These aren’t updates but rather things I should have been able to figure out ex ante:
Mark down private valuations of startups by a factor of ~2 (especially if the founders hold most of the equity)
Measure growth from peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough rather than trough-to-peak – I knew crypto was in a huge bull market
I maybe should have expected more correlation between Alameda and FTX, and a higher chance of going to zero, based on the outside view
If your assets are highly volatile and the community is risk-averse, that’s a good reason to discount the value of those assets and/or delay spending until you have more confidence in how much money you have.
Taken together, I think we should have planned on the basis of the portfolio being 2-3x smaller than my estimates, and expected less future growth. I think some of these effects were taken into account in planning (it was obvious that crypto could fall a lot), perhaps correctly in some cases, but not enough in others.
Moreover, even with these adjustments, I think spending would have still been significantly below target, so there would have still been efforts to grow spending significantly, but maybe slower in some areas, especially the FF.
Another mistake
I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did – just based on good PR sense and messaging strategy – and not to investigate it more. (80,000 Hours has written about a similar issue on their mistakes page.)
Epistemic virtues
I was unsure whether to say anything extra about epistemic virtues, like honesty, integrity and truthseeking. I agree that having more of these virtues would have given us led us to put a higher probability on what was happening (e.g. via more people sharing concerns even if might make the community look bad), though it doesn’t feel like a big update about the value of these traits, since we already knew they’re valuable. Someone would have also needed to end up with a pretty high probability to do much about it. I agree (as covered above) that these events are an update against the idea EA has unusually good epistemics, and that stronger epistemics virtues seem more important in order to constrain dangerous actors. Finally, I think epistemic virtues have already had a lot of emphasis relatively speaking, so it seems hard to get large gains here.
Degree of criticism in the culture
I feel worried that the updates listed are going to lead towards a more critical, non-trusting culture in which people’s character and minor actions are publicly scrutinised, and there’s more gossip and less friendship. Personally I already find EA culture often pretty negative and draining, so feel worried about moving more in that direction. One option is to accept it’s what’s needed to prevent dangerous actors, and that EA is going to be a less fun place to be, and therefore have less potential. However, I suspect and hope it’s also possible to find ways to make improvements in the directions I gesture at that don’t make the culture more negative.
Membership growth
I expect EA membership growth to take a hit. 2022 showed strong growth (20-60%), and I already expected 2023 to be lower (unless we maintain accelerating effort into growth). But FTX will reduce that because (i) a lot of the 2022 growth seems to be driven by personal connections, and that could be pretty sensitive to positive buzz (ii) lower funding & investment (iii) decent chance that a wave of people leaves (and this could start a negative feedback loop). I don’t think increased (negative) media coverage will lead to much growth, since even positive coverage hasn’t caused much growth in the past. I wouldn’t be shocked if the community were overall smaller in a couple of years. On the positive side, many measures of community growth seem unaffected so far, so it seems likely the longer term trend of 10-30% growth continues after the next 1-2 years.
I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did
But 80k didn’t just “affiliate” with SBF—they promoted him with untrue information. And I don’t see this addressed in the above or anywhere else. Particularly, his podcast interview made a thing of him driving a Corolla and sleeping on a beanbag as part of promoting the frugal Messiah image, when it seems likely that at least some people high up in EA knew that this characterisation was false. Plus no mentioning of the stories of how he treated his Alameda co-founders. And perhaps 80k and yourself were completely ignorant of this when the podcast was made, but did nobody tell you that this needed to be corrected? Either way, it doesn’t seem good for EA functioning.
My sense is that this idea that some people high up in EA lied or failed to correct the record has cast a shadow over everyone in such positions, since nobody has given a credible account of who knew and lied/withheld that information that I know of. It contributes to a reduction in trust. It’s not like it’s unforgiveable—I think it is understandable that good people might have felt like going along with some seemingly small lies for what they saw as a greater good, and I think everyone in such positions generally has very impressive and admirable achievements. But it’s hard to keep credibility with general suspicion in the air. If you really had no knowledge then I feel sorry that this seems likely to also affect you.
Hi Pagw — in case you haven’t seen it here’s my November 2022 reply to Oli H re Sam Bankman-Fried’s lifestyle:
“I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.
I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.
It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam’s reference to ‘nice apartments’ in the interview:
“I don’t know, I kind of like nice apartments. … I’m not really that much of a consumer exactly. It’s never been what’s important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets.”
Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.
In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the ‘crypto’ social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.
Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.”
Thanks Robert. No I hadn’t seen that, thanks for sharing it (the total amount of stuff on FTX exceeded my bandwidth and there is much I missed!).
Given that, the thought behind my earlier comment that remains is that it would seem more appropriately complete to acknowledge in Ben’s reflections that 80k made a mistake in information it put out, not just in “affiliating” with SBF. And also that if a body as prominent as 80k had not heard concerns about SBF that were circulating, it seems to suggest there are important things to improve about communication of information within EA and I’d have thought they’d warrant a mention in there. Though I appreciate that individuals may not want to be super tuned in to everything.
I agree with Peter’s comments here. Some of 80k’s own staff were part of the early Alameda cohort who left and thought SBF was a bad actor. In an honest accounting of mistakes made, it seems strange not to acknowledge that 80k (and others) missed an important red flag in 2018, and didn’t put any emphasis on it when talking to/promoting SBF
I’ve also assumed that 80k leadership was aware of red flags around SBF since 2018, due to A) 80k staff being part of the early Alameda staff that left, B) assuming 80k leadership was part of the EA Leader Slack channel where concerns were raised, C) Will (co-founder and board member) and Nick (board member) being aware of concerns (per Time’s reporting). It would be great if someone from 80k could confirm which of these channels (if any) 80k leadership heard concerns through. Assuming they were indeed aware of concerns, I agree with John and Pagw that it seems odd not to mention hearing those red flags in the OP.
To be explicit, even if 80k leadership was aware of red flags around SBF since 2018, I don’t think they should have anticipated the scale of his fraud. And they might have made correct decisions along the way given what they knew at the time. But those red flags (if 80k was indeed aware of them) seem like they should play a part in any retrospective accounting of lessons learned from the whole affair.
80k’s metrics seems unaffected so far, and it’s one of the biggest drivers of community growth.
I’ve also heard that EAG(x) applications didn’t seem affected.
GWWC pledgers were down, though a lot of that is due to them not doing a pledge drive in Dec. My guess is that if they do a pledge drive next Dec similar to previous ones, the results will be similar. The baseline of monthly pledges seems ~similar.
I would be surprised if the effect from the lack of a pledge drive would run on into February and March 2023 though. Comparison YoY here is 12 months before, Jan 2023 to 2022 etc.
I wonder if it’s because gwwc has cut back outreach or is getting less promotion by other groups (whereas 80k continued it’s marketing as before, plus a lot of 80k’s reach is passive), or whether it points to outreach actually being harder now.
I included your comment about 80k’s metrics being largely unaffected, but if there’s some updated data on if/how 80k’s metrics have changed post-FTX that would be very interesting to see.
Traffic for the intro page on effectivealtruism.org is at the lowest level since the data starts in April 2017, and has been falling steadily since FTX.
The EA newsletter has been losing subscribers steadily since FTX (i.e. people are unsubscribing faster than new people have started subscribing)
If you’re tracking the annual change in wealth between two periods, you should try to make sure the start at the end point are either both market peaks or both market lows.
e.g. from 2017 to 2021, or 2019 to Nov 2022 would be valid periods for tracking crypto.
If you instead track from e.g. 2019 to 2021, then you’re probably going to overestimate.
Another option would be to average over periods significantly longer than a typical market cycle (e.g. 10yr).
I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did – just based on good PR sense and messaging strategy – and not to i.
Appendix: some other comments that didn’t make it into the main post
I made some mistakes in tracking EA money
These aren’t updates but rather things I should have been able to figure out ex ante:
Mark down private valuations of startups by a factor of ~2 (especially if the founders hold most of the equity)
Measure growth from peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough rather than trough-to-peak – I knew crypto was in a huge bull market
I maybe should have expected more correlation between Alameda and FTX, and a higher chance of going to zero, based on the outside view
If your assets are highly volatile and the community is risk-averse, that’s a good reason to discount the value of those assets and/or delay spending until you have more confidence in how much money you have.
Taken together, I think we should have planned on the basis of the portfolio being 2-3x smaller than my estimates, and expected less future growth. I think some of these effects were taken into account in planning (it was obvious that crypto could fall a lot), perhaps correctly in some cases, but not enough in others.
Moreover, even with these adjustments, I think spending would have still been significantly below target, so there would have still been efforts to grow spending significantly, but maybe slower in some areas, especially the FF.
Another mistake
I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did – just based on good PR sense and messaging strategy – and not to investigate it more. (80,000 Hours has written about a similar issue on their mistakes page.)
Epistemic virtues
I was unsure whether to say anything extra about epistemic virtues, like honesty, integrity and truthseeking. I agree that having more of these virtues would have given us led us to put a higher probability on what was happening (e.g. via more people sharing concerns even if might make the community look bad), though it doesn’t feel like a big update about the value of these traits, since we already knew they’re valuable. Someone would have also needed to end up with a pretty high probability to do much about it. I agree (as covered above) that these events are an update against the idea EA has unusually good epistemics, and that stronger epistemics virtues seem more important in order to constrain dangerous actors. Finally, I think epistemic virtues have already had a lot of emphasis relatively speaking, so it seems hard to get large gains here.
Degree of criticism in the culture
I feel worried that the updates listed are going to lead towards a more critical, non-trusting culture in which people’s character and minor actions are publicly scrutinised, and there’s more gossip and less friendship. Personally I already find EA culture often pretty negative and draining, so feel worried about moving more in that direction. One option is to accept it’s what’s needed to prevent dangerous actors, and that EA is going to be a less fun place to be, and therefore have less potential. However, I suspect and hope it’s also possible to find ways to make improvements in the directions I gesture at that don’t make the culture more negative.
Membership growth
I expect EA membership growth to take a hit. 2022 showed strong growth (20-60%), and I already expected 2023 to be lower (unless we maintain accelerating effort into growth). But FTX will reduce that because (i) a lot of the 2022 growth seems to be driven by personal connections, and that could be pretty sensitive to positive buzz (ii) lower funding & investment (iii) decent chance that a wave of people leaves (and this could start a negative feedback loop). I don’t think increased (negative) media coverage will lead to much growth, since even positive coverage hasn’t caused much growth in the past. I wouldn’t be shocked if the community were overall smaller in a couple of years. On the positive side, many measures of community growth seem unaffected so far, so it seems likely the longer term trend of 10-30% growth continues after the next 1-2 years.
But 80k didn’t just “affiliate” with SBF—they promoted him with untrue information. And I don’t see this addressed in the above or anywhere else. Particularly, his podcast interview made a thing of him driving a Corolla and sleeping on a beanbag as part of promoting the frugal Messiah image, when it seems likely that at least some people high up in EA knew that this characterisation was false. Plus no mentioning of the stories of how he treated his Alameda co-founders. And perhaps 80k and yourself were completely ignorant of this when the podcast was made, but did nobody tell you that this needed to be corrected? Either way, it doesn’t seem good for EA functioning.
My sense is that this idea that some people high up in EA lied or failed to correct the record has cast a shadow over everyone in such positions, since nobody has given a credible account of who knew and lied/withheld that information that I know of. It contributes to a reduction in trust. It’s not like it’s unforgiveable—I think it is understandable that good people might have felt like going along with some seemingly small lies for what they saw as a greater good, and I think everyone in such positions generally has very impressive and admirable achievements. But it’s hard to keep credibility with general suspicion in the air. If you really had no knowledge then I feel sorry that this seems likely to also affect you.
Hi Pagw — in case you haven’t seen it here’s my November 2022 reply to Oli H re Sam Bankman-Fried’s lifestyle:
Thanks Robert. No I hadn’t seen that, thanks for sharing it (the total amount of stuff on FTX exceeded my bandwidth and there is much I missed!).
Given that, the thought behind my earlier comment that remains is that it would seem more appropriately complete to acknowledge in Ben’s reflections that 80k made a mistake in information it put out, not just in “affiliating” with SBF. And also that if a body as prominent as 80k had not heard concerns about SBF that were circulating, it seems to suggest there are important things to improve about communication of information within EA and I’d have thought they’d warrant a mention in there. Though I appreciate that individuals may not want to be super tuned in to everything.
I agree with Peter’s comments here. Some of 80k’s own staff were part of the early Alameda cohort who left and thought SBF was a bad actor. In an honest accounting of mistakes made, it seems strange not to acknowledge that 80k (and others) missed an important red flag in 2018, and didn’t put any emphasis on it when talking to/promoting SBF
I’ve also assumed that 80k leadership was aware of red flags around SBF since 2018, due to A) 80k staff being part of the early Alameda staff that left, B) assuming 80k leadership was part of the EA Leader Slack channel where concerns were raised, C) Will (co-founder and board member) and Nick (board member) being aware of concerns (per Time’s reporting). It would be great if someone from 80k could confirm which of these channels (if any) 80k leadership heard concerns through. Assuming they were indeed aware of concerns, I agree with John and Pagw that it seems odd not to mention hearing those red flags in the OP.
To be explicit, even if 80k leadership was aware of red flags around SBF since 2018, I don’t think they should have anticipated the scale of his fraud. And they might have made correct decisions along the way given what they knew at the time. But those red flags (if 80k was indeed aware of them) seem like they should play a part in any retrospective accounting of lessons learned from the whole affair.
The 80k team are still discussing it internally and hope to say more at a later date.
Speaking personally, Holden’s comments (e.g. in Vox) resonated with me. I wish I’d done more to investigate what happened at Alameda.
People downvoting—it would be useful to know why.
Interesting! Can you share details? (Or point to where others have?)
Some of the ones I’ve seen:
80k’s metrics seems unaffected so far, and it’s one of the biggest drivers of community growth.
I’ve also heard that EAG(x) applications didn’t seem affected.
GWWC pledgers were down, though a lot of that is due to them not doing a pledge drive in Dec. My guess is that if they do a pledge drive next Dec similar to previous ones, the results will be similar. The baseline of monthly pledges seems ~similar.
I would be surprised if the effect from the lack of a pledge drive would run on into February and March 2023 though. Comparison YoY here is 12 months before, Jan 2023 to 2022 etc.
Hmm that does seem worse than I expected.
I wonder if it’s because gwwc has cut back outreach or is getting less promotion by other groups (whereas 80k continued it’s marketing as before, plus a lot of 80k’s reach is passive), or whether it points to outreach actually being harder now.
FYI I’ve just released a post which offers significantly more empirical data on how FTX has impacted EA. FTX’s collapse seems to mark a clear and sizable deterioration across a variety of different EA metrics.
I included your comment about 80k’s metrics being largely unaffected, but if there’s some updated data on if/how 80k’s metrics have changed post-FTX that would be very interesting to see.
Other data points on community growth per CEA’s dashboard:
Traffic for the intro page on effectivealtruism.org is at the lowest level since the data starts in April 2017, and has been falling steadily since FTX.
The EA newsletter has been losing subscribers steadily since FTX (i.e. people are unsubscribing faster than new people have started subscribing)
What does this mean?
If you’re tracking the annual change in wealth between two periods, you should try to make sure the start at the end point are either both market peaks or both market lows.
e.g. from 2017 to 2021, or 2019 to Nov 2022 would be valid periods for tracking crypto.
If you instead track from e.g. 2019 to 2021, then you’re probably going to overestimate.
Another option would be to average over periods significantly longer than a typical market cycle (e.g. 10yr).
Ah, I see. Thanks. It makes total sense.
Is this an incomplete sentence?
Thanks fixed!