Surely everyone on this thread realises that there should be a relevant distinction between being some random hack and ‘the EA journalist’. We’re holding her to higher standards than general journalistic norms.
I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were:
- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews.
- Obviously SBF’s communications right now are going to be subpoenaed and presented in court. I can still get why he might not want them in the news, but that does seem like a significant constraint on how private he expected them to be. If we’d talked over Signal I’d feel differently.
- When I emailed him “hey! Writing about what you said happened and your plans now. Just wanted to confirm you still have access to your Twitter account and that isn’t a troll or something- Kelsey Piper, Vox Media”, it seemed possible to me that he would claim it was a troll, or decline to answer, or ask me to take the interview retroactively off the record (which by journalism norms I am not obliged to do, but I would probably have worked with him to at least some degree—there are complicated moral tradeoffs in both directions, at that point!). But he didn’t, which I thought was because he was okay with my writing a story about our conversation.
With all that said, I was less careful with SBF than I am with most people. With most people, if it seemed possible they were under seriously mind-altering substances, I’d hesitate to interview them. If I was not completely sure they understood they might appear in press, I would remind them, and maybe even at particularly salacious quotes ask “okay to quote you on that?” Not all journalists do that, but I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to be untrustworthy to people.
But in this case it felt to me like I had significant duties in the other direction—to get answers that made sense, if there were any, to the question of how this happened and (though as expected this did not have a thrilling answer) where the money was. A $10billion missing funds situation is just very very very different and much larger than most situations, and I think the right place on that tradeoff is also different.
I don’t think (as we all fret about these days) that the ends justify the means, or that it’s okay to break commitments of confidentiality as long as you have a good enough reason. I think I do believe that it’s okay to not be as proactive about commitments of confidentiality, not work as hard to remind people that they probably should want confidentiality when they seem perfectly happy to talk to you, when something happened to ten billion dollars.
I think it might be good if journalists had something like the Miranda warnings, where if you want to quote someone you have to first explicitly with established language warn them how journalism works and how to opt out, and if you failed to warn them then you don’t get to quote them. I think I would sign on to make that a norm of journalism. But it isn’t, and so I’m just balancing a lot of things that all seem important.
It seems possible that SBF thought that as a person involved in EA I wouldn’t hurt him, another person involved in EA. I don’t think that would be the right approach. It is not my job to protect EA, and that’s not what I do. It’s my job to try to make the world a better place through saying true things on topics that really really matter. I share values and priorities with many of you here, but my job comes with obligations and duties on top of those, and I think it’s overall good for the world that that’s so.
With all that said—I never intend to take a subject by surprise in publishing, and thought I had not done so. I wish that had happened differently, though I think I had serious professional obligations to write about this conversation.
*** This is edited. The original said ‘I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen’, which is as written kind of absurd—obviously he didn’t want the mean stuff in print—so I’m trying to be clearer about what specifically I thought he understood and what specifically I thought he knew.
I’m going to argue a line here that I’m uncertain of.
The key question in this part of the thread seems to be “Did SBF expect you to be on the record?”. To which, I guess you were scared the answer was no, hence you didn’t ask during the initial conversation. Even in the follow up you don’t say “can I share our screenshots”.
I can see the social benefit to the conversation. But I guess I don’t necessarily buy the “I did the journalism norms thing so it’s okay”. I think I buy “it provided a lot of social benefit so I did it” which does feel ends justify means-ey but in a way that I think most people can accept from someone who defrauded billions of dollars.
I don’t say you were wrong. Who prepares for a decision like this? It was the break of a lifetime and it would have almost seemed suspicious if you let a funder off here. But I don’t necessarily buy that it was straightforwardly acceptable either. What I do think is that I don’t buy the “it was journalistic norms” defence.
But her defense wasn’t that she was just following journalistic norms, but rather that she was in fact following significantly stricter norms than that.
And why would sharing the screenshots in particular be significant? Writing a news story from an interview would typically include quotes from the interview, and quoting text carries the same information content as a screenshot of it.
There are options between credible and lying. It’s possible, for one thing, that Kelsey was engaged in some motivated reasoning herself, trying to make these trade-offs between her values while faced with a clear incentive in one direction.
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.
Surely everyone on this thread realises that there should be a relevant distinction between being some random hack and ‘the EA journalist’. We’re holding her to higher standards than general journalistic norms.
Some thoughts about this—
I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were:
- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews.
- I knew SBF had given on the record interviews to the New York Times and Washington Post in the last few days, so while it seemed to me like he clearly shouldn’t be talking to the press, it also seemed like he clearly was choosing to do so for some reason and not at random. Edited to add: additionally, it appears that immediately after our conversation concluded he called another journalist to talk on the record and say among other things that he’d told his lawyer to “go fuck himself” and that lawyers “don’t know what they’re talking about”. I agree it is incredibly bizarre that Sam was knowingly saying things like this on the record to journalists.
- Obviously SBF’s communications right now are going to be subpoenaed and presented in court. I can still get why he might not want them in the news, but that does seem like a significant constraint on how private he expected them to be. If we’d talked over Signal I’d feel differently.
- When I emailed him “hey! Writing about what you said happened and your plans now. Just wanted to confirm you still have access to your Twitter account and that isn’t a troll or something- Kelsey Piper, Vox Media”, it seemed possible to me that he would claim it was a troll, or decline to answer, or ask me to take the interview retroactively off the record (which by journalism norms I am not obliged to do, but I would probably have worked with him to at least some degree—there are complicated moral tradeoffs in both directions, at that point!). But he didn’t, which I thought was because he was okay with my writing a story about our conversation.
With all that said, I was less careful with SBF than I am with most people. With most people, if it seemed possible they were under seriously mind-altering substances, I’d hesitate to interview them. If I was not completely sure they understood they might appear in press, I would remind them, and maybe even at particularly salacious quotes ask “okay to quote you on that?” Not all journalists do that, but I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to be untrustworthy to people.
But in this case it felt to me like I had significant duties in the other direction—to get answers that made sense, if there were any, to the question of how this happened and (though as expected this did not have a thrilling answer) where the money was. A $10billion missing funds situation is just very very very different and much larger than most situations, and I think the right place on that tradeoff is also different.
I don’t think (as we all fret about these days) that the ends justify the means, or that it’s okay to break commitments of confidentiality as long as you have a good enough reason. I think I do believe that it’s okay to not be as proactive about commitments of confidentiality, not work as hard to remind people that they probably should want confidentiality when they seem perfectly happy to talk to you, when something happened to ten billion dollars.
I think it might be good if journalists had something like the Miranda warnings, where if you want to quote someone you have to first explicitly with established language warn them how journalism works and how to opt out, and if you failed to warn them then you don’t get to quote them. I think I would sign on to make that a norm of journalism. But it isn’t, and so I’m just balancing a lot of things that all seem important.
It seems possible that SBF thought that as a person involved in EA I wouldn’t hurt him, another person involved in EA. I don’t think that would be the right approach. It is not my job to protect EA, and that’s not what I do. It’s my job to try to make the world a better place through saying true things on topics that really really matter. I share values and priorities with many of you here, but my job comes with obligations and duties on top of those, and I think it’s overall good for the world that that’s so.
With all that said—I never intend to take a subject by surprise in publishing, and thought I had not done so. I wish that had happened differently, though I think I had serious professional obligations to write about this conversation.
*** This is edited. The original said ‘I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen’, which is as written kind of absurd—obviously he didn’t want the mean stuff in print—so I’m trying to be clearer about what specifically I thought he understood and what specifically I thought he knew.
edited
I’m going to argue a line here that I’m uncertain of.
The key question in this part of the thread seems to be “Did SBF expect you to be on the record?”. To which, I guess you were scared the answer was no, hence you didn’t ask during the initial conversation. Even in the follow up you don’t say “can I share our screenshots”.
I can see the social benefit to the conversation. But I guess I don’t necessarily buy the “I did the journalism norms thing so it’s okay”. I think I buy “it provided a lot of social benefit so I did it” which does feel ends justify means-ey but in a way that I think most people can accept from someone who defrauded billions of dollars.
I don’t say you were wrong. Who prepares for a decision like this? It was the break of a lifetime and it would have almost seemed suspicious if you let a funder off here. But I don’t necessarily buy that it was straightforwardly acceptable either. What I do think is that I don’t buy the “it was journalistic norms” defence.
But her defense wasn’t that she was just following journalistic norms, but rather that she was in fact following significantly stricter norms than that.
And why would sharing the screenshots in particular be significant? Writing a news story from an interview would typically include quotes from the interview, and quoting text carries the same information content as a screenshot of it.
“I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen. ”
This is not credible, and anyone who thinks this is credible is engaged in motivated reasoning.
I still think you should have published the interview, but you don’t need to lie about this.
There are options between credible and lying. It’s possible, for one thing, that Kelsey was engaged in some motivated reasoning herself, trying to make these trade-offs between her values while faced with a clear incentive in one direction.
Weak disagree but upvoted—I think that Kelsey has played this game enough to know what’s up
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.