Austin: I’m happy to announce that Caroline Ellison has accepted a role at Manifund, to develop our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars.
In fact, she started a work trial on July 13, which converted to a fulltime role on Aug 10. Over the past two months, she’s been publishing her work and supporting Manifund users under the pseudonym “Carol”.
How did I come to consider this at all?
I specifically enjoyed Caroline’s tumblr and other writings, which I found thoughtful and relatable. I invited her to Manifest 2026, just because I wanted to meet her. During the festival, she came to my night market booth, and asked about joining our team, which I was interested to explore.
I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold. They funded the retreat which drew me into the EA community, and the conference where I met my wife. Much of Manifund’s work today is directly inspired by the Future Fund’s approach.
On FTX itself, I remain conflicted. It was their money and spirit that enabled the Future Fund, and I still admire many aspects of FTX and the individuals who worked there. But also: FTX did wrong. Its collapse harmed users (myself included), and damaged the movement which I deeply care about. I may write more about this in the future, but in any case:
I believe in redemption. Caroline has admitted her faults, worked to make creditors whole, and served her time in prison. I’d like to give her the opportunity to contribute back to the world; I hope that the world will concur.
Why did I hire Caroline for Manifund?
Manifund needs talent. Leading AI labs warn about recursive self improvement; poverty and disease remain unsolved; billions of animals suffer hell on earth. I, my team, and many EAs I know, are often burning the midnight candle to address these wrongs. I don’t wish to sideline a pair of capable hands. (We’re hiring!)
Caroline brings specific, useful expertise around finance and systems management to Manifund. I know this might seem like a joke — why would you trust someone who blew up an exchange? — but in fact she’s already been invaluable, for example building a reconciliation tool which identified several misregistered transactions in our database, in the 5-6 figures. (Obviously, she and I will be extremely motivated not to repeat FTX’s mistakes).
Through working together, I’ve had the privilege to know Caroline as more than just an icon of FTX. I find her to be kind, humble, down to earth, hardworking, smart and witty. She cares deeply about doing right, for our users, our donors, and the world. She shares many of my sensibilities around extant problems of philanthropy; see, for example, our essay in support of for-profits. She adores Ada, my 2yo daughter (and, the feeling is clearly mutual).
Manifund strives to be unusually transparent. And so, I apologize for our minor deception, in using a pseudonym over the last couple months. I still endorse having done this — I think it’s relatively common to work with people pseudonymously, when their real identity is famous. But I want to call out that we compromised on transparency here, which I do not take lightly.
I understand that some of our users, donors, and partners may now be skittish about working with Manifund, given this announcement. I appreciate any trust you are willing to extend, and ask that you judge us by our historical and future outputs. You (or your LLM) can take a look at Manifund’s source code, underlying data, finances and research; if you wish, you can see Caroline’s specific code commits and comments on Manifund.
I’m happy to take questions, over public comments or emailed to austin@manifund.org. (I can’t promise I’ll be able to reply to every one.) In the meantime, I’d like to ask Caroline to say a few words.
Caroline: I’ve said a lot about what I did wrong at Alameda/FTX—you can read what I said at my plea, during trial, and remarks at sentencing. I’m deeply sorry for what I did, and I completely understand why people may not want to work with me. But I’m very grateful to Austin for giving me a second chance, and judging me on my current work performance rather than my past. I feel very lucky not only to have a job, but to be working somewhere that I think is doing great work and has a mission I believe in.
When I started my work trial, unsure if I’d get a full-time offer at the end, I didn’t want to go through a public announcement just to potentially be let go a month later. But now that I’ve accepted a full-time offer at Manifund, I want to be upfront about it.
I’m excited to continue improving our technical infrastructure, working on operations and customer support, and posting updates on our newsletter.
I probably won’t reply to comments on this post—sorry.
While I am thankful for the transparency and understand that you don’t want to take part in discussing this in public forum threads, I, and maybe others, want to.
I have to say, I think this is harming what remains of the Effective Altruism name/brand and is making me reconsider openly associating with it.
If we ever hope to rebuild the trust that was lost and construct a better public image of EA, we need to have strong community norms that people who commit wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering have no place in any type of financial role in organisations that make up this community.
I get that you have personal ties, and I can understand wanting to act from a position of forgiveness towards a friend and uphold norms of redemption. From an outside perspective, though, these same personal ties can be perceived as more of the same mixing of professional and personal lives that infamously happened at FTX.
I, too, believe people can redeem themselves and, after completing their sentence, should be able to rejoin society. And I also think that the EA community can only ever gain a positive public image if they beat the accusations of fraud and favouritism through an abundance of care about these things and strict professional norms. Background checks for financial roles that exclude people with felony convictions for financial crimes are, in my opinion, justified.
After researching this a little more, I’m quite taken aback that apparently you still didn’t return the 500.000$ FTX investment, and instead let it go to litigation. So the Trust that is making the victims whole is currently suing you (Manifold for Charity) for that Money, while you hire one of the perpetrators.
Surely, even though you may not consider these facts related, you must understand how this looks from the outside. Let me spell it out: It looks like Caroline is continuing to benefit from the fraud by being paid by an organisation that kept the money she helped steal.
(Unfortunately, it’s tricky for me to comment on active legal proceedings, but I intend to check to see what our lawyer thinks is reasonable for me to say here. Please follow up if I haven’t said anything in 2 weeks.)
I don’t expect you to; this is mostly about the optics, no internal details needed.
I think I concur. It seems like a bad call to put someone who committed massive financial crimes into a grantmaking platform development/research role, especially one in the EA/AI safety community. I don’t disagree that redemption is possible and that people can change, but I think the conditions for hiring someone in these kinds of cases (e.g. time since the crime occurred and weight of evidence that the person has changed) need to be a function of the sensitivity of the role and the magnitude of the crime. And I don’t think that bar is anywhere close to having been met here.
If every decision made by any organization under the EA umbrella can make you reconsider associating with the brand, are there any other brands you associate with that manage to maintain the standards you look for?
Every discussion I’ve seen makes me think that people within EA overwhelmingly think this is a bad idea, and many of them plan to interact differently with Manifund going forward; for a community without formal standards for who “belongs”, that seems like as much as you could reasonably ask for (aside from even more overwhelming condemnation, I suppose).
Caveat: Our differing instincts might be informed by a different understanding of where Manifund sits within EA (I think of them as a fairly minor organization, but EA is a loose and chaotic group of orgs, and I only see certain parts of the elephant).
Many orgs are affiliated with Manifund one way or another by virtue of fundraising.
I wish this weren’t the case, for what it’s worth. I have some aspiration of Manifund being a neutral utility or infrastructure, similar to Twitter or Substack or Stripe, where it’s understood that people and orgs of very different backgrounds will still use it for funding.
There’s some evidence of this. I believe Manifund is the only platform that has hosted projects receiving donations from people as disparate as Marc Andreessen and Beth Barnes.
I’m happy that people overwhelmingly think that this is a bad idea. When I posted the comment, this wasn’t clear to me. I posted this because all I had seen at that point was a stream of positive comments on substack which all celebrated that Caroline was given a second chance in this way. I wanted there to at least be one comment expressing why this is bad.
I may have overestimated Manifunds importance since it was regularly recommended to me as where I should apply to fund a side project of mine, and I seriously considered it.
So no, I don’t reconsider my involvement after every bad action by any org, only when something seems to me like one of the worst moves, while seeing people I respect celebrating it, with little to no pushback (which now is clearly happening).
Hey! Thanks for your comments. As mentioned, Caroline doesn’t plan on replying, but I am happy to jot some quick thoughts in response:
“The EA name & brand” is kind of a tricky thing to reason about. Obviously, I feel bad about people who weren’t involved in this decision, suffering any kind of backlash as a result. I wish that the public would see “EA” as something like, idk, “Catholic”, where one bad or disagreeable act doesn’t make a particular statement about others.
FWIW I did send the CEA community health team a draft of this announcement. (It was with not that much advance notice, and I don’t blame them for not having a statement etc ready)
I expect some funders and orgs to “vote with their feet” and stop working with Manifund, at least for a period of time. I think this is understandable, and I hope to prove through our actions that we’re still worthy of trust
To be clear, Caroline and I hadn’t been friends before she came to Manifest 3 months ago. (I did previously count others who had worked at FTX or FTX Future Fund, among my friends.)
Manifund was already extremely transparent, but I hope one effect of Caroline joining and the public scrutiny on us is that we’ll be pushed to be even more transparent, moving forward
It took the Catholics 2000 years to get to the point where they could systematically protect and enable paedophiles and still survive the blowback. It should be quite obvious why EA’s reputation is far more brittle, especially when it comes to funding organisations.
I think you have every right to hire any cofounder you like if you run a startup, whatever their history, but then it shouldn’t be a 501c associated in such a big way with Effective Altruism.
From the perspective of someone who spent years in tedious discussions about being extremely careful with public outreach to not damage the perception of EA as a brand when we were building EA Germany, this feels like a slap in the face.
This seems both irrelevant and false to me.
Look, Austin made the comparison
I may have been more short tempered and aggressive than necessary, and arguing the specifics of what harm the Catholic Church has done is indeed beside the point. What I was gesturing at was: Wishing that EA were the same as a 2000 year old world-spanning religion in terms of public perception when scandals happen has some obvious problems.
I made this comparison because I am personally Catholic, fwiw, and that feels similarly important to me as my EA-ness. You might make make a comparison for your own community, or religion, or city or country, whatever feels appropriate.
I don’t think for-profit and 501c are so different here. Different non-profits have different mission statements and beliefs about what is best for EA.
Sometimes people will do things that harm a brand you share with them, and while they gonna do what they gonna do, it’s natural to be angry or disappointed. I’ve been going through this a lot lately, still figuring out what to do about it.
“‘The EA name & brand’ is kind of a tricky thing to reason about.”
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that we should be willing to pay a lot to preserve EA’s image, and it seems likely that hiring Ellison will cause significant negative backlash. It could be valuable to look at the EA community’s historical willingness to pay to improve its image, so here are some proxies:
CEA reported that about 4% of its 2025 spending ($21.8M) was on marketing and communications, which comes out to roughly $870k. I’m not sure how much of this work is directly about improving EA’s name and brand, but I suspect that’s maybe half the theory of change for all of CEA’s media outreach?
For reference, Fable says this money was spent on improving social media accounts, redesigning effectivealtruism.org, running an “EA Stories” video campaign, and working with journalists to improve how accurately EA is described in the media.
Spending on the team is projected to be well above $1M this year, and most of the work (or at least the work related to The Altruists) is reactive media handling and corrections.
I’m not confident in this, but I suspect that the primary theory of change for giving grants to Andy Masley is that he’s a good writer who says reasonable things well and shows off some of the strongest parts of EA.
I lack the information to determine if this hiring decision is net negative or net positive, but I don’t think it’s impossible to make a reasonable guess for how much we should be willing to pay to avoid bad PR. I hope Manifund receives a lot of surplus benefits from hiring her.
I don’t think “The EA name and brand” is that tricky to reason about really. Also what we “wish” the public could do is unfortunately not reality. I think there are a number of reasonable takes and good arguments for and against focusing on brand, which have been discussed much on the forum. These 2 might be the most obvious
1) “Don’t worry about PR it hurts epistemics and decision making. We should openly discuss any topic even if the public find it revolting or outside the overton window. This will help us truly do what has the highest EV, and achieve the most good—public perception be darned”
2) ” EA being in good standing towards most people helps EA’s do more good. PR is important for attracting people to the movement and makes community building easier. It helps It also helps donors outside EA feel more warm towards EA ideas and spend their money more cost-effectively. If we are not pariahs, or even better seen as good by most people, that will help us redirect more thought, talent and resouces towards the movement.
And everything in between, and probably some orthoganal takes too. There are arguments for and against these. But I don’t think its tricky to reason about as you state here.
From my perspective when we call ourselves EAs, or EA adjacents or even just vaguely part of the community, then we do have responsibility to others and the movement for the consequences of actions like hiring someone like Caroline Ellison. You’ve taken some of that responsibility which is great by posting here and having a discussion.
That said my take (FWIW) I understand your reasons for hiring here, but its probably not wise. I do have a STRONG bent towards second chances though, but I feel it might have been wiser for PR reasons at least to put her in a position which had nothing at all to do with finance. Also you are opening yourself up to a lot of risk if anything bad happens with Manifund finances, even if she had nothing to do it.
I don’t think you should make decisions like this based on “what’s good for EA reputation.” I am not swayed by those arguments here.
I do think — unless you think Caroline was wrongfully convicted or convicted under a bogus law and you can say that — this seems a shockingly naïve decision.
We’ve seen hubris and in-group biased naïveté before, the kind that treats EAs and EA orgs as if we’re somehow above boring, straight-up sensible, standard safeguards within a business because we’re too smart and too morally evolved for all that or something, or too rational. This attitude caused some of the FTX failures. Now you’re here telling us that you’re ignoring boring, straight-up sensible standard safeguards within a business like “don’t hire someone with a finance-related felony conviction into a finance position.” And only 4 years after the crime was committed. What reasons do you have to ignore that standard?
I can be sympathetic and even forgiving in my heart of Caroline as a person. I don’t need to turn that feeling into a finance job for her. I’d be less concerned if an org were hiring her in a comms role based on her writings or something and could assure everyone that she’d have nothing to do with finances. Still controversial, but not so out of touch.
This is not smart or wise. It’s the kind of willful, wide-eyed foolishness, while fooling oneself into thinking it’s good, that we’ve seen before. It does not bode well.
For context, Caroline Ellison has been recently convicted for financial fraud amounting to billions of dollars. Manifund has just hired her for a finance role. They couldn’t find a single qualified person that hadn’t committed billions of dollars worth of financial fraud?
Nobody has to be diplomatic or mince words here, or couch this in terms of “reputation”: this decision is rank incompetence, plainly obvious to anyone with a whit of common sense. Nobody should trust Manifund after this.
To add further context: The Manifund team currently consists of just two employees: CEO Austin Chen and “Carol N”, the pseudonym for Caroline Ellison. Literally 50% of the employees in the organization are convicted financial fraudsters.
Now when people have their funds approved, they will know that decision was made by a convicted fraudster. The article recruiting new hires was written by a convicted fraudster (who was hiding it at the time). Irrespective of her actual role, the fact that she makes up a large percentage of the employee base gives her a significant power in the organization: it’s crazy that she is apparently the first hire here.
This is a terrible decision on every dimension you can look at it. It’s certainly a brave decision: that does not make it a sane or moral one.
As most commenters write, hiring Caroline for a finance role does not strike me as the best decision. One thing I find missing in this conversation is putting ourselves in Austin or Caroline’s shoes.
Most comments are expressing amazement that Austin would hire Caroline when it’s so bad for Manifund’s reputation. If anything, this strengthens my view that Austin is doing something costly—much more expensive than the $500k FTX investment Manifund is trying to keep—because he believes it’s the right thing to do. We should be encouraging people to do what they believe is right even if it’s unpopular. Dragging Austin through the mud for doing what he believes is right does not seem like the ideal way to express disagreement. (On the FTX clawback, that legal dispute is several years old and doesn’t strike me as relevant to the recent hiring decision.)
For Caroline, imagine you’re an EA who made a catastrophic moral error. You’d feel horrible about it, you’d spend years reflecting on it, and then you’d hope you can do something useful and constructive with the rest of your life. Presumably you’d want a job where you can leverage your existing skillset to do something good.
Some other commenters give me the impression that they believe Caroline is a particularly bad person. When we look at historical atrocities, slavery, the fact that most people sleep perfectly well at night contributing to factory farming, etc, the main lesson we should draw is that most people do terrible things when their surroundings excuse it, and show far less regret than Caroline has.
In general, I believe people should have a concrete rule for when they forgive others. For myself, I need to believe that everyone has a path to redemption, no matter the magnitude of their crimes. So my personal rule for forgiveness is that I need to believe the person wouldn’t commit the same crime again if they were in the same position. From Caroline’s statements, it seems likely to me that she sincerely regrets her actions and wouldn’t do it again, so while I wouldn’t hire her as a finance professional, I do forgive her on a personal level.
It’d be constructive if we spent more time thinking about what the path should look like for someone who wants to contribute to the EA project but has committed catastrophic moral errors in the past. At present, hiring this person for a finance role in an org with a fiduciary duty to donors strikes me as premature. Still, to me, anyone who’s sincerely repented deserves to be able to make use of the rest of their life to make the world a better place.
Thank you for writing this comment.
Optics aside, I do not personally find the decision objectionable. When someone has been found guilty of violating a norm, it is not immediately obvious whether they should be considered more or less likely to violate it again. On the one hand, the specific violation is evidence of a general disposition toward that kind of transgression. On the other hand, being caught and held accountable can leave an indelible mark, and prompt serious self-reflection and self-improvement. On priors, I’m not sure which effect dominates. But in Caroline’s case, it seems reasonably clear to me—given my knowledge of her background, court transcripts, and existing incentives—that she is very, very unlikely to engage in anything remotely resembling financial fraud ever again.
I agree with your approach to reasoning about the chance of recidivism, and had been mulling it over much the same way when I wrote my above comment. My uninformed prior for the average ex-con recently released from prison would be cautious, just because my understanding of the literature on recidivism rates tells me that for the average person, the tendency to violate further seems to be stronger than the mark of having been held accountable.
Of course, every individual is different. If you know Caroline well enough, have done deeper research into her case, and feel you’re able to be objective about the matter, it might be completely reasonable for you to be fine with hiring her for a finance role. Given that I don’t know Caroline personally, nor have I dived deep into the particulars of her situation or her public statements, I currently lean towards greater caution. (In my personal experience, I’ve been burned by people enough times that I’m sadly in general less trusting than I was, which might play a part in this too.)
Over the next few years, if Caroline continues on a better path, I am hopeful that she will earn our trust once again.
“the main lesson we should draw is that most people do terrible things when their surroundings excuse it, and show far less regret than Caroline has.”
Hiring Caroline for a finance position within 6 months of her getting out of jail for billions of dollars of fraud is exactly her surroundings excusing it.
Thank you for saying this.
To tie things to current events: it’s plausible to me that some frontier lab employees working on AI capabilities, may be grappling with situations that rhymes with Caroline’s at FTX. I think Jacob Coxon (and others) are acting admirably in this regard. (I may try to write out more thoughts on this later.)
I agree with this and thought about a similar connection when I read your OP, but I feel like you are badly mis-analyzing the situation. I think my other comment (which I know you replied to, thanks!) is super relevant here.
In that comment, I articulate the idea that your worldview strongly emphasizes incentivzing and valuing ambition and risk-taking, and I contrast this with a view that incorporates “red lines”. The relevance of this to the AI situation is two-fold:
Many AI employees who may be considering leaving AI labs probably didn’t violate any common-sense morality red lines. Notably red lines that derive from “common-sense morality” are not necesarily 1-1 with expected harm, which I think is a fact that EAs/rationalist don’t seem to have entirely internalized in the discussions around AI.
A huge fucking reason why people joined the labs in the first place and continue to join or work at them is the exact ambition-based mentality you seem so enamored with. Just take a look at some of the Greg Brockman documents that came out of the litigation with Musk, or observe that its Sillicon Valley, not some other culture, where these labs are coming out of. Bro, the call is coming from inside the house!!!!
I also worry about the converse: because various AI safety people are genuinely well-intentioned, some people assume that their work must be good for the world.
Sadly, good people do indeed sometimes do bad things, and we are well to remember that fact.
Reasonable, thank you for flagging! @richard_ngo has been writing a series on this, how AI safety-motivated people, inside and outside of labs, may have contributed significantly to speedup. And he argues that even orgs that many people admire, like METR, are not immune to this—I think he has a quote like “the METR graph has significantly contributed to race dynamics”
I don’t have a settled thought on whether I agree overall, but I certainly appreciate his speaking up. I believe his stance is also that we should give up on “EA”, which, I currently disagree with. (But, perhaps “EA” will give up on me...)
100%. Arguably worse on the frontier lab employees’ part given they’re endangering all of our lives.
No, it’s because Caroline plays with his 2-year-old daughter. He explicitly said this
More generally, jumping from “this is costly” to “it’s a signal of moral goodness and conviction” is a silly line of reasoning that’s common in EA circles.
I note that in this post Austin doesn’t actually directly acknowledge that FTX misused customer funds, instead just saying that he’s “conflicted,” and that FTX “did wrong” and its “collapse harmed users”. I’m particularly confused what there is to be “conflicted” about. For avoidance of doubt: Austin, do you think that SBF and Caroline acted unethically and illegally in misusing customer funds, and do you think it is right that both were given criminal sentences? I think it would be good to clarify this.
It’s strange because Caroline’s message (especially the linked doc) implies that she believes she acted unethically and illegally. It would be weird for Austin to hire Caroline while disagreeing about this.
As Tobias writes, I would encourage you to read the linked doc excerpted from Caroline’s public court transcripts.
(I’m being relatively circumspect about my characterization of this event for now, on the advice of our lawyer.)
Note: “You” = Austin in this comment
The sense I get from reading this is that Ellison’s history with FTX was a significant positive reason in your mind for hiring her, whereas people might have generally expected this to be a negative factor. This reminded me of your talk with Elizabeth Van Nostrand on the topic of FTX. There, you expressed similar conflicted feeling around the events of FTX. One of the things you expressed was feelings of concern around the community reaction in regard to a sense of loyalty, that the reaction created an impression that people might not stand by someone if things went badly. I feel like there is some tension with the idea that people from the EA community are engaging in backstabbing in terms of their reaction to the FTX fiasco, while presumably you don’t view testifying against SBF as similarly implicating the concern about loyalty.
To me, this reminds me of a attitude that I associate with Silicon Vally VC culture and see coming through strongly in the sentiments around this issue. It seems to me like the feeling/pirnciple you are invoke here is more like downside protection than loyalty. I think there is a feeling prevalent in SV that entrenched interests are often the opponents of change and innovation, and that process and rules primarily serve those entrenched interests. Thus, brave innovators need to be willing to challenge and sometimes even break rules in order to change the world for the better. I think this is the idea you get at with your weak doge/buff shiba comment. A follow on from this that seems to have caught on among people of this subculture is that people who engage in these brave risk-taking effors deserve praise and high status, and ought to be protected and admired even if they fail.
You can try to cast that as being about protecting people from the mob (and this is explicitly brought up in the conversation), but to me that doesn’t really seem to be the core value being served. Yes innovators and founders may get unfairly attacked by a public that doesn’t really understand the underlying issues or a bureaucracy that is controlled by legacy players, but from what I can tell the core “ask” of this SV subculture is to support founders mostly regardless of whether evidence that those things are occuring is present. We are kind of meant to assume that of course that must be happening if someone is critizing a founder/ambitious innovator. The core value here is ambition, not loyalty.
In the talk, You and Elizabeth explore the tensions between your “winning” frame and her “truthseeking” one. I think the analysis I give above fits squarely within that, but I would offer a something of a synthesis that I think you two miss, and that is generally underappreciated in the wider rationality/EA ecosystem:
I believe your “winning” frame is well-modeled by the description I give above, but what of the “truthseeking” frame? Later in the talk you two consider the question of whether “truthseeking” often cause people/orgs to need to slow down. I think this does identify a core problem with “truthseeking” as it is often conceptualized. If I’m trying to make a new cure for cancer, and I’m 95% confident it is safe and effective, am I duty-bound for truthseeking reasons to never let anyone use it until I’m 99.999999% certain? “Truthseeking” sounds great in theory when you are just reading posts about meta-honesty or whatever, but when it comes to application it seems to really struggle with managing tradeoffs. You end up with a situation where people who are doing there best to navigate tough choices can too easily get called out for being “insufficiently truthseeking” for not meeting the arbitrary standards of someone else.
I think there is a reasonable synthesis of these that is actually fairly commonly held outside of EA/rationality, which is that you should try to win, according to your own definition of winning, while treating certain ethical contraints like truthfulness/honesty (in contrast to “truthseeking”) as red lines that you need to stay on the correct side of. This solves the problem with truthseeking in that ambitious people have a safe harbor if they stay on the right side of those lines, will still reigning in bad behavior by unscrupulous innovators.
Game theory gets brought up in the talk as well. Within my interpretation of your framework, it makes sense to hire Ellison on these grounds. She was in a sense a victim of the powers that be because she was an ambitious person and the system failed to provide downside protection. You can provide that by giving her a job. Under this view, it is very important to do this in order to send the signal that innovation and ambitition are valued and people will still support you if you fail.
The trouble with this within the “truthfulness” framework that I articulate here is that it fails to disincentivize crossing red lines, and arguably even incentivizes doing so. There have been several incidences of fraud or related conduct in SV VC-funded startups in recent history, suggesting that this may a phenomenon that is genuinely playing out in practice.
(Without yet taking a stance on agreement or disagreement, I’ve strong upvoted this comment; I think it is well researched and engages with some of the tricky questions of ethics and “doing good”, which I am myself always trying to understand better.
I want to be clear that I don’t have all the answers, and am often wrong. I appreciate you, and everyone else commenting, who are contributing to our shared state of this understanding.)
Would you be open to a public debate on this topic, potentially for stakes? I’m open to wagering on a debate judged by lesswrong or EA forum vote totals of an exchange at least 10 messages long, details TBD. I’d prefer a topic specific to AI safety but open to one that is general as well.
This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn’t express this directly, but I’ve seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline’s message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).
I don’t really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I’m a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you’re right that she’s an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.
This is obviously going to be a very controversial post and action. I’ll start by disclosing that I have always been very sympathetic to Caroline, and even with all that’s happened, I think any exploration in depth of the whole FTX-Alameda fiasco will still show her to be 1) extremely talented, 2) hard-working (these two should be uncontroversial) and 3) morally serious and conscientious (even though she participated in fraud and made catastrophic mistakes in her life). For argumentative purposes, I think premise 3 is not needed, but I think it is true.
If one wanted to speculate about the possible consequences of Caroline’s hire by Manifund, I think it makes sense to consider two levels: the one that affects Manifund and the one that affects EA as a whole.
For the first, I think one can make a case that hiring Caroline is positive expected value for the company. Given premises 1 and 2 and the fact that her actions under SBF have effectively made her unemployable and (I presume) a pariah for most of the EA community, Austin may be getting access to an unusually valuable employee whom much of the labor market is unwilling to hire because of reputational risk. I know lots of you would dispute premise 3 -I have no personal knowledge of Ms. Ellison, but from everything I’ve read from/about her, I think it is inconsistent not to consider her a deeply moral even if flawed person (and aren’t we all?). But even if you’re skeptic here, there is no rational incentive for her to be less than extremely, scrupulously honest in the future for the second chance she gets. And I am willing to bet that it will pay out (so direct message me if you want to place a bet). The worst downside for Manifund I can envisage is that donors will refuse to collaborate with them. Will this be a big issue? I don’t know. I do feel that there was a subset of possible donors who were already unlikely to donate to the anyway, given that Manifund is, I think, an offshoot of Manifold. And this connects to what I perceive as a battle for the soul of EA that has been taking place for some time, with those who favor maximizing outcomes through making EA more mainstream, more aligned with left values and organizations and more publicly palatable EA causes versus those closer to Longtermism, Rationalism and maximizing outcomes through exploring riskier, unpopular but numerically/theoretically backed actions and interventions, and Manifund would clearly align with the latter.
For the second case, I think it is likely that in the short run, having Ms. Ellison working in a charity that seems at least to some degree aligned to EA will likely be pretty terrible PR for EA. Perhaps in the mid-term too. Then again, given that I think Caroline satisfies premises 1, 2 and 3, I can also imagine her doing a lot of good, impactful work. In fact, my rough forecast for the next couple of years would be something like this:
~65%: the controversy fades, Caroline becomes an extremely competent but relatively low-profile Manifund worker, and little by little she develops a respectable second career in philanthropy.
~20%: she becomes considerably more prominent, writing serious pieces about grantmaking, philanthropy, perhaps forecasting or institutional design, eventually becoming a recognizable intellectual/operational figure around Manifund and perhaps in the philanthropy space at large.
~15%: donor or partner backlash makes her employment sufficiently costly that either her role becomes more private or she eventually moves elsewhere.
I see some people seem to find it troubling that Caroline would be specifically landing a a ‘finance job’, but to my limited knowledge, the functions she’s going to be doing (technical infrastructure, operations, customer support, and the Manifund newsletter, research on how philanthropic money should be invested) do not sound like a typical ‘finance’ job to me. Definitely not like executive ones, or implying she’s going to be personally investing people’s money.
I think it’s good to give people second chances and I think Caroline deserves a second chance from society. I think it’s extremely bad for that second chance to come from an organization that received money that she and others misappropriated from customers.
It is concerning to me that this wasn’t obviously disqualifying for this particular position.
Personal notes: I’ve had friendly interactions with Austin and spent some time in the Mox coworking space. I’ve never met Caroline, though I liked her Tumblr and hope she finds ways to do good moving forward. The FTX collapse cost me thousands of dollars, destroyed a video game I loved, made my job much harder for the next year, and damaged a community I love.
Thoughts on the situation, as someone who cares a lot about EA’s reputation and also thinks it’s sometimes good to make unusual decisions based on controversial ethical principles:
Perspective-taking: Ariel’s comment is really good. Read that first if you haven’t.
Competence: Having read Going Infinite and a bunch of news stories, I don’t feel qualified to distinguish between “Caroline is bad at operations/finance/judging ideas” and “Caroline is good at those things — after all, FTX/Alameda had lots of early success — but she got overwhelmed by the complexities of an org with billions of dollars in assets while struggling with interpersonal entanglements”. If Austin thinks her abilities are a good fit, I’m not all that inclined to doubt him.
Personal ethics: My ethical qualms are with Austin, not Caroline. I don’t think her ethics matter much for this role: she is unlikely to end up in a situation where the pressures on her, and decisions available to her, even vaguely resemble her situation at FTX. I’d still feel safe using Manifund’s platform while she’s involved.
Is this a good decision (impact)? Seems terrible from the standpoint of furthering Manifund’s goals. It’s also a small ding on EA’s reputation as a whole, with whatever damage that implies. But I think Austin understood those things, and impact wasn’t his primary focus.
I wouldn’t have made this decision in Austin’s shoes, given the chance that it could undo years of work to build Manifund, but I respect that EA contains lots of people with unusual perspectives and that they’ll sometimes do things I wouldn’t. That said, I’ll reserve my donations for people whose perspectives are closer to mine.
Is this a good decision (ethics)? I don’t think it’s unethical to hire people with criminal backgrounds, and the weak “finance” connection here doesn’t change my view (see “personal ethics”). But I agree with others’ concerns about paying someone with money they helped steal. If Manifund doesn’t pay back the FTX money, that would breach my ethical standards; I’d hope that any org self-labeling as “EA” would do better.
Using loyalty and indebtedness as hiring criteria strikes me as unwise, but not unethical, as long as Austin is honest with his donors about his motives.
What does this say about Manifund? If I wanted to predict Manifund’s actions, I’d care more about the years of activity they’ve documented than this particular hire. If you thought they were a good grantmaker before, it’s reasonable not to update much. However:
The situation presents other reasons for concern, unrelated to their grantmaking ability.
Manifund supports lots of small projects with unclear impact. If you find their results hard to judge, you might care more about the judgment of their staff. If I were a Manifund donor in that position, I’d be updating in the direction of “Austin sees the world and makes decisions very differently from me”, and that would affect my trust in Manifund’s work.
EA’s reputation: Overall, this is small potatoes. FTX is famous, but the fame is fading. Caroline is much less famous than SBF. Manifund is an obscure org. From my recent experience, EA’s reputation seems to hinge more on AI safety (and the age-old GiveWell/ETG stuff) than FTX. If Caroline were broadly welcomed back, that would be unusual, but the most common reactions being either severe skepticism or outright condemnation is… pretty much what you’d see elsewhere, for better or for worse.
However, I’d still describe it as a “small ding” — if someone hears about this, and cares at all, they’re more likely to update negatively than positively against EA.
If you see someone cite Manifund’s decision as a reason to distrust EA, you could point them to this thread, or the comments on Austin’s Substack post. They might realize that Manifund’s decision doesn’t say much about the EA community or EA’s principles.
If you judge a situation by its salience on the day it happens, you’ll routinely overestimate its lasting impact. The Nick Bostrom letter felt like a disaster the day it came out — a perfect intersection of hot-button social issue, prominent figure, and scissor situation for the community — but in the end, I don’t think it left much of an impression on the wider world.
Should Manifund be “organizatio non grata” in EA? This is up to the loose collection of orgs and people that comprise “EA”, not any single entity. I respect anyone’s decision to update on Manifund as they see fit. If I ran EA Global or made grants, and I had to decide whether to invite/fund the org, I’d consider it (assuming they paid back the FTX money). But I would expect to end on “nope, this crosses too many lines even if I like Manifund’s work and see Austin’s perspective”.
Hiring because of “loyalty and indebtedness”, where those terms largely refer to a 501c3 donation, is illegal (to the best of my understanding, I’m not a lawyer but I’ve spent a great deal of time understanding and dealing with 501c3 rules)
To be clear, I hired Caroline because I thought she was an excellent candidate for the role. I talk about my feelings towards the Future Fund and FTX to explain why I would consider an action that other people would find controversial.
I agree with most of your points except “this is small potatoes”. Caroline is the protagonist of The Altruists coming out in November, which will likely get lots of eyes on what she’s doing now. If the series completely flops, I’d agree.
To single out one specific point … The sentiment around feeling indebted to FTX and by proxy people associated with it seems like a deeply worrying and flawed viewpoint?
If the argument was purely “she’s smart and can likely do good work, let’s give her a chance”, I’d be far less concerned.
The first time I saw SBF in a newsletter from 80k and felt skeptical, I self-censored. Even as things unfolded, I talked very sycophantically and did not manage to speak out my doubts.
I don’t want this to happen again, and I’m afraid it’s happening again, with people playing mind games similar to the ones that convinced them that SBF was living frugally and definitely trustworthy.
In doubt, I’ll leave this comment for the record, and will happilly look at it full of shame if need be:
1-I do not trust Caroline and reading the post and the discussion so far does not give me enough signal to trust her more. No hard feelings, but that’s just how things are for me and part of my surroundings. If you think she is trustworthy, it means there is probably a way to make me update? It’d probably need to be a very hard-to-fake signal. Trust has to correlate to evidence.
2-Hoo boy, my friends at the EA table in university already had a hard time. It’s gonna get even harder for them.
3-I’m afraid this will feed even more of the absolutely pointless EA vs LW war. Will not expand on that.
(2) For what it’s worth, I don’t think this particular news is likely to reach the people your friends are talking to at their university table.
You could spend years engaging with EA and never hear about Manifund, and if you did, you’d probably hear about the conference they run rather than the decision to hire the second-most-famous person involved in a financial scandal that happened when the class of 2030 were 14-year-olds.
If someone does hear about the decision, and worries that Manifest represents something bad at the heart of EA, you might show them the comment thread on this post — I think it’s a good representation of the community as a whole (some people biting bullets, many people pointing out various ethical concerns).
And on (3), I don’t see this feeding into any war much: it seems like ~90% of EA people and ~90% of LW people (maybe 95?) think this is a bad decision.
On point 2, I think this extrapolates to the whole community and its adjacents, which is why I think this decision is bonkers and potentially extremely harmful for the EA/effective giving space.
I see an opinion on these forums that seems something like, ‘We shouldn’t care what people think of us.’ I heartily disagree. Reputation does a huge amount of work in relationship building and trust. Reputational damage has real consequences (SBF etc etc).
This sort of decision makes speaking to people about the value of EA ideas much more difficult. We can’t keep shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
I weakly think that Austin can hire who he likes.
I moderately think that EA could do with caring a less about reputation and more about good work. Does Caroline do good work? Seems like the org will internalise that, so it’s probably up to donors and other orgs to decide.
That said, I think this paragraph is kind of notable:
I also feel a debt to the Future Fund, they gave me my first grant for the work I now do. But I don’t feel much debt towards Caroline there. Plus, perhaps, if i am to forgive her her debts, perhaps that should also cancel out benefits?
I believe the entire EA Bahamas Fellowship was Caroline’s idea? (But to be clear, Joel Becker was the one who took over and organized most of it.)
One kind-of-funny detail in all this: Caroline herself interviewed, then rejected Manifold initially in Dec 2021. (I doubt she remembers this; I’d forgotten until this week.) It was a later Future Fund regrantor who got us into that fellowship.
Anyways: I agree that the Future Fund team definitely deserves more of the credit than FTX—and also, FTX’s creditors deserve a lot of that credit rather than FTX management. I’ve offered at times to support folks who worked on the Future Fund or FTX Foundation; happily I think they are all now off doing amazing things.
I guess I am curious if the debt you feel brought her to your attention or changed your decision. I think I weakly endorse the former and weakly to moderately unendorse the latter.
I also think it’s brave of Austin to do this, and in general I like bravery, even if it causes people do things I don’t like. Doesn’t seem like a huge or secret kind of bravery either, which are sometimes time bad kinds.
As I read this comment section, the story my mind generates is a ‘this is bad and I want people to see that I think it’s bad’. Is that how people who are writing the negative comments feel?
Or do you feel like you could be convinced this is fine/none of your business?
Cos personally I think I could be convinced this is a bad idea, or that Manifund should not be considered an org in good standing[1]. I don’t think it would destroy me to come to that conclusion.
I probably do think that Manifund is not an easy safe org for your sweet friend who is new to EA, though I guess I think that of CEA and CG and Nonlinear too
what
Would you be able to speak more on why you decided to announce this publicly at all, rather than continue to use a pseudonym for Caroline and keep her away from outward-facing roles?
Why do you believe that the EA-wide and Manifund-specific harms you’ve already acknowledged, are worthwhile to incur, and to what end?
Do you believe there is some positive signalling value to be gained from announcing this that offsets the negative signalling?
Did you specifically trade off broader harms to EA’s reputation in order to advance Manifund’s own reputation? (My sense is Manifund has a non-overlapping target audience with EA)
I’m struggling to understand why this had to be announced, given the harms that specifically come from publicising it.
We chose to announce it today because we figured we weren’t going to be able to keep it under wraps forever; we didn’t want to anyways, per Manifund’s spirit of transparency; she was visiting town this week and in-person discussion/collaboration made the announcement easier; and my wife is due to give birth ~5 days and didn’t want to worry about the announcement while on paternity leave.
One hypothesis is that someone else was going to announce it, so it was decided it would be better if he went ahead and did it.
Then a line like ‘we did not intend to announce this, but decided to because it would have made it to light anyway’ would have sufficed, since there is a stated concern for transparency :)
You’re asking us to believe that Caroline can not only out-contribute the next best available candidate, but out-contribute that PLUS the negative externalities she brings to the project and everything associated with it. I urge you to set aside your personal feelings and consider how many projects this affects.
Congrats on the new role, Caroline!