I am one of the people who thinks that we have reacted too much to the FTX situation. I think as a community we sometimes suffer from a surfeit of agency and we should consider the degree to which we are also victims of SBF’s fraud. We got used. It’s like someone asking to borrow your car and then using it as the getaway car for a heist. Sure, you causally contributed, but your main sin was poor character judgement. And many, many people, even very sophisticated people, get taken in by charismatic financial con men.
I also think there’s too much uncritical acceptance of what SBF said about his thoughts and motivations. That makes it look like FTX wouldn’t have existed and the fraud wouldn’t have happened without EA ideas… but that’s what Sam wants you to think.
I think if SBF had never encountered EA, he would still have been working in finance and spotted the opportunity to cash in with a crypto exchange. And he would still have been put in situations where he could commit fraud to keep his enterprise alive. And he would still have done it. Perhaps RB provided cover for what he was thinking (subconsciously even), but plenty of financial fraud happens with much flimsier cover.
That is, I think P(FTX exists) is not much lower than P(FTX exists | SBF in EA), and similarly for P(FTX is successful) and P(SBF commits major fraud) (actually I’d find it plausible to think that the EA involvement might even have lowered the chances of fraud).
Overall this makes me mostly feel that we should be embarrassed about the situation and not really blameworthy. I think the following people could do with some reflection:
People who met, liked, and promoted SBF. “How could I have spotted that he was a con man?”
People who bought SBF’s RB reasoning at face value. “How could I have noticed that this was a cover for bad behaviour?”
I include myself in this a bit. I remember reading the Tyler Cowen interview where he says he’d play double or nothing with the world on a coin flip and thinking “haha, how cute, he enjoys biting some bullets in decision theory, I’m sure this mostly just applies to his investing strategy”.
That’s about it. I think the people who took money from the FTXFF are pretty blameless and it’s weird to expect them to have done massive due diligence that others didn’t manage.
There are various reasons to believe that SBF’s presence in EA increased the chance that FTX would happen and thrive:
Only ~10k/10B people are in EA, while they represent ~1/10 of history’s worst frauds, giving a risk ratio of about 10^5:1, or 10^7:1, if you focus on an early cohort of EAs. This should give an immediate suspicion that P(FTX thrives | SBF in EA)/P(FTX thrives | SBF not in EA) is very large indeed.
Sam decided to do ETG due to conversations with EA leaders.
EA gave Alameda a large majority of its funding and talent.
EA gave FTX at least 1-2 of the other leaders of the company.
ETG was a big part of Sam’s public image and source of his reputation.
Only ~10k/10B people are in EA, while they represent ~1/10 of history’s worst frauds, giving a risk ratio of about 10^5:1, or 10^7:1, if you focus on an early cohort of EAs.
This seems wildly off to me—I think the strength of the conclusion here should make you doubt the reasoning!
I think that the scale of the fraud seems like a random variable uncorrelated with our behaviour as a community. It seems to me like the relevant outcome is “producing someone able and willing to run a company-level fraud”; given that, whether or not it’s a big one or a small one seems like it just adds (an enormous amount of) noise.
How many people-able-and-willing-to-run-a-company-level-fraud does the world produce? I’m not sure, but I would say it has to be at least a dozen per year in finance alone, and more in crypto. So far EA has got 1. Is that above the base rate? Hard to say, especially if you control for the community’s demographics (socioeconomic class, education, etc.).
This is a very interesting take, and very well expressed. You could well be right that the narrative that ‘we got used’ is the most correct simple summary for EAs/EA. And I definitely agree that it is an under-rated narrative. There could even be psychological reasons for that (EAs being more prone to guilt than to embarassment?).
I note that even if P(FTX exists | EA exists) were quite a bit higher than P(FTX exists | ~EA exists), that could be compatible with your suggested narrative of EAs being primarily marks/victims. To reuse your example, if you were the only person the perpetrator of the heist could con into lending their car to act as a getaway vehicle, then that would make P(Heist happens | Your actions) quite a bit higher than P(Heist happens | You acting differently), but you would still be primarily a mark or (minor) victim of the crime, rather than primarily one of the responsible parties for it.
I agree the primary role of EAs here was as victims, and that presumably only a couple of EAs intentionally conspired with Sam. But I wouldn’t write it off as just social naivete; I think there was also some negligence in how we boosted him, e.g.:
Some EAs knew about his relationship with Caroline, which would undermine the public story about FTX<->Alameda relations, but didn’t disclose this.
Some EAs knew that Sam and FTX weren’t behaving frugally, which would undermine his public image, but also didn’t disclose.
Despite warnings from early-Alameda people, FTX received financial and other support from EAs.
EAs granted money from FTX’s foundation before it had been firewalled in a foundation bank account.
EA leaders invited him to important meetings, IIRC, even once he was under govt investigation.
It might be that naive consequentialist thinking, a strand of EA’s cultural DNA, played a role here, too. In general I think it would be fruitful to think about ways that our ambitions, attitudes, or practices might have made us negligent, not just ways that we might have been too trusting.
Some EAs knew about his relationship with Caroline, which would undermine the public story about FTX<->Alameda relations, but didn’t disclose this.
Some EAs knew that Sam and FTX weren’t behaving frugally, which would undermine his public image, but also didn’t disclose.
FWIW, these examples feel hindsight-bias-y to me. They have the flavour of “we now know this information was significant, so of course at the time people should have known this and done something about it”. If I put myself in the shoes of the “some EAs” in these examples, it’s not clear to me that I would have acted differently and it’s not clear what norm would suggest different action.
Suppose you are a random EA. Maybe you run an EA org. You have met Sam a few times, he seems fine. You hear that he is dating Caroline. You go “oh, that’s disappointing, probably bad for the organization, but I guess we’ll have to see what happens” and get on with your life.
It seems to me that you’re suggesting this was negligent, but I’m not sure what norm we would like to enforce here. Always publish (on the forum?) negative information about people you are at all associated with, even if it seems like it might not matter?
The case doesn’t seem much stronger to me even if you’re, say, on the FTX Foundation board. You hear something that sounds potentially bad, maybe you investigate a little, but it seems that you want a norm that there should be some kind of big public disclosure, and I’m not sure that really is something we could endorse in general.
I think the best thing here would have been for much of the information to be shared casually, without needing to justify itself as important. People gossip about relationships and their terrible bosses all the time I suspect that if that had happened, people would have gathered more clues earlier, enough to make a difference on the margin.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that if “naive consequentialism” just means sometimes thinking the ends justify the means in a particular case, and being wrong about it, then that extends into the history of scandals far far beyond groups that have ever been motivated by explicitly utilitarian technical moral theory.
Oh, I definitely agree that the guilt narrative has some truth to it too, and that the final position must be some mix of the two, with somewhere between a 10⁄90 and 90⁄10 split. But I’d definitely been neglecting the ‘we got used’ narrative, and had assumed others were too (though aprilsun’s comment suggests I might be incorrect about that).
I’d add that for different questions related to the future of EA, the different narratives change their mix. For example, the ‘we got used’ narrative is at its most relevant if asking about ‘all EAs except Sam’. But if asking about whether it is good to grow EA, it is relevant that we may get more Sams. And if asking ‘how much good or bad do people who associate with EA do?’ the ‘guilt’ narrative increases in importance.
I do think it’s an interesting question whether EA is prone to generate Sams at higher than the base rate. I think it’s pretty hard to tell from a single case, though.
As you’ve linked me to this comment elsewhere, I’ll respond.
I’m not sure why EAs who knew about Caroline and Sam dating would have felt the need to ‘disclose’ this? (Unless they already suspected the fraud but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim that anyone did?)
Sam and FTX seem about as frugal as I’d expect for an insanely profitable business and an intention to give away the vast majority of tens of billions of dollars, too frugal if anything (although I actually think my disagreeing with you here is a point in favour of your broader argument—the more Sam splurged on luxuries, the less it looks like he was motivated by any kind of altruism)
What financial and other support did FTX receive after the early Alameda split by people who were ‘warned’? (There may well be a substantial amount, I just don’t think I’ve heard of any.) I’ll note, though, that it’s easy to see as ‘warnings’ now what at the time could have just looked like a messy divorce.
Admittedly I don’t know much about how these things work, but yet again this looks like hindsight bias to me. Would this have been a priority for you if you had no idea what was coming? If the firewalling was delayed for whatever reason, would you have refused to award grants until it had been? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s obvious. Also wouldn’t they still be vulnerable to clawbacks in any case?
Again, I just don’t think I know anything about this. In fact I don’t think I knew Sam was under government investigation before November. I’d be curious if you had details to share, especially regarding how serious the allegations were at the time and which meetings he was invited to.
1 - it’s because Sam was publicly claiming that the trading platform and the traders were completely firewalled from one another, and had no special info, as would normally (e.g. in the US) be legally required to make trading fair, but which is impossible if the CEOs are dating
2 - I’m not objecting the spending. It was clear at the time that he was promoting an image of frugality that wasn’t accurate. One example here, but there are many more.
3 - A lot of different Alameda people warned some people at the time of the split. For a variety of reasons, I believe that those who were more involved would have been warned commensurately more than I was (someone who was barely involved).
4 - Perhaps, but it is negligent not to follow this rule, when you’re donating money from an offshore crypto exchange.
5 - I’m just going off recollection, but I believe he was under serious-sounding US govt investigation.
1 - Oh I see. So who knew that Sam and Caroline continued to date while claiming that FTX and Alameda were completely separate?
2 - You link to a video of a non-EA saying that Sam drives a corolla and also has a shot of his very expensive-looking apartment...what about this is misleading or inaccurate? What did you expect the EAs you have in mind to ‘disclose’ - that FTX itself wasn’t frugal? Was anyone claiming it was? Would anyone expect it to have been? Could you share some of your many actual examples?
3 - (I don’t think you’ve addressed anything I said in this section, so perhaps we should just leave it there.)
4 - Perhaps, but as I indicated, it looks like it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.
5 - (Okay, it looks like we should just leave this one there too.)
Can you confirm which important meetings Sam was invited to while under government investigation then? (The OP seems to be unable to remember when I pressed him on it.)
And I imagine you might have some insight on whether FTX (or Alameda tbf) received financial support from EAs after the acrimonious split? E.g., did you yourself continue to fund FTX/Alameda? (The Semafor article says that you were one of the two initial funders of Alameda but that you only called in the “majority” of your loans.)
To reuse your example, if you were the only person the perpetrator of the heist could con into lending their car to act as a getaway vehicle, then that would make P(Heist happens | Your actions) quite a bit higher than P(Heist happens | You acting differently), but you would still be primarily a mark or (minor) victim of the crime
Yes, this is a good point. I notice that I don’t in fact feel very moved by arguments that P(FTX exists | EA exists) is higher, I think for this reason. So perhaps I shouldn’t have brought that argument up, since I don’t think it’s the crux (although I do think it’s true, it’s just over-determining the conclusion).
Anecdotally, among the EAs I’ve spoken to IRL about all this and among the non-EAs I’ve spoken to about it, ‘EA got used’ is by far the more common narrative. I think the mood on this forum is quite different and I thought of the OP as the EA most committed to this ‘it’s all EA’s fault’ narrative even before he made this post. So I worry that his post paints a very skewed picture (also obviously because of the research others have mentioned in the comments).
See here. Among people who know EA as well as I do, many—perhaps 25% - are about as pessimistic as me, and some of the remainder have conflicts of interest, or have left.
Interesting. I think I know EA as well as you do and know many EAs who know EA as well as you do and as I said, you’re the person most committed to this narrative that I could think of even before you made this post (no doubt there are others more pessimistic I haven’t come across, but I’d be very surprised if it was 25%+). I also can’t think of any who have left, but perhaps our respective circles are relevantly skewed in some way (and I’m very curious about who has!).
Point taken, though, that many of us have ‘conflicts of interest,’ if by that you mean ‘it would be better for us if EA were completely innocent and thriving’ (although as others have pointed out, we are an unusually guilt-prone community).
I mostly agree that people seem to have overreacted and castigated themselves about SBF-FTX, but also feel the right amount of reaction should be non-trivial. We aren’t just talking about SBF, as the whole affair included other insiders who were arguably as ‘true believers’ in EA as it is reasonable to expect (like Caroline Ellison) and SBF-FTX becoming poster-children of the movement at a very high level. But I think you are mostly right: one can’t expect omniscience and a level of character-detection amongst EAs when among the fooled were much more cynical, savvy and skeptic professionals in finance.
For what it’s worth, I feel some EA values might have fueled some of Sam’s bad praxis, but weren’t the first mover. From what I’ve read, he absorbed (naive?) utilitarianism and a high-risks stake from the home. As for the counterfactual of him having ending up where he has without any involvement with EA… I just don’t know. the story that is usually told is that his intent was working in charity NGOs before Will McAskill steered him towards an ‘earning to give’ path. Perhaps he would have gone into finance anyway after some time. It’s very difficult to gauge intentions and mental states- I have never been a fan of Sam’s (I discovered his existence, along with that of EA after and because of the FTX affair), but I can still assume that, if it comes to ‘intent’, his thoughts were probably more in a naive utilitarian, ‘rules are for the sheep, I am smart enough to take dangerous bets and do some amoral stuff towards creating the greater good’ frame than ‘let me get rich by a massive scam and fleece the suckers’. Power and vanity would probably reinforce these as well.
We aren’t just talking about SBF, as the whole affair included other insiders who were arguably as ‘true believers’ in EA as it is reasonable to expect (like Caroline Ellison)
Are there actually any other examples beyond SBF and his on-and-off romantic partner? I’d be a lot more concerned if there were several EAs independently plotting fraud who then joined forces, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Nishad Singh pleaded guilty to several counts of conspiracy charges early this year.
Nishad Singh, the former director of engineering at FTX, pleaded guilty to six conspiracy charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate federal campaign finances laws.
Singh is the third top executive and close confidante of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors. Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, the former head of FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research, both pleaded guilty last year and are cooperating against Bankman-Fried.
Edit: Nishad knew by mid-2022 that Alameda was using FTX customer funds:
“I am unbelievably sorry for my role in all of this,” Singh said, adding that he knew by mid-2022 that Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, was borrowing FTX customer funds, and customers were not aware. Singh said that he would forfeit proceeds from the scheme. (Reuters)
I think that it has been said that among the leadership, Nishad Singh was pretty close to EA too. Further down the line, it is commonly said that Alameda especially attracted a lot of EA people as it was part of its appeal from the beginning. Needless to say, though, these people would have been completely in the dark about what was happening until they were told, in the very end.
I am one of the people who thinks that we have reacted too much to the FTX situation. I think as a community we sometimes suffer from a surfeit of agency and we should consider the degree to which we are also victims of SBF’s fraud. We got used. It’s like someone asking to borrow your car and then using it as the getaway car for a heist. Sure, you causally contributed, but your main sin was poor character judgement. And many, many people, even very sophisticated people, get taken in by charismatic financial con men.
I also think there’s too much uncritical acceptance of what SBF said about his thoughts and motivations. That makes it look like FTX wouldn’t have existed and the fraud wouldn’t have happened without EA ideas… but that’s what Sam wants you to think.
I think if SBF had never encountered EA, he would still have been working in finance and spotted the opportunity to cash in with a crypto exchange. And he would still have been put in situations where he could commit fraud to keep his enterprise alive. And he would still have done it. Perhaps RB provided cover for what he was thinking (subconsciously even), but plenty of financial fraud happens with much flimsier cover.
That is, I think P(FTX exists) is not much lower than P(FTX exists | SBF in EA), and similarly for P(FTX is successful) and P(SBF commits major fraud) (actually I’d find it plausible to think that the EA involvement might even have lowered the chances of fraud).
Overall this makes me mostly feel that we should be embarrassed about the situation and not really blameworthy. I think the following people could do with some reflection:
People who met, liked, and promoted SBF. “How could I have spotted that he was a con man?”
People who bought SBF’s RB reasoning at face value. “How could I have noticed that this was a cover for bad behaviour?”
I include myself in this a bit. I remember reading the Tyler Cowen interview where he says he’d play double or nothing with the world on a coin flip and thinking “haha, how cute, he enjoys biting some bullets in decision theory, I’m sure this mostly just applies to his investing strategy”.
That’s about it. I think the people who took money from the FTXFF are pretty blameless and it’s weird to expect them to have done massive due diligence that others didn’t manage.
There are various reasons to believe that SBF’s presence in EA increased the chance that FTX would happen and thrive:
Only ~10k/10B people are in EA, while they represent ~1/10 of history’s worst frauds, giving a risk ratio of about 10^5:1, or 10^7:1, if you focus on an early cohort of EAs. This should give an immediate suspicion that P(FTX thrives | SBF in EA)/P(FTX thrives | SBF not in EA) is very large indeed.
Sam decided to do ETG due to conversations with EA leaders.
EA gave Alameda a large majority of its funding and talent.
EA gave FTX at least 1-2 of the other leaders of the company.
ETG was a big part of Sam’s public image and source of his reputation.
This seems wildly off to me—I think the strength of the conclusion here should make you doubt the reasoning!
I think that the scale of the fraud seems like a random variable uncorrelated with our behaviour as a community. It seems to me like the relevant outcome is “producing someone able and willing to run a company-level fraud”; given that, whether or not it’s a big one or a small one seems like it just adds (an enormous amount of) noise.
How many people-able-and-willing-to-run-a-company-level-fraud does the world produce? I’m not sure, but I would say it has to be at least a dozen per year in finance alone, and more in crypto. So far EA has got 1. Is that above the base rate? Hard to say, especially if you control for the community’s demographics (socioeconomic class, education, etc.).
I estimated that 1-2% of YCombinator-backed companies commit substantial fraud. It seems hard to make the case that the rate in EA is 10^7x this.
This is a very interesting take, and very well expressed. You could well be right that the narrative that ‘we got used’ is the most correct simple summary for EAs/EA. And I definitely agree that it is an under-rated narrative. There could even be psychological reasons for that (EAs being more prone to guilt than to embarassment?).
I note that even if P(FTX exists | EA exists) were quite a bit higher than P(FTX exists | ~EA exists), that could be compatible with your suggested narrative of EAs being primarily marks/victims. To reuse your example, if you were the only person the perpetrator of the heist could con into lending their car to act as a getaway vehicle, then that would make P(Heist happens | Your actions) quite a bit higher than P(Heist happens | You acting differently), but you would still be primarily a mark or (minor) victim of the crime, rather than primarily one of the responsible parties for it.
I agree the primary role of EAs here was as victims, and that presumably only a couple of EAs intentionally conspired with Sam. But I wouldn’t write it off as just social naivete; I think there was also some negligence in how we boosted him, e.g.:
Some EAs knew about his relationship with Caroline, which would undermine the public story about FTX<->Alameda relations, but didn’t disclose this.
Some EAs knew that Sam and FTX weren’t behaving frugally, which would undermine his public image, but also didn’t disclose.
Despite warnings from early-Alameda people, FTX received financial and other support from EAs.
EAs granted money from FTX’s foundation before it had been firewalled in a foundation bank account.
EA leaders invited him to important meetings, IIRC, even once he was under govt investigation.
It might be that naive consequentialist thinking, a strand of EA’s cultural DNA, played a role here, too. In general I think it would be fruitful to think about ways that our ambitions, attitudes, or practices might have made us negligent, not just ways that we might have been too trusting.
FWIW, these examples feel hindsight-bias-y to me. They have the flavour of “we now know this information was significant, so of course at the time people should have known this and done something about it”. If I put myself in the shoes of the “some EAs” in these examples, it’s not clear to me that I would have acted differently and it’s not clear what norm would suggest different action.
Suppose you are a random EA. Maybe you run an EA org. You have met Sam a few times, he seems fine. You hear that he is dating Caroline. You go “oh, that’s disappointing, probably bad for the organization, but I guess we’ll have to see what happens” and get on with your life.
It seems to me that you’re suggesting this was negligent, but I’m not sure what norm we would like to enforce here. Always publish (on the forum?) negative information about people you are at all associated with, even if it seems like it might not matter?
The case doesn’t seem much stronger to me even if you’re, say, on the FTX Foundation board. You hear something that sounds potentially bad, maybe you investigate a little, but it seems that you want a norm that there should be some kind of big public disclosure, and I’m not sure that really is something we could endorse in general.
I think the best thing here would have been for much of the information to be shared casually, without needing to justify itself as important. People gossip about relationships and their terrible bosses all the time I suspect that if that had happened, people would have gathered more clues earlier, enough to make a difference on the margin.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that if “naive consequentialism” just means sometimes thinking the ends justify the means in a particular case, and being wrong about it, then that extends into the history of scandals far far beyond groups that have ever been motivated by explicitly utilitarian technical moral theory.
Oh, I definitely agree that the guilt narrative has some truth to it too, and that the final position must be some mix of the two, with somewhere between a 10⁄90 and 90⁄10 split. But I’d definitely been neglecting the ‘we got used’ narrative, and had assumed others were too (though aprilsun’s comment suggests I might be incorrect about that).
I’d add that for different questions related to the future of EA, the different narratives change their mix. For example, the ‘we got used’ narrative is at its most relevant if asking about ‘all EAs except Sam’. But if asking about whether it is good to grow EA, it is relevant that we may get more Sams. And if asking ‘how much good or bad do people who associate with EA do?’ the ‘guilt’ narrative increases in importance.
I do think it’s an interesting question whether EA is prone to generate Sams at higher than the base rate. I think it’s pretty hard to tell from a single case, though.
As you’ve linked me to this comment elsewhere, I’ll respond.
I’m not sure why EAs who knew about Caroline and Sam dating would have felt the need to ‘disclose’ this? (Unless they already suspected the fraud but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim that anyone did?)
Sam and FTX seem about as frugal as I’d expect for an insanely profitable business and an intention to give away the vast majority of tens of billions of dollars, too frugal if anything (although I actually think my disagreeing with you here is a point in favour of your broader argument—the more Sam splurged on luxuries, the less it looks like he was motivated by any kind of altruism)
What financial and other support did FTX receive after the early Alameda split by people who were ‘warned’? (There may well be a substantial amount, I just don’t think I’ve heard of any.) I’ll note, though, that it’s easy to see as ‘warnings’ now what at the time could have just looked like a messy divorce.
Admittedly I don’t know much about how these things work, but yet again this looks like hindsight bias to me. Would this have been a priority for you if you had no idea what was coming? If the firewalling was delayed for whatever reason, would you have refused to award grants until it had been? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s obvious. Also wouldn’t they still be vulnerable to clawbacks in any case?
Again, I just don’t think I know anything about this. In fact I don’t think I knew Sam was under government investigation before November. I’d be curious if you had details to share, especially regarding how serious the allegations were at the time and which meetings he was invited to.
1 - it’s because Sam was publicly claiming that the trading platform and the traders were completely firewalled from one another, and had no special info, as would normally (e.g. in the US) be legally required to make trading fair, but which is impossible if the CEOs are dating
2 - I’m not objecting the spending. It was clear at the time that he was promoting an image of frugality that wasn’t accurate. One example here, but there are many more.
3 - A lot of different Alameda people warned some people at the time of the split. For a variety of reasons, I believe that those who were more involved would have been warned commensurately more than I was (someone who was barely involved).
4 - Perhaps, but it is negligent not to follow this rule, when you’re donating money from an offshore crypto exchange.
5 - I’m just going off recollection, but I believe he was under serious-sounding US govt investigation.
1 - Oh I see. So who knew that Sam and Caroline continued to date while claiming that FTX and Alameda were completely separate?
2 - You link to a video of a non-EA saying that Sam drives a corolla and also has a shot of his very expensive-looking apartment...what about this is misleading or inaccurate? What did you expect the EAs you have in mind to ‘disclose’ - that FTX itself wasn’t frugal? Was anyone claiming it was? Would anyone expect it to have been? Could you share some of your many actual examples?
3 - (I don’t think you’ve addressed anything I said in this section, so perhaps we should just leave it there.)
4 - Perhaps, but as I indicated, it looks like it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.
5 - (Okay, it looks like we should just leave this one there too.)
I think this is a very good summary.
Oh, interesting, thanks!
Can you confirm which important meetings Sam was invited to while under government investigation then? (The OP seems to be unable to remember when I pressed him on it.)
And I imagine you might have some insight on whether FTX (or Alameda tbf) received financial support from EAs after the acrimonious split? E.g., did you yourself continue to fund FTX/Alameda? (The Semafor article says that you were one of the two initial funders of Alameda but that you only called in the “majority” of your loans.)
Yes, this is a good point. I notice that I don’t in fact feel very moved by arguments that P(FTX exists | EA exists) is higher, I think for this reason. So perhaps I shouldn’t have brought that argument up, since I don’t think it’s the crux (although I do think it’s true, it’s just over-determining the conclusion).
Anecdotally, among the EAs I’ve spoken to IRL about all this and among the non-EAs I’ve spoken to about it, ‘EA got used’ is by far the more common narrative. I think the mood on this forum is quite different and I thought of the OP as the EA most committed to this ‘it’s all EA’s fault’ narrative even before he made this post. So I worry that his post paints a very skewed picture (also obviously because of the research others have mentioned in the comments).
See here. Among people who know EA as well as I do, many—perhaps 25% - are about as pessimistic as me, and some of the remainder have conflicts of interest, or have left.
Interesting. I think I know EA as well as you do and know many EAs who know EA as well as you do and as I said, you’re the person most committed to this narrative that I could think of even before you made this post (no doubt there are others more pessimistic I haven’t come across, but I’d be very surprised if it was 25%+). I also can’t think of any who have left, but perhaps our respective circles are relevantly skewed in some way (and I’m very curious about who has!).
Point taken, though, that many of us have ‘conflicts of interest,’ if by that you mean ‘it would be better for us if EA were completely innocent and thriving’ (although as others have pointed out, we are an unusually guilt-prone community).
I mostly agree that people seem to have overreacted and castigated themselves about SBF-FTX, but also feel the right amount of reaction should be non-trivial. We aren’t just talking about SBF, as the whole affair included other insiders who were arguably as ‘true believers’ in EA as it is reasonable to expect (like Caroline Ellison) and SBF-FTX becoming poster-children of the movement at a very high level. But I think you are mostly right: one can’t expect omniscience and a level of character-detection amongst EAs when among the fooled were much more cynical, savvy and skeptic professionals in finance.
For what it’s worth, I feel some EA values might have fueled some of Sam’s bad praxis, but weren’t the first mover. From what I’ve read, he absorbed (naive?) utilitarianism and a high-risks stake from the home. As for the counterfactual of him having ending up where he has without any involvement with EA… I just don’t know. the story that is usually told is that his intent was working in charity NGOs before Will McAskill steered him towards an ‘earning to give’ path. Perhaps he would have gone into finance anyway after some time. It’s very difficult to gauge intentions and mental states- I have never been a fan of Sam’s (I discovered his existence, along with that of EA after and because of the FTX affair), but I can still assume that, if it comes to ‘intent’, his thoughts were probably more in a naive utilitarian, ‘rules are for the sheep, I am smart enough to take dangerous bets and do some amoral stuff towards creating the greater good’ frame than ‘let me get rich by a massive scam and fleece the suckers’. Power and vanity would probably reinforce these as well.
Are there actually any other examples beyond SBF and his on-and-off romantic partner? I’d be a lot more concerned if there were several EAs independently plotting fraud who then joined forces, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Nishad Singh pleaded guilty to several counts of conspiracy charges early this year.
Source
Nishad is reported to have been very into EA.
Edit: Nishad knew by mid-2022 that Alameda was using FTX customer funds:
I think that it has been said that among the leadership, Nishad Singh was pretty close to EA too. Further down the line, it is commonly said that Alameda especially attracted a lot of EA people as it was part of its appeal from the beginning. Needless to say, though, these people would have been completely in the dark about what was happening until they were told, in the very end.