FTX was a high-trust/bad actor shock event. The movement probably needs to operate for a bit in a low-trust environment to earn back the conditions that allow high-trust. Or, the movement can insist on high-trust at the expense of losing members who no longer feel comfortable or safe trusting others completely.
I was arguing to the contrary: the inquiries post-FTX have shown very little untrustworthy behaviour in the community as a whole. So if anything we should regard this as a validation of our trust.
Certainly I wouldn’t trust FTX after this, but I think extending the reduced trust to the rest of the community in any significant way is mistaken.
Perhaps you’re worried about more things like FTX happening in the future. To that I would just accept the risk—being high-trust means you can get suckered. If it doesn’t happen too often, maybe it’s worth the cost. And right after the event is the classic time for people to highly overestimate how likely such events will be (or how likely we should have considered them to be in the past).
The key actors involved in FTX were extremely close to the EA community. SBF became involved after a 1:1? conversation with Will MacAskill, worked at CEA for a short while, held prime speaking slots at EAG, and set up and funded a key organization (FTX fund). Caroline held an officer position in her university EA group. It’s fair to say the people at the center of the fraud were embedded and more tightly aligned with the EA movement than most people connected with EA. It’s a classic example of high-trust / bad actors—it only takes a few of them to cause serious damage.
Is this just a black swan event? Perhaps.
Are there more bad actors in the EA community? Perhaps.
You are certainly welcome to keeping treating EA as high-trust community, but others have good reason not to.
SBF became involved after a 1:1? conversation with Will MacAskill, worked at CEA for a short while, held prime speaking slots at EAG, and set up and funded a key organization (FTX fund).
Only the last point seems concerning to me because Sam was working closely together with figures very central within EA at a time when some of the red flags should already have been visible. By contrast, I think it’s unreasonable to hold anyone responsible for another person’s negative impact if you motivate them to do something in a 1-on-1 conversation or if some “bad actor” briefly worked at [central EA organization]. We can’t be responsible for the behavior of everyone we ever interact with! It’s not always possible to vet people’s character in a single conversation or even during a brief period of working together. (And sometimes people get more corrupted over time – though I’d expect there to be early warning signs pretty much always.) I think the EA community made big mistakes with respect to FTX, but that’s precisely because many EAs have interacted with Sam over many years and worked closely together with him before the collapse.
“[T]he inquiries post-FTX” have been largely deflected due to legal concerns. I’m not going to second-guess the presumed advice of the relevant lawyers here, but that’s hardly the same as there having been a public and independent investigation that reveals the potential concerns to have been unfounded. Given the absence of any real information (other than knowing that someone senior heard that SBF was under criminal investigation, shared that report, and got muted responses), the range of plausible narratives in my view ranges from no errors to ordinary errors of judgment to severe errors of judgment (which would provide significant reason to believe that the relevant actors’ judgment is “untrustworthy” in the sense of not being reliable) to willful blindness.
The really tricky issue is something like second impact syndrome, where death or severe injury occurs because the head was hit a second time before healing from the first.
So I would be a little more careful for a few years for EA.
I was arguing to the contrary: the inquiries post-FTX have shown very little untrustworthy behaviour in the community as a whole. So if anything we should regard this as a validation of our trust.
Certainly I wouldn’t trust FTX after this, but I think extending the reduced trust to the rest of the community in any significant way is mistaken.
Perhaps you’re worried about more things like FTX happening in the future. To that I would just accept the risk—being high-trust means you can get suckered. If it doesn’t happen too often, maybe it’s worth the cost. And right after the event is the classic time for people to highly overestimate how likely such events will be (or how likely we should have considered them to be in the past).
The key actors involved in FTX were extremely close to the EA community. SBF became involved after a 1:1? conversation with Will MacAskill, worked at CEA for a short while, held prime speaking slots at EAG, and set up and funded a key organization (FTX fund). Caroline held an officer position in her university EA group. It’s fair to say the people at the center of the fraud were embedded and more tightly aligned with the EA movement than most people connected with EA. It’s a classic example of high-trust / bad actors—it only takes a few of them to cause serious damage.
Is this just a black swan event? Perhaps. Are there more bad actors in the EA community? Perhaps.
You are certainly welcome to keeping treating EA as high-trust community, but others have good reason not to.
Only the last point seems concerning to me because Sam was working closely together with figures very central within EA at a time when some of the red flags should already have been visible. By contrast, I think it’s unreasonable to hold anyone responsible for another person’s negative impact if you motivate them to do something in a 1-on-1 conversation or if some “bad actor” briefly worked at [central EA organization]. We can’t be responsible for the behavior of everyone we ever interact with! It’s not always possible to vet people’s character in a single conversation or even during a brief period of working together. (And sometimes people get more corrupted over time – though I’d expect there to be early warning signs pretty much always.) I think the EA community made big mistakes with respect to FTX, but that’s precisely because many EAs have interacted with Sam over many years and worked closely together with him before the collapse.
“[T]he inquiries post-FTX” have been largely deflected due to legal concerns. I’m not going to second-guess the presumed advice of the relevant lawyers here, but that’s hardly the same as there having been a public and independent investigation that reveals the potential concerns to have been unfounded. Given the absence of any real information (other than knowing that someone senior heard that SBF was under criminal investigation, shared that report, and got muted responses), the range of plausible narratives in my view ranges from no errors to ordinary errors of judgment to severe errors of judgment (which would provide significant reason to believe that the relevant actors’ judgment is “untrustworthy” in the sense of not being reliable) to willful blindness.
The really tricky issue is something like second impact syndrome, where death or severe injury occurs because the head was hit a second time before healing from the first.
So I would be a little more careful for a few years for EA.