about the fact that SBF’s “frugal lifestyle” image was fabricated,
I concede that this speaks for “he isn’t always careful with what he conveys.” However, for the reasons Rob Bensinger explained in one of his comments, I think this could be more innocent. And there’s another likely explanation of this that is also pretty innocent. It’s a cool story with the cheap car, it’s an image that “sticks.” Maybe he just didn’t notice confusion, didn’t say “oops” when he saw things that were in tension with this mental image of Sam. I think this happens pretty commonly. (E.g., let’s say you see your parents about twice per year and they remember from when you used to live with them that you’re vegan. Then, they see you eat animal products a couple of times when you visit. The parents may not update strongly enough on the obvious evidence that “vegan” is no longer accurate, so they may tell other people that their son is vegan by accident because that’s the mental image they’ve “saved you under.” That doesn’t mean the parents are deceivers covering up your relapse! They simply aren’t paying close attention and are slow to update on the image that’s still salient in their mind.)
potentially about events that took place at early Alameda, etc.
I think this is referring to things like allegations that Sam tricked co-founders when he registered entities in his own name rather than theirs, that he seemed reckless with risks, and that he was bending numbers with accounting when this was favorable for him/for the company? I have no idea if Will had information about this. It seems possible to me, but I don’t know! If he knew about it, then it really makes you wonder why he vouched for Sam. In my view, the vouching was already the worst thing I’m aware of because if you vouch for someone, you’re saying that you know them well enough that you would know if something was amiss (so ignorance of some bad past behavior is not even a good excuse). However, I think you’re being uncharitable when you imply that knowing about the early Alameda stuff (hypothetically!) would mean that Will was deceiving people about Sam’s character. It’s about twenty times more likely, IMO, that rather than thinking Sam has bad character, he simply didn’t update enough on the evidence (if he at all knew). This is also a common pattern: people observe red flags but the flags go against the mental image they have formed of the other person as someone decent, so they allow the bad actor to make excuses and explain away any incongruencies. For instance, I’m sure Sam had his own story about what happened. Let’s say Will heard rumors and asked Sam about it. Sam would have said something that sounded reassuring. He probably would have said stuff like “Well, one of the other co-founders was a bit of narcissist and we generally didn’t get along. And they seemed unusually risk-averse and not made for the crypto environment.” I’m just making stuff up here, but you can see how it’s possible that there were two sides of the story. I’m not saying it would have been smart to dismiss any red flags, but that’s often how things go. Many people are not cynical enough (and sometimes bad actors are really good at spinning up a counter-narrative).
His close relationship with SBF: the fact that he was the one to offer SBF an EA job after SBF left Jane Street, the support given by EA organizations to Alameda Research early on,
Nothing about this seems in any way bad to me. It’s not always easy to tell how someone’s going to behave. Also, maybe Sam got “corrupted” over time and some tendencies became worse as he got more successful? At best, I count this as evidence of “not great people judgment,” but sometimes you get unlucky. Not every time something goes wrong it means that you made a horrible mistake ex ante.
The shady nature of Future Fund grantmaking channels when he would have been in a position to know who received funding from where
He may not spend much attention on following or understanding logistics like that. Even if he saw that the bank account wasn’t labelled “FTX future fund,” he may have thought there was some random logistical reason behind it. This really seems like the sort of thing that only looks suspicious with hindsight. Or, okay, maybe it should look suspicious to someone who has accounting/legal knowledge (it wouldn’t have been salient to me that “money comes from a different entity” is a potential red flag, but maybe this would be salient to someone who does accounting or law). For what it’s worth, I’m definitely sympathetic to the claim that someone at the FTX future fund should have been on top of the situation and should have done better due diligence. However, my guess would be that Will’s personal role there wouldn’t have made him responsible for this.
Overall, I agree that Will looks bad in many ways, so please don’t take my comment as saying that there’s “nothing to see here.” Still, the thing I mainly want to push back on is the idea that Will personally thought Sam was probably committing fraud or at least that he was otherwise a horrible person and he (Will) was okay with that. I could be wrong, but I really doubt this. I think all of Will’s behavior so far (that I’m aware of) is easily explained by “he had bad people judgment + maybe had a tendency to believe things that are convenient for him.” It’s possible that you know things I don’t know, but I can’t take your word for it with regard to the things I don’t know, given that we seem to disagree about how to interpret the evidence that’s already been openly discussed.
All you’re saying, as far as I can see, is that the available evidence is consistent with MacAskill simply having made mistakes, having bad judgment, not making deductions that he reasonably should have made, et cetera. I agree with that, which is why I noted in my original comment that
If you have a highly favorable view of MacAskill, the above is probably insufficient to update you to an extent that you would agree with me about his character.
I just don’t understand why people have the prior that obviously MacAskill should be a nice person who always acts in good faith. The circumstantial evidence I’ve outlined is insufficient to overcome such a strong prior, and you can always explain it away by attributing any number of honest mistakes and oversights to MacAskill.
In addition, I don’t think the way you’re casting the issue is appropriate. I think MacAskill didn’t spend his days thinking about how SBF was a horrible person who EA nevertheless needed because of the resources at his disposal, and I don’t believe he knew about the fraud. I think only some of his deception is conscious and deliberate. I suspect his failures in many cases looked more like “choosing not to know” or “choosing not to focus on” certain things, but I also don’t think these choices were entirely innocuous as you’re making them sound. Often when you choose not to know something it’s because of self-serving or otherwise immoral reasons.
I don’t believe for a second that he pushed SBF’s frugal image because he wasn’t careful with the information he conveys. I think this was a fully deliberate decision on his part and you attempting to make it look otherwise requires stories which are, on their face, much less plausible than that.
As for other issues I raised, I believe that some of it was not deliberate on his part. For instance, I don’t think MacAskill concocted a conscious scheme to try to kill Guzey’s post. He simply felt personally attacked by the hostility in the review and those emotions got him to conceal the fact that Guzey’s private draft had been leaked against what should have been his better judgment. Still, what people do in such situations is often informative about how they generally act when under pressure, and MacAskill seems to have fared quite badly in this particular test.
There were likely also plenty of things about FTX and SBF that he “chose not to know”. These would be odd observations that he might have made that he never followed up on, for instance. He may or may not have contemplated the possibility that FTX was engaged in some serious wrongdoing; I’m honestly quite uncertain about this. Either way, I believe he didn’t have any proof and all the evidence he had access to would have been circumstantial.
I agree with almost everything you say here (still have my doubts about the frugality thing).
but I also don’t think these choices were entirely innocuous as you’re making them sound.
I didn’t mean to imply that all these things were innocuous. “Choosing not to look carefully” isn’t innocuous – but most of Germany did it in WW2. I think there’s an important distinction between “dark agency” (what Sam had) vs. a more passive “lack of high integrity,” which is how I’d describe the patterns you’re describing in your last comment here. I feel like “lack of high integrity” is a good phrasing. You may say it’s a euphemism, but I think it’s important to highlight that “high integrity” is difficult to cultivate and therefore rare. Also, I think people often develop high integrity after they fuck something up and are given a second chance. (I think this becomes less likely if they make mistakes later in life – but you never know and maybe some people can turn their mental habits at age 30+!)
In any case, I agree that both things (“dark agency” and “lack of high integrity”) are bad. I’d even claim that people tend to overrate the importance of whether bad things are done with fully-conscious bad intent/bad faith vs. (partly) unconscious hidden motives and self-deception. Still, I feel like it’s useful to be precise in what we’re accusing someone of, because the stuff that isn’t fully conscious seems quite common and isn’t always “irredeemable.” I would strongly vote against people who don’t have high integrity to have leadership positions, but I don’t think it warrants much more drastic steps like “I wouldn’t work with a person who is like that.” In fact, I could very much see myself from age 21-25 making mistakes very similar to Will’s if I had been in his situation, and I certainly don’t think my past self was a terrible person. (And I’m kicking myself for not having become more worried about FTX and about the implications of a potential collapse of FTX for EA after I pointed out to others how it seems very suspicious that Sam was defending the cryptocurrency tether. It’s long been a pet peeve of mine that tether seems like a potentially big fraud and people in crypto are totally insane to tolerate it!) I don’t know what your exact view is on these distinctions. I could image that you’re mostly upset about this particular issue because of the important position of responsibility that Will is in. And that makes perfect sense to me – we should hold leaders to especially high standards! So, maybe we don’t disagree too much. I think some of your phrasings in earlier comments, or maybe just the strongly condemnatory attitude, conveyed to me that you might be accusing will of “dark agency” and I thought that was unwarranted.
I’m pretty sure there are multiple sources confirming that Will knew about early Alameda events. One is that Semafor reported that the ex-Alameda employees reported allegations about SBF to CEA trustees in 2018. Will was a CEA trustee in 2018 according to Wayback Machine.
[In 2018, CEA] trustees considered allegations that Bankman-Fried had engaged in unethical business practices at his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, but ultimately took no action, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. A spokesman for the Centre for Effective Altruism declined to comment. MacAskill and Bankman-Fried, an investor in Semafor, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Notice that, as usual, these allegations are considered privately and nobody from CEA responds to requests for comments, even after FTX goes bankrupt.
People should be demanding from all EA organizations to make their internal deliberations on this subject public. What allegations did they consider in 2018? Why did they decide that they were ultimately not serious enough to warrant action?
The tolerance this community has shown for the silence of EA organizations in light of what has happened is astonishing to me. I think it’s partly that they simply don’t know the extent of the connection between early Alameda and central EA infrastructure, but that can’t be the whole story. There’s some slim chance that some of this will come out in court if the discovery process ever extends that far, but it seems much less likely at this point than I would like.
At least MacAskill and Beckstead need to resign from the EVF board, take a leave of absence, publicly recuse from responding to the FTX situation, or submit a detailed explanation of the facts and circumstances that render none of these actions appropriate. They are just too intertwined in the events that happened to be able to manage the conflict of interest and risks to impartiality (or at least the appearance of the same).
That’s not me saying that I think they committed misconduct, but I think the circumstances would easily “cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question [their] impartiality in the matter,” and that’s enough. Cf.5 CFR § 2635.502(a) (Standards of Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch [of the U.S. Government]). Although I’m not going to submit that EA officials should always follow government ethics rules, this is a really clear-cut case.
Hopefully they have recused and this just isn’t being stated due to PR concerns (because some people might misinterpret recusal as an admission of wrongdoing rather than as respect for a basic principle of good governance).
Yes — since the first week of the crisis, Nick and Will have been recused from the relevant discussions / decisions on the boards of both EV entities to avoid any potential conflict of interest. Staff in both EV entities were informed about that decision in mid-November.
My suspicion is that FTX fallout may be the defining issue of EVF’s corporate governance for the next few years, so having nearly half the board recused ain’t ideal but is certain better than non-recusal.
I concede that this speaks for “he isn’t always careful with what he conveys.” However, for the reasons Rob Bensinger explained in one of his comments, I think this could be more innocent. And there’s another likely explanation of this that is also pretty innocent. It’s a cool story with the cheap car, it’s an image that “sticks.” Maybe he just didn’t notice confusion, didn’t say “oops” when he saw things that were in tension with this mental image of Sam. I think this happens pretty commonly. (E.g., let’s say you see your parents about twice per year and they remember from when you used to live with them that you’re vegan. Then, they see you eat animal products a couple of times when you visit. The parents may not update strongly enough on the obvious evidence that “vegan” is no longer accurate, so they may tell other people that their son is vegan by accident because that’s the mental image they’ve “saved you under.” That doesn’t mean the parents are deceivers covering up your relapse! They simply aren’t paying close attention and are slow to update on the image that’s still salient in their mind.)
I think this is referring to things like allegations that Sam tricked co-founders when he registered entities in his own name rather than theirs, that he seemed reckless with risks, and that he was bending numbers with accounting when this was favorable for him/for the company? I have no idea if Will had information about this. It seems possible to me, but I don’t know! If he knew about it, then it really makes you wonder why he vouched for Sam. In my view, the vouching was already the worst thing I’m aware of because if you vouch for someone, you’re saying that you know them well enough that you would know if something was amiss (so ignorance of some bad past behavior is not even a good excuse). However, I think you’re being uncharitable when you imply that knowing about the early Alameda stuff (hypothetically!) would mean that Will was deceiving people about Sam’s character. It’s about twenty times more likely, IMO, that rather than thinking Sam has bad character, he simply didn’t update enough on the evidence (if he at all knew). This is also a common pattern: people observe red flags but the flags go against the mental image they have formed of the other person as someone decent, so they allow the bad actor to make excuses and explain away any incongruencies. For instance, I’m sure Sam had his own story about what happened. Let’s say Will heard rumors and asked Sam about it. Sam would have said something that sounded reassuring. He probably would have said stuff like “Well, one of the other co-founders was a bit of narcissist and we generally didn’t get along. And they seemed unusually risk-averse and not made for the crypto environment.” I’m just making stuff up here, but you can see how it’s possible that there were two sides of the story. I’m not saying it would have been smart to dismiss any red flags, but that’s often how things go. Many people are not cynical enough (and sometimes bad actors are really good at spinning up a counter-narrative).
Nothing about this seems in any way bad to me. It’s not always easy to tell how someone’s going to behave. Also, maybe Sam got “corrupted” over time and some tendencies became worse as he got more successful? At best, I count this as evidence of “not great people judgment,” but sometimes you get unlucky. Not every time something goes wrong it means that you made a horrible mistake ex ante.
He may not spend much attention on following or understanding logistics like that. Even if he saw that the bank account wasn’t labelled “FTX future fund,” he may have thought there was some random logistical reason behind it. This really seems like the sort of thing that only looks suspicious with hindsight. Or, okay, maybe it should look suspicious to someone who has accounting/legal knowledge (it wouldn’t have been salient to me that “money comes from a different entity” is a potential red flag, but maybe this would be salient to someone who does accounting or law). For what it’s worth, I’m definitely sympathetic to the claim that someone at the FTX future fund should have been on top of the situation and should have done better due diligence. However, my guess would be that Will’s personal role there wouldn’t have made him responsible for this.
Overall, I agree that Will looks bad in many ways, so please don’t take my comment as saying that there’s “nothing to see here.” Still, the thing I mainly want to push back on is the idea that Will personally thought Sam was probably committing fraud or at least that he was otherwise a horrible person and he (Will) was okay with that. I could be wrong, but I really doubt this. I think all of Will’s behavior so far (that I’m aware of) is easily explained by “he had bad people judgment + maybe had a tendency to believe things that are convenient for him.” It’s possible that you know things I don’t know, but I can’t take your word for it with regard to the things I don’t know, given that we seem to disagree about how to interpret the evidence that’s already been openly discussed.
All you’re saying, as far as I can see, is that the available evidence is consistent with MacAskill simply having made mistakes, having bad judgment, not making deductions that he reasonably should have made, et cetera. I agree with that, which is why I noted in my original comment that
I just don’t understand why people have the prior that obviously MacAskill should be a nice person who always acts in good faith. The circumstantial evidence I’ve outlined is insufficient to overcome such a strong prior, and you can always explain it away by attributing any number of honest mistakes and oversights to MacAskill.
In addition, I don’t think the way you’re casting the issue is appropriate. I think MacAskill didn’t spend his days thinking about how SBF was a horrible person who EA nevertheless needed because of the resources at his disposal, and I don’t believe he knew about the fraud. I think only some of his deception is conscious and deliberate. I suspect his failures in many cases looked more like “choosing not to know” or “choosing not to focus on” certain things, but I also don’t think these choices were entirely innocuous as you’re making them sound. Often when you choose not to know something it’s because of self-serving or otherwise immoral reasons.
I don’t believe for a second that he pushed SBF’s frugal image because he wasn’t careful with the information he conveys. I think this was a fully deliberate decision on his part and you attempting to make it look otherwise requires stories which are, on their face, much less plausible than that.
As for other issues I raised, I believe that some of it was not deliberate on his part. For instance, I don’t think MacAskill concocted a conscious scheme to try to kill Guzey’s post. He simply felt personally attacked by the hostility in the review and those emotions got him to conceal the fact that Guzey’s private draft had been leaked against what should have been his better judgment. Still, what people do in such situations is often informative about how they generally act when under pressure, and MacAskill seems to have fared quite badly in this particular test.
There were likely also plenty of things about FTX and SBF that he “chose not to know”. These would be odd observations that he might have made that he never followed up on, for instance. He may or may not have contemplated the possibility that FTX was engaged in some serious wrongdoing; I’m honestly quite uncertain about this. Either way, I believe he didn’t have any proof and all the evidence he had access to would have been circumstantial.
I agree with almost everything you say here (still have my doubts about the frugality thing).
I didn’t mean to imply that all these things were innocuous. “Choosing not to look carefully” isn’t innocuous – but most of Germany did it in WW2. I think there’s an important distinction between “dark agency” (what Sam had) vs. a more passive “lack of high integrity,” which is how I’d describe the patterns you’re describing in your last comment here. I feel like “lack of high integrity” is a good phrasing. You may say it’s a euphemism, but I think it’s important to highlight that “high integrity” is difficult to cultivate and therefore rare. Also, I think people often develop high integrity after they fuck something up and are given a second chance. (I think this becomes less likely if they make mistakes later in life – but you never know and maybe some people can turn their mental habits at age 30+!)
In any case, I agree that both things (“dark agency” and “lack of high integrity”) are bad. I’d even claim that people tend to overrate the importance of whether bad things are done with fully-conscious bad intent/bad faith vs. (partly) unconscious hidden motives and self-deception. Still, I feel like it’s useful to be precise in what we’re accusing someone of, because the stuff that isn’t fully conscious seems quite common and isn’t always “irredeemable.” I would strongly vote against people who don’t have high integrity to have leadership positions, but I don’t think it warrants much more drastic steps like “I wouldn’t work with a person who is like that.” In fact, I could very much see myself from age 21-25 making mistakes very similar to Will’s if I had been in his situation, and I certainly don’t think my past self was a terrible person. (And I’m kicking myself for not having become more worried about FTX and about the implications of a potential collapse of FTX for EA after I pointed out to others how it seems very suspicious that Sam was defending the cryptocurrency tether. It’s long been a pet peeve of mine that tether seems like a potentially big fraud and people in crypto are totally insane to tolerate it!) I don’t know what your exact view is on these distinctions. I could image that you’re mostly upset about this particular issue because of the important position of responsibility that Will is in. And that makes perfect sense to me – we should hold leaders to especially high standards! So, maybe we don’t disagree too much. I think some of your phrasings in earlier comments, or maybe just the strongly condemnatory attitude, conveyed to me that you might be accusing will of “dark agency” and I thought that was unwarranted.
I’m pretty sure there are multiple sources confirming that Will knew about early Alameda events. One is that Semafor reported that the ex-Alameda employees reported allegations about SBF to CEA trustees in 2018. Will was a CEA trustee in 2018 according to Wayback Machine.
Notice that, as usual, these allegations are considered privately and nobody from CEA responds to requests for comments, even after FTX goes bankrupt.
People should be demanding from all EA organizations to make their internal deliberations on this subject public. What allegations did they consider in 2018? Why did they decide that they were ultimately not serious enough to warrant action?
The tolerance this community has shown for the silence of EA organizations in light of what has happened is astonishing to me. I think it’s partly that they simply don’t know the extent of the connection between early Alameda and central EA infrastructure, but that can’t be the whole story. There’s some slim chance that some of this will come out in court if the discovery process ever extends that far, but it seems much less likely at this point than I would like.
At least MacAskill and Beckstead need to resign from the EVF board, take a leave of absence, publicly recuse from responding to the FTX situation, or submit a detailed explanation of the facts and circumstances that render none of these actions appropriate. They are just too intertwined in the events that happened to be able to manage the conflict of interest and risks to impartiality (or at least the appearance of the same).
That’s not me saying that I think they committed misconduct, but I think the circumstances would easily “cause a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question [their] impartiality in the matter,” and that’s enough. Cf. 5 CFR § 2635.502(a) (Standards of Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch [of the U.S. Government]). Although I’m not going to submit that EA officials should always follow government ethics rules, this is a really clear-cut case.
Hopefully they have recused and this just isn’t being stated due to PR concerns (because some people might misinterpret recusal as an admission of wrongdoing rather than as respect for a basic principle of good governance).
Yes — since the first week of the crisis, Nick and Will have been recused from the relevant discussions / decisions on the boards of both EV entities to avoid any potential conflict of interest. Staff in both EV entities were informed about that decision in mid-November.
Thanks, Howie. That is reassuring.
My suspicion is that FTX fallout may be the defining issue of EVF’s corporate governance for the next few years, so having nearly half the board recused ain’t ideal but is certain better than non-recusal.
Why don’t you think the EA-Alameda connection will come out in court proceedings? I thought it was pretty likely.