I think EA leadership should have learned from this and been much more cautious about the financial, legal and reputational risks of having large amounts of their funding provided by crypto billionaires.
Yeah, but I feel like the situation with Ben Delo wasn’t perceived as a highest-category catastrophe at the time because Delo never became a huge public figure within EA and wasn’t particularly involved with any big project. (He worked with some EA funders briefly and it probably didn’t reflect well on them, but they seemed like a smaller and newer org at the time and it was overall an extremely different situation than what happened with FTX and the Future fund.) This could explain why people didn’t draw a big enough update.
Also, while I think “accepting money from someone and it later turns out it was based on fraud” is bad, I view it as the type of bad that I don’t think one has to spend sleepless nights over, at least not under all circumstances. The circumstances where it’s most unambiguously bad are when a donor is using their donations to build up a positive public image and they become more active and powerful within the EA ecosystem. In those instances, it seems absolutely crucial to make sure they’re not fraudsters.
However, if a donor is keeping a low profile and the amount of money doesn’t make you too dependent on them, then IMO there’s a strong argument to be made for “minimal vetting is perfectly okay.” By “minimal vetting,” I mean something like you check if there’s an ongoing criminal investigation into the person in question and you comply with any laws regarding money laundering and so on. And if there’s no criminal investigation and if the donation is compliant with money laundering laws, then that’s it and you take the money without worrying about it too much. It’s not your job to figure out if someone’s a financial criminal – there are government agencies whose job that is. If it later turns out that there was fraud, you stop taking the money! (And maybe have to give some of it back for moral and legal reasons – so prepare for the possibility in your planning.) In practice, I think there’s a problem where, by taking the money, you automatically “endorse” the donor in some sense, and this could be used by them to white-wash their reputation. So maybe you could write a disclaimer that describes the type of vetting that your org does for big donors, so it’s apparent to outsiders that accepting a donation doesn’t necessarily mean “we vouch for this donor being an A+ high-integrity person.” But that should be pretty self-explanatory, since it would be an unreasonable standard to vet all donors in that way. I guess it’s a special situation with crypto given how crazily high the fraud rates are. There are many honest people in crypto, but the risk is maybe elevated enough to warrant the awkwardness of a “how we vet crypto donors” disclaimer.
I’m aware that some people think there’s a moral obligation to go beyond the process I described above, but IMO that’s a legitimate thing to disagree over and we also have to consider the costs of turning down money or of asking big donors to go through time-intensive auditing for extra vetting. It’s easy to virtue-signal that we should never do anything that could turn out to look bad, but that’s not the right stance to take either given that the world is full of suffering and inaction is often costly, too.
Yeah, but I feel like the situation with Ben Delo wasn’t perceived as a highest-category catastrophe at the time because Delo never became a huge public figure within EA and wasn’t particularly involved with any big project. (He worked with some EA funders briefly and it probably didn’t reflect well on them, but they seemed like a smaller and newer org at the time and it was overall an extremely different situation than what happened with FTX and the Future fund.) This could explain why people didn’t draw a big enough update.
Also, while I think “accepting money from someone and it later turns out it was based on fraud” is bad, I view it as the type of bad that I don’t think one has to spend sleepless nights over, at least not under all circumstances. The circumstances where it’s most unambiguously bad are when a donor is using their donations to build up a positive public image and they become more active and powerful within the EA ecosystem. In those instances, it seems absolutely crucial to make sure they’re not fraudsters.
However, if a donor is keeping a low profile and the amount of money doesn’t make you too dependent on them, then IMO there’s a strong argument to be made for “minimal vetting is perfectly okay.” By “minimal vetting,” I mean something like you check if there’s an ongoing criminal investigation into the person in question and you comply with any laws regarding money laundering and so on. And if there’s no criminal investigation and if the donation is compliant with money laundering laws, then that’s it and you take the money without worrying about it too much. It’s not your job to figure out if someone’s a financial criminal – there are government agencies whose job that is. If it later turns out that there was fraud, you stop taking the money! (And maybe have to give some of it back for moral and legal reasons – so prepare for the possibility in your planning.) In practice, I think there’s a problem where, by taking the money, you automatically “endorse” the donor in some sense, and this could be used by them to white-wash their reputation. So maybe you could write a disclaimer that describes the type of vetting that your org does for big donors, so it’s apparent to outsiders that accepting a donation doesn’t necessarily mean “we vouch for this donor being an A+ high-integrity person.” But that should be pretty self-explanatory, since it would be an unreasonable standard to vet all donors in that way. I guess it’s a special situation with crypto given how crazily high the fraud rates are. There are many honest people in crypto, but the risk is maybe elevated enough to warrant the awkwardness of a “how we vet crypto donors” disclaimer.
I’m aware that some people think there’s a moral obligation to go beyond the process I described above, but IMO that’s a legitimate thing to disagree over and we also have to consider the costs of turning down money or of asking big donors to go through time-intensive auditing for extra vetting. It’s easy to virtue-signal that we should never do anything that could turn out to look bad, but that’s not the right stance to take either given that the world is full of suffering and inaction is often costly, too.