I’ve worked to pitch (and in some cases, been the target of) investigative pieces for the last 15 or so years of my life, and honestly, nothing here strikes me as particularly troubling. These are routine errors in communication, or cognitive biases (e.g., salience bias), and probably not indications of any sort of wrongful conduct.
Misstatements about Sam’s frugality. It’s possible there was an effort to mislead, but seems more plausible that this was just salience bias. A billionaire driving a Corolla is salient; owning a luxury condo in the Bahamas is not. Unless there is evidence that people actively misled the reporter, this is not particularly notable to me, other than reminding us all not to fall victim to that bias.
Warnings about Sam’s misbehavior. Say someone causes others to find them completely ethical in 99.9% of all interactions. That’s a very high rate! But once one becomes prominent, even a very high rate of perceived ethical behavior will lead to a high number of warnings because the number of interactions increases exponentially. Every prominent person has at least some people saying, “They’re unethical.” This is often because the prominent person merely turned a request down, when many requests are being made. (I am much less prominent than Sam but have had this happen to me many times.) I find the failure to respond to the exceedingly vague allegations against Sam unremarkable.
Sam’s contradictions on malaria nets. You can read this as a lie. You can also read this as changing sentiments. We all contradict ourselves, and this is especially true when we are talking about highly speculative questions, such as cause prioritization, where our evidentiary basis is often quite slim, and where much depends on relatively small differences in the assumptions we make (e.g., a small change in the probability of hostile AGI). It is possible Sam is lying about his commitment to malaria nets to cover up his crimes. It’s also possible that he just changed his mind, or at different moments, has a different emotional and rhetorical commitment to various causes. To give another example, Sam once stated that he was very committed to animal protection. Over time, he shifted his commitments and seemed more focused on concerns such as AI. I don’t see that as a lie, even though I disagreed with it. It’s just change.
The main thing that I would find concerning in this piece is the excessive focus on PR by EA leaders. Don’t focus on PR. Focus on trying to get a true and accurate account out there in the media. It’s very hard to manipulate or even strategize about how to portray yourself. It’s much easier to be real, because you don’t have to constantly perform. That should be a norm within EA, especially among leaders.
I think your point about the various “warning flags” is well-taken. Of course, in retrospect, we’ve been combing the forums for comments that could have given pause. But the volume of comments is way too large to imagine we would have actually updated enough on a single comment to make a difference.
That said, I think the mass exodus of Alameda employees in 2018 should have been a bigger warning flag, cause for more scrutiny on the business, to the extent where those with a concern for the risks should have tried to dig deeper on those employees, even with the complications that NDAs can pose. We can’t say we weren’t aware of it—that episode even made it into SBF’s fawning 80k interview, albeit mostly framed as “how do you pick yourself up after hardships?”.
The best case scenario conclusion of such an investigation very likely wouldn’t have been “SBF is committing massive fraud” especially as that might not have happened until years later. But I think it still would have been useful for the community to know that SBF had a reckless appetite for risk, so we could anticipate at least the potential for FTX to just outright collapse, especially as the crypto industry turned sour earlier this year.
I’ve worked to pitch (and in some cases, been the target of) investigative pieces for the last 15 or so years of my life, and honestly, nothing here strikes me as particularly troubling. These are routine errors in communication, or cognitive biases (e.g., salience bias), and probably not indications of any sort of wrongful conduct.
Misstatements about Sam’s frugality. It’s possible there was an effort to mislead, but seems more plausible that this was just salience bias. A billionaire driving a Corolla is salient; owning a luxury condo in the Bahamas is not. Unless there is evidence that people actively misled the reporter, this is not particularly notable to me, other than reminding us all not to fall victim to that bias.
Warnings about Sam’s misbehavior. Say someone causes others to find them completely ethical in 99.9% of all interactions. That’s a very high rate! But once one becomes prominent, even a very high rate of perceived ethical behavior will lead to a high number of warnings because the number of interactions increases exponentially. Every prominent person has at least some people saying, “They’re unethical.” This is often because the prominent person merely turned a request down, when many requests are being made. (I am much less prominent than Sam but have had this happen to me many times.) I find the failure to respond to the exceedingly vague allegations against Sam unremarkable.
Sam’s contradictions on malaria nets. You can read this as a lie. You can also read this as changing sentiments. We all contradict ourselves, and this is especially true when we are talking about highly speculative questions, such as cause prioritization, where our evidentiary basis is often quite slim, and where much depends on relatively small differences in the assumptions we make (e.g., a small change in the probability of hostile AGI). It is possible Sam is lying about his commitment to malaria nets to cover up his crimes. It’s also possible that he just changed his mind, or at different moments, has a different emotional and rhetorical commitment to various causes. To give another example, Sam once stated that he was very committed to animal protection. Over time, he shifted his commitments and seemed more focused on concerns such as AI. I don’t see that as a lie, even though I disagreed with it. It’s just change.
The main thing that I would find concerning in this piece is the excessive focus on PR by EA leaders. Don’t focus on PR. Focus on trying to get a true and accurate account out there in the media. It’s very hard to manipulate or even strategize about how to portray yourself. It’s much easier to be real, because you don’t have to constantly perform. That should be a norm within EA, especially among leaders.
I think your point about the various “warning flags” is well-taken. Of course, in retrospect, we’ve been combing the forums for comments that could have given pause. But the volume of comments is way too large to imagine we would have actually updated enough on a single comment to make a difference.
That said, I think the mass exodus of Alameda employees in 2018 should have been a bigger warning flag, cause for more scrutiny on the business, to the extent where those with a concern for the risks should have tried to dig deeper on those employees, even with the complications that NDAs can pose. We can’t say we weren’t aware of it—that episode even made it into SBF’s fawning 80k interview, albeit mostly framed as “how do you pick yourself up after hardships?”.
The best case scenario conclusion of such an investigation very likely wouldn’t have been “SBF is committing massive fraud” especially as that might not have happened until years later. But I think it still would have been useful for the community to know that SBF had a reckless appetite for risk, so we could anticipate at least the potential for FTX to just outright collapse, especially as the crypto industry turned sour earlier this year.