Ya, they aren’t really talking about the numbers, even though a utilitarian should probably accept instrumental harm to innocents for a large enough benefit, at least in theory. Maybe they distrust this logic so much in practice, possibly based on historical precedent like communism, that they endorse a general rule against it. But it would still be good to see some numbers.
I read that the Future Fund has granted something like $200 million already, and FTX/​Alameda leadership invested probably something like half a billion dollars in Anthropic. And they were probably expecting to donate more. Pesumably they didn’t expect to get caught or have a bank run, at least not this soon. Maybe they even expected that they could eventually make sure they had enough cash to cover all customer investments, so no customer would actually ever be harmed even in the case of a bank run (although they’d still be exposed to risks they were lied to about until then). Plausibly they underestimated the risk of getting caught, but maybe by their own lights, it’ll already have been worth it even with getting caught, as long as the EA community doesn’t pay it all back.
If our integrity, public trust/​perception, lost potential EAs and ability to cooperate with others are worth this much, should we* just pay everything we got from FTX and associates back to FTX customers? And maybe more for deterence and the cases that don’t get caught?
*possibly our major funders, not individual grantees.
Ya, they aren’t really talking about the numbers, even though a utilitarian should probably accept instrumental harm to innocents for a large enough benefit, at least in theory. Maybe they distrust this logic so much in practice, possibly based on historical precedent like communism, that they endorse a general rule against it. But it would still be good to see some numbers.
I read that the Future Fund has granted something like $200 million already, and FTX/​Alameda leadership invested probably something like half a billion dollars in Anthropic. And they were probably expecting to donate more. Pesumably they didn’t expect to get caught or have a bank run, at least not this soon. Maybe they even expected that they could eventually make sure they had enough cash to cover all customer investments, so no customer would actually ever be harmed even in the case of a bank run (although they’d still be exposed to risks they were lied to about until then). Plausibly they underestimated the risk of getting caught, but maybe by their own lights, it’ll already have been worth it even with getting caught, as long as the EA community doesn’t pay it all back.
If our integrity, public trust/​perception, lost potential EAs and ability to cooperate with others are worth this much, should we* just pay everything we got from FTX and associates back to FTX customers? And maybe more for deterence and the cases that don’t get caught?
*possibly our major funders, not individual grantees.