can pick up the pieces and restart when funding becomes available again.
I don’t think it has to be that burdensome to be useful, just some independent investigation into relevant information, ideally with some help from Moskovitz with some of the relevant documents/information. That said I would bet actual real money that Moskovitz won’t stop donating to EA if he faces some audit, provided it doesn’t require some sort of serious breach of contract of the sort you mention. I think he would understand given the circumstances and my impression is that he genuinely cares about this stuff quite a lot. If you want to arrange something feel free to DM me. The bigger risk, which I considered bringing up, might be putting off future donors who are less committed if they expect to face similar scrutiny. I’m not sure how to feel about this one, except I kind of bite the bullet that, if the result of ensuring that it is less likely that something like SBF happens again means no one person donates nearly as much to us as he did, that might well be worth it. I tend to lean steering over rowing on these things, and whether it’s hindsight bias or not recent events make me feel fairly vindicated in this.
That’s the key question, and I don’t think you’ve answered it. Would SBF have been less likely to take people’s money if there were a light touch EA audit of major donors in place? Or would he have still taken people’s money, but not donated it to EA charities? Or would he have still taken the money, still donated it to EA charities, and we would feel even more foolish because we thought we had prevented this possibility? Any of those three stories sound plausible to me, but ultimately I do think it sounds strange to require an audit of someone’s business accounts before they buy bednets to save lives
SBF specifically might have been less likely to commit fraud, if some of this fraud was motivated by wanting to earn to give, but in general I don’t think it would actively prevent most people from committing this fraud. That’s not what I take the point of an audit like this to be.
I also think if we look, find nothing, and then later it turns out there was harder to spot wrongdoing, that won’t be worse than if we don’t even try and the same wrongdoing comes up. If the concern is that it will cause us to be overconfident, I would want to see an example of what we would be doing differently from what we are doing now if we were overconfident.
Finally, I think the point “ultimately I do think it sounds strange to require an audit of someone’s business accounts before they buy bednets to save lives” proves too much. I think EA’s involvement with SBF was bad, and it would have been worth some effort to try to avoid that. I think this is true even if SBF still engaged in fraud, and still donated money some other place. You could have raised identical points to defend not doing this in the case of SBF, which maybe you also think it wouldn’t have made sense to do, but at the very least in retrospect there was a cost to not doing so. Given this cost, it doesn’t seem particularly odd to me at all.
Yes, exactly—I don’t think it would have made sense for us to try to audit FTX. That’s not the role of the EA community.
Sure, I don’t think that’s a crazy position, I just disagree with it pretty strongly. Insofar as movement building and community health are valid EA cause areas (and at least we often treat them as such) this strikes me as highish on the list of most impactful things, not just in hindsight but also in expectation, people working on this cause area could have done.