I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen.
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this.
My understanding is that you didn’t ask SBF whether he wanted the text published. More importantly, I am confident you would have been able to correctly predict that he would say “no” if you did ask. Hence, why you didn’t.
The reasons SBF wouldn’t want his DMs published are too obvious to belabor: he said things like “fuck regulators”, that his “ethics” were nothing but a cover for PR, and he spoke in a conversationalist rather than professional tone. Even if you actually thought he would probably be OK with those messages being leaked, an ethical journalist would at least ask, because of the highly plausible “no” you would have received.
In my opinion, publishing the DMs without his consent might have been the right thing to do, for the greater good. I do not think you’re a bad person for doing it. But I don’t think it makes sense to have expected SBF to want the conversation to be published, and I don’t think it makes sense for you to claim you thought that.
I’m also not persuaded by the appeal journalistic norms, since I think journalistic norms generally fall well below high ethical standards.
That doesn’t seem plausible to me. I haven’t seen any substantive reason for why you should have thought that.
Again, SBF said things like “fuck regulators” and you knew that he was trying to foster a good public image to regulators. I find the idea that you thought that he thought people would react positively to the leaks highly implausible. And the “fuck regulators” comment was not the only example of something that strikes me as a thing he obviously meant to keep private. The whole chat log was littered with things that he likely did not want public.
And again, you could have just asked him whether he wanted the DMs published.
In my opinion, you were either very naive about what he expected, or you’re not being fully honest about what you really thought, and I don’t think either possibility reflects well on what you did.
- if you asked SBF “did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?” the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to.
- if you asked SBF “is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad”, the answer would be no.
- if you asked me “is SBF okay with this being published”, I think I would have said “I know he knows I’m writing about it and I’m pretty damn sure he knows how “on the record” works but he’s probably going to be mad about the tone and contents”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
This is not the claim I am making. I don’t think you thought that, or claimed that.
The most important claim I’m trying to make is that I think it was obvious that SBF would not want those DMs published, and so it doesn’t make sense for you to claim you thought he would be OK with it.
Note that I am not saying that publishing those DMs is definitely bad. Again, it might have been worth it to violate his consent for the greater good. I’m still uncertain about the ethics of violating someone’s consent like that, but it’s a plausible perspective.
I mostly just don’t think you should say you thought he’d be OK with you publishing the DMs, because I think that’s very likely false.
But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn’t object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.
People (must) behave according to complex norms in very competitive (hostile) external environments
If they don’t, they don’t exist, and we’re just in an internet forum pretty much LARPing.
It’s difficult to draw bright lines—it’s impossible.
For the issue of Piper’s quoting, very adjacent worlds has other outcomes that are more negative
Clearly, sentiment about SBF and the consequent effects played a role in the acceptability of quoting him
Piper’s explanations are doing a lot of dancing here
While there’s probably relevance to “deontological” or “utilitarian” rules and philosophy, the quality of discussion about utilitarianism ha been really bad in the wake of the FTX crisis.
The EA forum and EA ability in general doesn’t really provide good ways to discuss this
To be precise, it’s something like, “high quality spanning vectors” for discussion don’t really exist here. Like, Parfit is not enough.
Don’t get me started on the “Sequences”
I think the above is a useful set of content.
There’s another relevant set of content:
EA thinks it looks bad because it discusses things, but I suspect if it was more competent and had greater intellectual depth, it wouldn’t need to do this awkward dance, and at least in this aspect, I strongly agree with Ollie (? I thought it was Oliver but maybe I’m not cool enough to use that name?)
It’s not Will or the “utilitarians” fault.
Unfortunately “walking in a straight line” to go deontological probably is counterproductive.
More to the heart of the matter, the blogs and “intellectual leaders” of EA are often second rate, and sometimes much worse, and this is pretty suffocating.
To be clear, Will is good or great
For the forum, IMO, Gertler pretty much just climbed the hill and hit a local max that looks presentable. He never understood the issues, and left Lizka and others with deep structural challenges.
To be fair, the skills involved are huge
I don’t have the spoons for this right now, even the outline above is low quality.
Re “fuck regulators”, I guess it’s possible that in the mental state he was in, he thought this would go down well with the crypto community and he could regain some of their trust that way, or something. Recently the crypto community had turned against him for being too cosy with regulators in the US. See e.g. this clip that went viral on crypto twitter recently (28 Oct), and the reaction to his proposed regulations.
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this.
My understanding is that you didn’t ask SBF whether he wanted the text published. More importantly, I am confident you would have been able to correctly predict that he would say “no” if you did ask. Hence, why you didn’t.
The reasons SBF wouldn’t want his DMs published are too obvious to belabor: he said things like “fuck regulators”, that his “ethics” were nothing but a cover for PR, and he spoke in a conversationalist rather than professional tone. Even if you actually thought he would probably be OK with those messages being leaked, an ethical journalist would at least ask, because of the highly plausible “no” you would have received.
In my opinion, publishing the DMs without his consent might have been the right thing to do, for the greater good. I do not think you’re a bad person for doing it. But I don’t think it makes sense to have expected SBF to want the conversation to be published, and I don’t think it makes sense for you to claim you thought that.
I’m also not persuaded by the appeal journalistic norms, since I think journalistic norms generally fall well below high ethical standards.
I believed that SBF thought not that the conversation was secret but that the coverage would be positive.
That doesn’t seem plausible to me. I haven’t seen any substantive reason for why you should have thought that.
Again, SBF said things like “fuck regulators” and you knew that he was trying to foster a good public image to regulators. I find the idea that you thought that he thought people would react positively to the leaks highly implausible. And the “fuck regulators” comment was not the only example of something that strikes me as a thing he obviously meant to keep private. The whole chat log was littered with things that he likely did not want public.
And again, you could have just asked him whether he wanted the DMs published.
In my opinion, you were either very naive about what he expected, or you’re not being fully honest about what you really thought, and I don’t think either possibility reflects well on what you did.
My best guess is:
- if you asked SBF “did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?” the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to.
- if you asked SBF “is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad”, the answer would be no.
- if you asked me “is SBF okay with this being published”, I think I would have said “I know he knows I’m writing about it and I’m pretty damn sure he knows how “on the record” works but he’s probably going to be mad about the tone and contents”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
This is not the claim I am making. I don’t think you thought that, or claimed that.
The most important claim I’m trying to make is that I think it was obvious that SBF would not want those DMs published, and so it doesn’t make sense for you to claim you thought he would be OK with it.
Note that I am not saying that publishing those DMs is definitely bad. Again, it might have been worth it to violate his consent for the greater good. I’m still uncertain about the ethics of violating someone’s consent like that, but it’s a plausible perspective.
I mostly just don’t think you should say you thought he’d be OK with you publishing the DMs, because I think that’s very likely false.
But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn’t object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.
I guess he could have also not been reading carefully and missed that somehow?
(inhales slowly)
Like, I think you guys don’t understand what this means. It’s extremely relevant and poetic to this thread developing.
https://www.shakespearetheatre.org/watch-listen/coriolanus-and-the-body-politic-martius-butterfly/
Well, Ben or another mod hit this with a −8 vote.
Anyhoo, the point that is being made is:
People (must) behave according to complex norms in very competitive (hostile) external environments
If they don’t, they don’t exist, and we’re just in an internet forum pretty much LARPing.
It’s difficult to draw bright lines—it’s impossible.
For the issue of Piper’s quoting, very adjacent worlds has other outcomes that are more negative
Clearly, sentiment about SBF and the consequent effects played a role in the acceptability of quoting him
Piper’s explanations are doing a lot of dancing here
While there’s probably relevance to “deontological” or “utilitarian” rules and philosophy, the quality of discussion about utilitarianism ha been really bad in the wake of the FTX crisis.
The EA forum and EA ability in general doesn’t really provide good ways to discuss this
To be precise, it’s something like, “high quality spanning vectors” for discussion don’t really exist here. Like, Parfit is not enough.
Don’t get me started on the “Sequences”
I think the above is a useful set of content.
There’s another relevant set of content:
EA thinks it looks bad because it discusses things, but I suspect if it was more competent and had greater intellectual depth, it wouldn’t need to do this awkward dance, and at least in this aspect, I strongly agree with Ollie (? I thought it was Oliver but maybe I’m not cool enough to use that name?)
It’s not Will or the “utilitarians” fault.
Unfortunately “walking in a straight line” to go deontological probably is counterproductive.
More to the heart of the matter, the blogs and “intellectual leaders” of EA are often second rate, and sometimes much worse, and this is pretty suffocating.
To be clear, Will is good or great
For the forum, IMO, Gertler pretty much just climbed the hill and hit a local max that looks presentable. He never understood the issues, and left Lizka and others with deep structural challenges.
To be fair, the skills involved are huge
I don’t have the spoons for this right now, even the outline above is low quality.
Re “fuck regulators”, I guess it’s possible that in the mental state he was in, he thought this would go down well with the crypto community and he could regain some of their trust that way, or something. Recently the crypto community had turned against him for being too cosy with regulators in the US. See e.g. this clip that went viral on crypto twitter recently (28 Oct), and the reaction to his proposed regulations.