Can you say more about “[p]eople who received funding in dubious ways and didn’t say anything (North Dimension donating on behalf of FTX Future fund)”?
“FTX Future Fund” wasn’t a legal entity (although there was “FTX Philantrophy” a/k/a “FTX Foundation”). I think it was disclosed on the “Fund’s” website that that the monies might actually come from various entities and people. I didn’t save a copy of the website before it went down, though. So, it’s reasonable that a recipient would think any potentially dubious information had been publicly disclosed already.
Second, it’s not immediately obvious to me why the exact funding source is “dubious.” At least for a natural person, there are potentially solid (tax) reasons certain persons might choose to make some donations out of the entity that actually realized the associated income rather than out of a private foundation. Without the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I (who am a lawyer) would have caught this as a flag that needed to be discussed with the community—and I wouldn’t expect the grantees (who are generally not) to have flagged it either.
So I wouldn’t lower my opinion of grantees, or EA in general, based on the existence of people who did not mention their exact source of funding.
As a comparator, over the years I’m pretty sure I’ve received funding “from/through OpenPhil” that actually legally came from a few different entities.
Big corporations have lots of subsidiaries, and I don’t think it’s super-rare to acquire what amounts to a dummy/shell corporation for non-fraudulent reasons. I’d call it a yellow flag if the grantee knew North Dimension had been “defunct phone stores.” Except for perhaps recipients of the largest grants, I don’t think that flag is bad enough that the grantee couldn’t have reasonably relied on others’ due diligence—both in the investing world and in EA.
But more to the point: the only thing the grantee knew was that the money came from an entity with the generic name of North Dimension. I don’t think that information alone put them on notice that they needed to dig or discuss with others.
To be clear, it seems that far too little due diligence was done as a whole, but I don’t think the original poster should think less of most individual grantees for that.
I don’t think you would have been obliged to spot it, but someone should have. Obviously the people who were in a prime position to spot this were the people over at the Future Fund, and if I recall correctly Nick Beckstead posted a comment on the forum saying that Future Fund grants would be disbursed through a variety of legal entities.
I haven’t seen confirmation of this, but I would guess they knew the list of entities they used most frequently for this purpose, and North Dimension seems to have been one of them. Explaining why a defunct phone store was being used to disburse payments to grantees seems like it should have been a reasonably high priority.
Can you say more about “[p]eople who received funding in dubious ways and didn’t say anything (North Dimension donating on behalf of FTX Future fund)”?
“FTX Future Fund” wasn’t a legal entity (although there was “FTX Philantrophy” a/k/a “FTX Foundation”). I think it was disclosed on the “Fund’s” website that that the monies might actually come from various entities and people. I didn’t save a copy of the website before it went down, though. So, it’s reasonable that a recipient would think any potentially dubious information had been publicly disclosed already.
Second, it’s not immediately obvious to me why the exact funding source is “dubious.” At least for a natural person, there are potentially solid (tax) reasons certain persons might choose to make some donations out of the entity that actually realized the associated income rather than out of a private foundation. Without the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I (who am a lawyer) would have caught this as a flag that needed to be discussed with the community—and I wouldn’t expect the grantees (who are generally not) to have flagged it either.
So I wouldn’t lower my opinion of grantees, or EA in general, based on the existence of people who did not mention their exact source of funding.
As a comparator, over the years I’m pretty sure I’ve received funding “from/through OpenPhil” that actually legally came from a few different entities.
Did any of that funding come from defunct phone stores, which is what North Dimension legally was?
Big corporations have lots of subsidiaries, and I don’t think it’s super-rare to acquire what amounts to a dummy/shell corporation for non-fraudulent reasons. I’d call it a yellow flag if the grantee knew North Dimension had been “defunct phone stores.” Except for perhaps recipients of the largest grants, I don’t think that flag is bad enough that the grantee couldn’t have reasonably relied on others’ due diligence—both in the investing world and in EA.
But more to the point: the only thing the grantee knew was that the money came from an entity with the generic name of North Dimension. I don’t think that information alone put them on notice that they needed to dig or discuss with others.
To be clear, it seems that far too little due diligence was done as a whole, but I don’t think the original poster should think less of most individual grantees for that.
Do you have a link for that claim?
https://twitter.com/bax1337/status/1590916763549503488
Sure, I don’t know anything about North Dimension and am open to the claim that it in particular was dubious.
I don’t think I’d have spotted this which in hindsight seems like a dumb error. I guess there are a range of red flags like this?
I don’t think you would have been obliged to spot it, but someone should have. Obviously the people who were in a prime position to spot this were the people over at the Future Fund, and if I recall correctly Nick Beckstead posted a comment on the forum saying that Future Fund grants would be disbursed through a variety of legal entities.
I haven’t seen confirmation of this, but I would guess they knew the list of entities they used most frequently for this purpose, and North Dimension seems to have been one of them. Explaining why a defunct phone store was being used to disburse payments to grantees seems like it should have been a reasonably high priority.