There is much that could be said in response to this.
The tone of your comment is not very constructive. I get that you’re upset but I would love if we could aim for a higher standard on this platform.
The EA community is not a monolithic super-agent that has perfect control over what all its parts do—far from it. That is actually one of the strengths of the community (and some might even say that we give too much credit to orthodoxy). So even if everyone on this forum or the wider community did agree that this was a stupid idea, then we could still do nothing about it since it is FTX’s money and theirs to do with what they want.
It does not make sense to talk about this in terms of “the EA community” launching this fellowship in the same way that it does not make sense to say that “the EA community” thinks that [cause XYZ] is the most important one. You could of course argue that the post received a lot of positive attention and that indicates support from the wider community and that would be a good argument, but it’s far from being equivalent to everyone (or even the majority) of the EA community agreeing that this is the best way to spend a few million marginal dollars (ballpark estimate I just made up).
You are getting the direction of causality wrong. FTX moved to the Bahamas because it is crypto-friendly. That makes sense because FTX is a crypto exchange. Afaict, they want to build an EA community there because that’s where they are located which also makes sense from their perspective (I don’t necessarily agree it’s the best place for this kind of project but I can at least understand the reasoning).
You seem to be mixing two arguments here. One is the “PR disaster” angle which might be valid regardless of the actual merits of the project. The other one seems to be an argument against the actual merits of the project, but you don’t provide actual arguments on the object level, so I don’t know what to respond here.
There is much that could be said in response to this.
The tone of your comment is not very constructive. I get that you’re upset but I would love if we could aim for a higher standard on this platform.
The EA community is not a monolithic super-agent that has perfect control over what all its parts do—far from it. That is actually one of the strengths of the community (and some might even say that we give too much credit to orthodoxy). So even if everyone on this forum or the wider community did agree that this was a stupid idea, then we could still do nothing about it since it is FTX’s money and theirs to do with what they want. It does not make sense to talk about this in terms of “the EA community” launching this fellowship in the same way that it does not make sense to say that “the EA community” thinks that [cause XYZ] is the most important one. You could of course argue that the post received a lot of positive attention and that indicates support from the wider community and that would be a good argument, but it’s far from being equivalent to everyone (or even the majority) of the EA community agreeing that this is the best way to spend a few million marginal dollars (ballpark estimate I just made up).
You are getting the direction of causality wrong. FTX moved to the Bahamas because it is crypto-friendly. That makes sense because FTX is a crypto exchange. Afaict, they want to build an EA community there because that’s where they are located which also makes sense from their perspective (I don’t necessarily agree it’s the best place for this kind of project but I can at least understand the reasoning).
You seem to be mixing two arguments here. One is the “PR disaster” angle which might be valid regardless of the actual merits of the project. The other one seems to be an argument against the actual merits of the project, but you don’t provide actual arguments on the object level, so I don’t know what to respond here.