Many people right now are looking for reassurance about where the actual ethical lines are that EA is drawing. Trying to reassure those people seems like one of the primary goals of this post.
(speaking for myself. Was not involved in drafting the post, though I read an earlier version of it) FWIW this is very much not how I read the post, which is more like “organizational updates in light of FTX crashing.” RP’s financial position, legal position, approach to risk, and future hiring plans all seem to be relevant here, at least for current and future collaborators, funders, and employees. They also take up more lines than the paragraph you focused on, and carry more information than discussions about EA ethical lines, which are quite plentiful in the forum and elsewhere.
That’s possible! My guess is most readers are more interested in the condemnation part though, given the overwhelming support that posts like this have received, which have basically no content besides condemnation (and IMO with even bigger problems on being inaccurate about where to draw ethical lines).
It is plausible that RP primarily aimed to just give an organizational update, though I do think de-facto the condemnation part will just end up being more important and have a greater effect on the world and will be referred back to more frequently than the other stuff, so there might just be a genuine mismatch between the primary goals that RP has with this post, and where the majority of the effect of this post will come from.
My guess is most readers are more interested in the condemnation part though, given the overwhelming support that posts like this have received, which have basically no content besides condemnation (and IMO with even bigger problems on being inaccurate about where to draw ethical lines).
I think my post is quite clear about what sort of fraud I am talking about. If you look at the reasons that I give in my post for why fraud is wrong, they clearly don’t apply to any of examples of justifiable lying that you’ve provided here (lying to Nazis, doing the least fraudulent thing in a catch-22, lying by accident, etc.).
In particular, if we take the lying to Nazis example and see what the reasons I provide say:
When we, as humans, consider whether or not it makes sense to break the rules for our own benefit, we are running on corrupted hardware: we are very good at justifying to ourselves that seizing money and power for own benefit is really for the good of everyone. If I found myself in a situation where it seemed to me like seizing power for myself was net good, I would worry that in fact I was fooling myself—and even if I was pretty sure I wasn’t fooling myself, I would still worry that I was falling prey to the unilateralist’s curse if it wasn’t very clearly a good idea to others as well.
This clearly doesn’t apply to lying to Nazis, since it’s not a situation where money and power are being seized for oneself.
Additionally, if you’re familiar with decision theory, you’ll know that credibly pre-committing to follow certain principles—such as never engaging in fraud—is extremely advantageous, as it makes clear to other agents that you are a trustworthy actor who can be relied upon. In my opinion, I think such strategies of credible pre-commitments are extremely important for cooperation and coordination.
I think the fact that you would lie to a Nazi makes you more trustworthy for coordination and cooperation, not less.
Furthermore, I will point out, if FTX did engage in fraud here, it was clearly in fact not a good idea in this case: I think the lasting consequences to EA—and the damage caused by FTX to all of their customers and employees—will likely outweigh the altruistic funding already provided by FTX to effective causes.
And in the case of lying to Nazis, the consequences are clearly positive.
I am working on a longer response to your post, so not going to reply to you here in much depth.
Responding to this specific comment:
I don’t think your line of argumentation here makes much sense (making very broad statements like “Fraud in the service of Effective Altruism is unacceptable” but then saying “well, but of course only the kind of fraud for which I gave specific counterarguments”). Your post did not indicate that it was talking about any narrower definition of fraud, and I am confident (based on multiple conversations I’ve had about it with) that it was being read by other readers as arguing for a broad definition of fraud. If you actually think it should only apply to a narrower definition of fraud, then I think you should add a disclaimer to the top explaining what kind of fraud you are talking about, or change the title.
I think you’re wrong about how most people would interpret the post. I predict that if readers were polled on whether or not the post agreed with “lying to Nazis is wrong” the results would be heavily in favor of “no, the post does not agree with that.” If you actually had a poll that showed the opposite I would definitely update.
I think the nazi example is too loaded for various reasons (and triggers people’s “well, this is clearly some kind of thought experiment” sensors).
I think there are a number of other examples that I have listed in the comments to this post that I think would show this. E.g. something in the space of “jewish person lies about their religious affiliation in order to escape discrimination that’s unfair to them for something like scholarship money, of which they then donate a portion (partially because they do want to offset the harm that came from being dishonest)”, is I think a better experiment here.
I think people would interpret your post being pretty clearly and strongly against, in a way that doesn’t seem very justified to me (my model of whether this is OK is pretty context-dependent, to be clear).
Adding on to my other reply: from my perspective, I think that if I say “category A is bad because X, Y, Z” and you’re like “but edge case B!” and edge case B doesn’t satisfy X, Y, or Z, then clearly I’m not including it in category A.
That sounds like a fully generalized defense against all counterarguments, and I don’t think is how discourse usually works. If you say “proposition A is true about category B, for reasons X, Y, Z” and someone else is like “but here is an argument C for why proposition A is not true about category B”, then of course you don’t get to be like, “oh, well, I of course meant the subset of category B where argument C doesn’t hold”.
If I say “being honest is bad because sometimes people use true information against you” and you say “but sometimes they won’t though and actually use it to help you”, then I can’t say “well, of course I didn’t include that case when I was talking about ‘being honest’, I was just talking about being honest to people who don’t care about you”.
Or less abstractly, when you argue that giving money to GiveWell is good because money donated there can go much farther than otherwise, and then GiveWell turns out to have defrauded the money, then you don’t get to be like “oh, well, of course, in that case giving money to GiveWell was bad, and I meant to exclude the case where GiveWell was defrauding money, so my original post is still correct”.
That sounds like a fully generalized defense against all counterarguments, and I don’t think is how discourse usually works.
It’s clearly not fully general because it only applies to excluding edge cases that don’t satisfy the reasons I explicitly state in the post.
If you say “proposition A is true about category B, for reasons X, Y, Z” and someone else is like “but here is an argument C for why proposition A is not true about category B”, then of course you don’t get to be like, “oh, well, I of course meant the subset of category B where argument C doesn’t hold”.
Sure, but that’s not what happened. There are some pretty big disanalogies between the scenarios you’re describing and what actually happened:
The question is about what activities belong to the vague, poorly defined category of “fraud,” not about the truth of some clearly stated “proposition A.” When someone says “category A has property X,” for any vague category A—which is basically all categories of things—there will always be edge cases where it’s not clear.
You’re not presenting some new “argument C” for why fraud is good actually. You’re just saying there are edge cases where my arguments don’t apply. Which is obviously correct! But just because there are always edge cases for all categories—it’s effectively just an objection to the use of categories at all.
Furthermore, in this case, I pretty clearly laid out exactly why I thought fraud was bad. Which gives you a lot of evidence to figure out what class of things I was centrally pointing to when using “fraud” as a general category, and it’s pretty clear based on those reasons that the examples you’re providing don’t fit into that category.
The question is about what activities belong to the vague, poorly defined category of “fraud,” not about the truth of some clearly stated “proposition A.” When someone says “category A has property X,” for any vague category A—which is basically all categories of things—there will always be edge cases where it’s not clear.
I mean, indeed the combination of “fraud is a vague, poorly defined category” together with a strong condemnation of said “fraud”, without much explicit guidance on what kind of thing you are talking about, is what I am objecting to in your post (among some other things, but again, seems better to leave that up to my more thorough response).
I think you are vastly overestimating how transparent the boundaries of the fraud concept are that you are trying to point to. Like, I don’t know whether you meant to include half of the examples I listed on this thread, and I don’t think other readers of your post do. Nevertheless you called for strong condemnation of that ill-defined category.
I think the average reader of your post will leave with a feeling that they are supposed to be backing up some kind of clear line, because that’s the language that your post is written in. But there is no clear line, and your post does not actually meaningfully commit us to anything, or should serve as any kind of clear sign to the external world about where our ethical lines are.
Of course we oppose fraud of the type that Sam committed, that fraud exploded violently and was also incredibly reckless and was likely even net-negative by Sam’s own goals, but that’s obvious and not an interesting statement and is not actually what your post is primarily saying (indeed, it is saying that we should condemn fraud independently of the details of the FTX case, whatever that means).
I think what we owe the world is both reflection about where our actual lines are (and how the ones that we did indeed have might have contributed to this situation), as well as honest and precise statements about what kinds of things we might actually consider doing in the future. I don’t think your post is helping with either, but instead feels to me like an inwards-directed applause light for “fraud bad”, in a way that does not give people who have genuine concerns about where our moral lines are (which includes me) much comfort or reassurance.
I mean, indeed the combination of “fraud is a vague, poorly defined category” together with a strong condemnation of said “fraud”, without much explicit guidance on what kind of thing you are talking about, is what I am objecting to in your post.
I guess I don’t really think this is a problem. We’re perfectly comfortable with statements like “murder is wrong” while also understanding that “but killing Hitler would be okay.” I don’t mean to say that talking about the edge cases isn’t ever helpful—in fact, I think it can be quite useful to try to be clear about what’s happening on the edges in certain cases, since it can sometimes be quite relevant. But I don’t see that as a reason to object to someone saying “murder is wrong.”
To be clear, if your criticism is “the post doesn’t say much beyond the obvious,” I think that’s basically correct—it was a short post and wasn’t intended to accomplish much more than basic common knowledge building around this sort of fraud being bad even when done with ostensibly altruistic motivations. And I agree that further posts discussing more clearly how to think about various edge cases would be a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion (though I don’t personally plan to write such a post because I think I have more valuable things to do with my time).
However, if your criticism is “your post says edge case B is bad but edge case B is actually good,” I think that’s a pretty silly criticism that seems like it just doesn’t really understand or engage with the inherent fuzziness of conceptual categories.
think what we owe the world is both reflection about where our actual lines are (and how the ones that we did indeed have might have contributed to this situation), as well as honest and precise statements about what kinds of things we might actually consider doing in the future.
I actually state in the post that I agree with this. From my post:
In that spirit, I think it’s worth us carefully confronting the moral question here: is fraud in the service of raising money for effective causes wrong?
Perhaps that is not as clear as you would like, but like I said it was a short post. And that sentence is pretty clearly saying that I think it’s worthwhile for us to try to carefully confront the moral question of what is okay and what is not—which the post then attempts to start the discussion on by providing some of what I think.
I do think your post is making actually answering that question as a community harder, because you yourself answer that question with “we unequivocally need to condemn this behavior” in a form that implies strong moral censure to anyone who argues the opposite.
You also said that we should do so independently of the facts of the FTX case, which feels weird to me, because I sure think the details of the case are very relevant to what ethical lines I want to draw in the future.
The section you quote here reads to me as a rhetorical question. You say “carefully”, but you just answer the question yourself in the next sentence and say that the answer “clearly” is the way you say it is. I don’t think your post invites discussion or discourse about where the lines of fraud are, or when we do think deception is acceptable, or generally reflecting on our moral principles.
in a form that implies strong moral censure to anyone who argues the opposite
I don’t think this and didn’t say it. If you have any quotes from the post that you think say this, I’d be happy to edit it to be more clear, but from my perspective it feels like you’re inventing a straw man to be mad at rather than actually engaging with what I said.
You also said that we should do so independently of the facts of the FTX case, which feels weird to me, because I sure think the details of the case are very relevant to what ethical lines I want to draw in the future.
I think that, for the most part, you should be drawing your ethical boundaries in a way that is logically prior to learning about these sorts of facts. Otherwise it’s very hard to cooperate with you, for example.
The section you quote here reads to me as a rhetorical question.
It isn’t intended as a rhetorical question. I am being quite sincere there, though rereading it, I see how you could be confused. I just edited that section to the following:
In that spirit, I think it’s worth us carefully confronting the moral question here: is fraud in the service of raising money for effective causes wrong? This is a thorny moral question that is worth nuanced discussion, and I don’t claim to have all the answers.
Nevertheless, I think fraud in the service of effective altruism is basically unacceptable—and that’s as someone who is about as hardcore of a total utilitarian as it is possible to be.
I don’t think this and didn’t say it. If you have any quotes from the post that you think say this, I’d be happy to edit it to be more clear, but from my perspective it feels like you’re inventing a straw man to be mad at rather than actually engaging with what I said.
I mean, the title of your post starts with “We must be very clear”. This at least to me communicated an attitude that discourages people prominently associated with EA going like “I don’t know man, I don’t think I stand behind this”. I don’t really know what other purpose the “we must be very clear” here serves besides trying to indicate that you think it’s very important that EA projects a unified front here.
And I think independently of your intention, I am confident that your post has also not made other people excited about discussing the actual ethical lines here, based on conversations I’ve had with other people about how they relate to your post (many of which like the post, but exactly for the reason that they don’t want to see people defending fraud, which would look quite bad for us).
I think that, for the most part, you should be drawing your ethical boundaries in a way that is logically prior to learning about these sorts of facts. Otherwise it’s very hard to cooperate with you, for example.
Yeah, I think I disagree with this. I think most of my ethical boundaries are pretty contingent on facts about history and what kind of cognitive algorithms seem to be perform well or badly, and indeed almost all my curiosities when trying to actually genuinely answer the question of when fraud is acceptable consist of questions about the empirical details of the world, like “to what degree is your environment coercive so that fraud is justified?” and “to what degree is fraud widespread?” and “how many people does fraud seem to hurt?”, and so on.
I don’t think this makes me harder to coordinate with. Indeed, I think being receptive to empirical feedback about ethical rules is I think quite important for being able to be cooperated with, since it gives people the confidence that I will update on evidence that some cognitive strategy, or some attitude, or some moral perspective causes harm.
I don’t really know what other purpose the “we must be very clear” here serves besides trying to indicate that you think it’s very important that EA projects a unified front here.
I am absolutely intending to communicate that I think it would be good for people to say that they think fraud is bad. But that doesn’t mean that I think we should condemn people who disagree regarding whether saying that is good or not. Rather, I think discussion about whether it’s a good idea for people to condemn fraud seems great to me, and my post was an attempt to provide my (short, abbreviated) take on that question.
(speaking for myself. Was not involved in drafting the post, though I read an earlier version of it) FWIW this is very much not how I read the post, which is more like “organizational updates in light of FTX crashing.” RP’s financial position, legal position, approach to risk, and future hiring plans all seem to be relevant here, at least for current and future collaborators, funders, and employees. They also take up more lines than the paragraph you focused on, and carry more information than discussions about EA ethical lines, which are quite plentiful in the forum and elsewhere.
That’s possible! My guess is most readers are more interested in the condemnation part though, given the overwhelming support that posts like this have received, which have basically no content besides condemnation (and IMO with even bigger problems on being inaccurate about where to draw ethical lines).
It is plausible that RP primarily aimed to just give an organizational update, though I do think de-facto the condemnation part will just end up being more important and have a greater effect on the world and will be referred back to more frequently than the other stuff, so there might just be a genuine mismatch between the primary goals that RP has with this post, and where the majority of the effect of this post will come from.
I think my post is quite clear about what sort of fraud I am talking about. If you look at the reasons that I give in my post for why fraud is wrong, they clearly don’t apply to any of examples of justifiable lying that you’ve provided here (lying to Nazis, doing the least fraudulent thing in a catch-22, lying by accident, etc.).
In particular, if we take the lying to Nazis example and see what the reasons I provide say:
This clearly doesn’t apply to lying to Nazis, since it’s not a situation where money and power are being seized for oneself.
I think the fact that you would lie to a Nazi makes you more trustworthy for coordination and cooperation, not less.
And in the case of lying to Nazis, the consequences are clearly positive.
I am working on a longer response to your post, so not going to reply to you here in much depth.
Responding to this specific comment:
I don’t think your line of argumentation here makes much sense (making very broad statements like “Fraud in the service of Effective Altruism is unacceptable” but then saying “well, but of course only the kind of fraud for which I gave specific counterarguments”). Your post did not indicate that it was talking about any narrower definition of fraud, and I am confident (based on multiple conversations I’ve had about it with) that it was being read by other readers as arguing for a broad definition of fraud. If you actually think it should only apply to a narrower definition of fraud, then I think you should add a disclaimer to the top explaining what kind of fraud you are talking about, or change the title.
I think you’re wrong about how most people would interpret the post. I predict that if readers were polled on whether or not the post agreed with “lying to Nazis is wrong” the results would be heavily in favor of “no, the post does not agree with that.” If you actually had a poll that showed the opposite I would definitely update.
I think the nazi example is too loaded for various reasons (and triggers people’s “well, this is clearly some kind of thought experiment” sensors).
I think there are a number of other examples that I have listed in the comments to this post that I think would show this. E.g. something in the space of “jewish person lies about their religious affiliation in order to escape discrimination that’s unfair to them for something like scholarship money, of which they then donate a portion (partially because they do want to offset the harm that came from being dishonest)”, is I think a better experiment here.
I think people would interpret your post being pretty clearly and strongly against, in a way that doesn’t seem very justified to me (my model of whether this is OK is pretty context-dependent, to be clear).
Adding on to my other reply: from my perspective, I think that if I say “category A is bad because X, Y, Z” and you’re like “but edge case B!” and edge case B doesn’t satisfy X, Y, or Z, then clearly I’m not including it in category A.
That sounds like a fully generalized defense against all counterarguments, and I don’t think is how discourse usually works. If you say “proposition A is true about category B, for reasons X, Y, Z” and someone else is like “but here is an argument C for why proposition A is not true about category B”, then of course you don’t get to be like, “oh, well, I of course meant the subset of category B where argument C doesn’t hold”.
If I say “being honest is bad because sometimes people use true information against you” and you say “but sometimes they won’t though and actually use it to help you”, then I can’t say “well, of course I didn’t include that case when I was talking about ‘being honest’, I was just talking about being honest to people who don’t care about you”.
Or less abstractly, when you argue that giving money to GiveWell is good because money donated there can go much farther than otherwise, and then GiveWell turns out to have defrauded the money, then you don’t get to be like “oh, well, of course, in that case giving money to GiveWell was bad, and I meant to exclude the case where GiveWell was defrauding money, so my original post is still correct”.
It’s clearly not fully general because it only applies to excluding edge cases that don’t satisfy the reasons I explicitly state in the post.
Sure, but that’s not what happened. There are some pretty big disanalogies between the scenarios you’re describing and what actually happened:
The question is about what activities belong to the vague, poorly defined category of “fraud,” not about the truth of some clearly stated “proposition A.” When someone says “category A has property X,” for any vague category A—which is basically all categories of things—there will always be edge cases where it’s not clear.
You’re not presenting some new “argument C” for why fraud is good actually. You’re just saying there are edge cases where my arguments don’t apply. Which is obviously correct! But just because there are always edge cases for all categories—it’s effectively just an objection to the use of categories at all.
Furthermore, in this case, I pretty clearly laid out exactly why I thought fraud was bad. Which gives you a lot of evidence to figure out what class of things I was centrally pointing to when using “fraud” as a general category, and it’s pretty clear based on those reasons that the examples you’re providing don’t fit into that category.
I mean, indeed the combination of “fraud is a vague, poorly defined category” together with a strong condemnation of said “fraud”, without much explicit guidance on what kind of thing you are talking about, is what I am objecting to in your post (among some other things, but again, seems better to leave that up to my more thorough response).
I think you are vastly overestimating how transparent the boundaries of the fraud concept are that you are trying to point to. Like, I don’t know whether you meant to include half of the examples I listed on this thread, and I don’t think other readers of your post do. Nevertheless you called for strong condemnation of that ill-defined category.
I think the average reader of your post will leave with a feeling that they are supposed to be backing up some kind of clear line, because that’s the language that your post is written in. But there is no clear line, and your post does not actually meaningfully commit us to anything, or should serve as any kind of clear sign to the external world about where our ethical lines are.
Of course we oppose fraud of the type that Sam committed, that fraud exploded violently and was also incredibly reckless and was likely even net-negative by Sam’s own goals, but that’s obvious and not an interesting statement and is not actually what your post is primarily saying (indeed, it is saying that we should condemn fraud independently of the details of the FTX case, whatever that means).
I think what we owe the world is both reflection about where our actual lines are (and how the ones that we did indeed have might have contributed to this situation), as well as honest and precise statements about what kinds of things we might actually consider doing in the future. I don’t think your post is helping with either, but instead feels to me like an inwards-directed applause light for “fraud bad”, in a way that does not give people who have genuine concerns about where our moral lines are (which includes me) much comfort or reassurance.
I guess I don’t really think this is a problem. We’re perfectly comfortable with statements like “murder is wrong” while also understanding that “but killing Hitler would be okay.” I don’t mean to say that talking about the edge cases isn’t ever helpful—in fact, I think it can be quite useful to try to be clear about what’s happening on the edges in certain cases, since it can sometimes be quite relevant. But I don’t see that as a reason to object to someone saying “murder is wrong.”
To be clear, if your criticism is “the post doesn’t say much beyond the obvious,” I think that’s basically correct—it was a short post and wasn’t intended to accomplish much more than basic common knowledge building around this sort of fraud being bad even when done with ostensibly altruistic motivations. And I agree that further posts discussing more clearly how to think about various edge cases would be a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion (though I don’t personally plan to write such a post because I think I have more valuable things to do with my time).
However, if your criticism is “your post says edge case B is bad but edge case B is actually good,” I think that’s a pretty silly criticism that seems like it just doesn’t really understand or engage with the inherent fuzziness of conceptual categories.
I actually state in the post that I agree with this. From my post:
Perhaps that is not as clear as you would like, but like I said it was a short post. And that sentence is pretty clearly saying that I think it’s worthwhile for us to try to carefully confront the moral question of what is okay and what is not—which the post then attempts to start the discussion on by providing some of what I think.
I do think your post is making actually answering that question as a community harder, because you yourself answer that question with “we unequivocally need to condemn this behavior” in a form that implies strong moral censure to anyone who argues the opposite.
You also said that we should do so independently of the facts of the FTX case, which feels weird to me, because I sure think the details of the case are very relevant to what ethical lines I want to draw in the future.
The section you quote here reads to me as a rhetorical question. You say “carefully”, but you just answer the question yourself in the next sentence and say that the answer “clearly” is the way you say it is. I don’t think your post invites discussion or discourse about where the lines of fraud are, or when we do think deception is acceptable, or generally reflecting on our moral principles.
I don’t think this and didn’t say it. If you have any quotes from the post that you think say this, I’d be happy to edit it to be more clear, but from my perspective it feels like you’re inventing a straw man to be mad at rather than actually engaging with what I said.
I think that, for the most part, you should be drawing your ethical boundaries in a way that is logically prior to learning about these sorts of facts. Otherwise it’s very hard to cooperate with you, for example.
It isn’t intended as a rhetorical question. I am being quite sincere there, though rereading it, I see how you could be confused. I just edited that section to the following:
I mean, the title of your post starts with “We must be very clear”. This at least to me communicated an attitude that discourages people prominently associated with EA going like “I don’t know man, I don’t think I stand behind this”. I don’t really know what other purpose the “we must be very clear” here serves besides trying to indicate that you think it’s very important that EA projects a unified front here.
And I think independently of your intention, I am confident that your post has also not made other people excited about discussing the actual ethical lines here, based on conversations I’ve had with other people about how they relate to your post (many of which like the post, but exactly for the reason that they don’t want to see people defending fraud, which would look quite bad for us).
Yeah, I think I disagree with this. I think most of my ethical boundaries are pretty contingent on facts about history and what kind of cognitive algorithms seem to be perform well or badly, and indeed almost all my curiosities when trying to actually genuinely answer the question of when fraud is acceptable consist of questions about the empirical details of the world, like “to what degree is your environment coercive so that fraud is justified?” and “to what degree is fraud widespread?” and “how many people does fraud seem to hurt?”, and so on.
I don’t think this makes me harder to coordinate with. Indeed, I think being receptive to empirical feedback about ethical rules is I think quite important for being able to be cooperated with, since it gives people the confidence that I will update on evidence that some cognitive strategy, or some attitude, or some moral perspective causes harm.
I am absolutely intending to communicate that I think it would be good for people to say that they think fraud is bad. But that doesn’t mean that I think we should condemn people who disagree regarding whether saying that is good or not. Rather, I think discussion about whether it’s a good idea for people to condemn fraud seems great to me, and my post was an attempt to provide my (short, abbreviated) take on that question.