Does anyone care that FTX failed? They care that it stole. A complete fraud like Theranos only destroyed a billion dollars of investor money. Whereas a bank like FTX has access not only to investor money, but also to much more money in the form of deposits from people who don’t think they’re making an investment in a risky start up.
Yes, the collapse of FTX would have had significant effects on EA even if its cause was benign. People made life decisions based on beliefs about likely future funding, and charities made important decisions as well. Some of those decisions appear in retrospect to have not adequately accounted for the all-cause risk of FTX’s collapse.
The title tells us the post is about what its author wishes they had said:
<<We should not beat ourselves up for not knowing about the fraud or extent of the lies, but we absolutely should beat ourselves up for (from what I’ve seen from writing prior to 11⁄22), not making some version of these claims.>>
It’s not that benign-cause collapse is as harmful as fraud, but that at least a meaningful risk of any-cause collapse (or at least dramatic underperformance) should have been clear for any-cause failure.
The post mixes together several topics. If you want to write a better post, “What I wish Applied Divinity Studies had written,” you should do so. But my comment is a response to the actual post, which may well be an intentional conflation.
Does anyone care that FTX failed? They care that it stole. A complete fraud like Theranos only destroyed a billion dollars of investor money. Whereas a bank like FTX has access not only to investor money, but also to much more money in the form of deposits from people who don’t think they’re making an investment in a risky start up.
Yes, the collapse of FTX would have had significant effects on EA even if its cause was benign. People made life decisions based on beliefs about likely future funding, and charities made important decisions as well. Some of those decisions appear in retrospect to have not adequately accounted for the all-cause risk of FTX’s collapse.
The title tells us the post is about what its author wishes they had said:
<<We should not beat ourselves up for not knowing about the fraud or extent of the lies, but we absolutely should beat ourselves up for (from what I’ve seen from writing prior to 11⁄22), not making some version of these claims.>>
It’s not that benign-cause collapse is as harmful as fraud, but that at least a meaningful risk of any-cause collapse (or at least dramatic underperformance) should have been clear for any-cause failure.
The post mixes together several topics. If you want to write a better post, “What I wish Applied Divinity Studies had written,” you should do so. But my comment is a response to the actual post, which may well be an intentional conflation.