Before FTX collapsed, the company was aggressively marketing crypto, a highly speculative and volatile asset class, to unsophisticated retail investors. IMO this should have been a red flag, because it’s a harmful career in the form of “Marketing and R&D for compulsive behaviours such as [...] gambling” from this list: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/what-are-the-10-most-harmful-jobs/ . This should have made the EA community apply more scrutiny towards SBF and FTX and avoid making him the public face of the movement as much as he was.
Is it fair to say that EA made him the public face of the movement, or did he make himself the face of the movement?
I know of some instances of him being promoted by EA related organizations (such as 80k), and most likely there are a bunch of cases that I don’t know about.
My impression thus far has been that he mostly ended up a public EA figure, because he was famous for non EA-related reasons and being a famous person he identified publicly and frequently as an effective altruist. This is based on only cursory information, so please correct me if that impression is wrong.
Before FTX collapsed, the company was aggressively marketing crypto, a highly speculative and volatile asset class, to unsophisticated retail investors. IMO this should have been a red flag, because it’s a harmful career in the form of “Marketing and R&D for compulsive behaviours such as [...] gambling” from this list: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/what-are-the-10-most-harmful-jobs/ . This should have made the EA community apply more scrutiny towards SBF and FTX and avoid making him the public face of the movement as much as he was.
Is it fair to say that EA made him the public face of the movement, or did he make himself the face of the movement?
I know of some instances of him being promoted by EA related organizations (such as 80k), and most likely there are a bunch of cases that I don’t know about.
My impression thus far has been that he mostly ended up a public EA figure, because he was famous for non EA-related reasons and being a famous person he identified publicly and frequently as an effective altruist. This is based on only cursory information, so please correct me if that impression is wrong.