Sadly I can’t give any explicit examples without giving people material information about my identity that I would not be comfortable revealing. I agree that it’s possible I’ve been interacting with a different subset of EA. I also can’t share the exact date but you can assume it was some weeks after Nov 11.
OK! I’m sad about that, and very much want to make EA a space where people can rationally spill their guts more and not fear big social costs.
MacAskill has previously been dishonest by pushing the misleading image that Bankman-Fried had a frugal lifestyle despite knowing better,
Hmm. In the quoted article he says:
“Heavily considering what you show as well as what you do, especially if you’re in a position of high visibility. ‘Signalling’ is often very important! For example, the funding situation means I now take my personal giving more seriously, not less. I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call.”
This could mean ‘I think it’s great that Sam is so frugal overall (with the Corolla being just one example), since that sends a great signal’, but a more literal reading is just ‘I think it’s great that Sam was frugal in one particular way (the Corolla), because this sends a great signal’. Like, I come away with two three questions:
When Will wrote this (in May 2022? sometime earlier?), did he know how unrepresentative the Corolla was in a ton of ways?
(I assume so, but Plausibly so, but it would be nice to confirm?)
If Will knew the Corolla was unrepresentative, did he intend to deceive the reader into thinking the Corolla was representative?
(This isn’t obvious to me at all. If Will knew SBF was unfrugal and had praised SBF in the article for his frugality, then I’d go “yeah, trying to trick the reader”. But the thing Will actually praised was SBF’s signaling, not his frugality; this is not the phrasing I’d have chosen if I were trying to trick readers into thinking SBF is amazingly frugal.)
Did Will think it mattered how representative the Corolla is, for purposes of signaling to the larger public?
Like, a cynical take on the Corolla is “SBF is trying to trick people by being frugal in one or two minor ways and then plastering the Internet with those cherry-picked examples, while being totally unfrugal otherwise”.
A less cynical take is “SBF is willing to spend huge amounts when he thinks it’s useful for EA, but a nicer car wouldn’t actually help even a tiny bit with any EA thing, so he picked the Corolla just on the merits, not trying to paint a coherent picture or push a narrative”. Like, it’s not as though it would have been more virtuous for SBF to buy a fancier car.
If Will had the cynical model of SBF’s motives, then I definitely object to him singling this out as a good example of EA virtue signaling; good EA virtue signaling should be honest, not dishonest and cherry-picked!!
But if Will had the less-cynical model, then I don’t actually object to him mentioning it to other EAs, as a good thing for us to emulate. I do think that letting the Corolla example catch on and go viral, without regularly chiming in with examples of SBF being less frugal (given that it’s in fact unrepresentative!), would be very bad. But I don’t actually know the details here, and if he just mentioned it in an 80K page the one time and wasn’t running around bragging about it to everyone, and didn’t have the cynical model, then I’m not bothered. Examples of marginal virtue (“Bob did a good thing that one time!”) are fine, as long as they don’t metastasize into false “that good thing is a major defining feature of Bob!” mythologies.
and he has a further track record of instrumental dishonesty e.g. when promoting What We Owe the Future to the public.
I’d be interested to hear some concrete examples? I expect Will to spin and cherry-pick some things in ways that I wouldn’t, but you might have something more serious in mind (or less serious, if your bar for instrumental dishonesty is low enough).
If he wants to provide Bayesian evidence that he’s actually honest, he should try being honest instead of linking passages from his old books that extol honesty as a virtue. Talk is cheap, action is not.
This argument seems structurally valid to me. Like, if you think that a friend of yours is a drug addict, then hearing them claim to have hardline anti-drug views out of the blue could be a negative update (“oh jeez, they’re lying now too”), where hearing them come clean and talk about their past mistakes would update you to thinking they may be on the path to changing their behavior.
To an innocent who has no idea Carol is an addict, the drug confession would be a shocking negative update; to the person who knows Carol better, it’s an important positive update.
I could post on this forum under my real name that SBF had a positive impact in some areas despite him running the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme and I wouldn’t be concerned at all. Your impression of which claims are punished and which claims are not punished is wildly miscalibrated.
I’d indeed expect this to cost you more than if you just wrote an article criticizing SBF. Not sure how to operationalize this into a bet.
I agree that the error you’re talking about is one of the key errors that protected SBF, but I don’t agree that it’s now operating in the opposite direction with anything like the same intensity.
Interesting!
To be clear, I’m not making a claim about the exact intensity levels. I just think that there was a large pressure to only say positive things before, and that there’s a large pressure to only say negative things now. I don’t feel confident about which of those pressures was larger.
I know for a fact that MacAskill knew SBF’s “frugal lifestyle” image was fabricated and he fully assisted him in perpetuating this myth, effectively acting as a PR agent for him. I also suspect MacAskill knew a substantial amount of information about events that happened in early Alameda and had good cause to suspect SBF’s character. He also knew that FTX operated in a shady way in which they would deliberately conceal relevant facts about their business from the venture capitalists who had invested in FTX. He chose to reveal none of this.
I’d love to see a longer write-up somewhere that provides more evidence and details about any or all of these claims—I don’t know who you are and don’t currently know how much weight to put on them. I could see them turning out to be totally true, or totally false, depending on how honest and rigorous you (and/or your sources, if this isn’t direct info) are.
I’d be interested to hear some concrete examples? I expect Will to spin and cherry-pick some things in ways that I wouldn’t, but you might have something more serious in mind (or less serious, if your bar for instrumental dishonesty is low enough)...
I’d love to see a longer write-up somewhere that provides more evidence and details about any or all of these claims—I don’t know who you are and don’t currently know how much weight to put on them. I could see them turning out to be totally true, or totally false, depending on how honest and rigorous you (and/or your sources, if this isn’t direct info) are.
There are plenty of views held by EA leadership that would be bad if they were to be brought up on, say, Trevor Noah’s show. Do you really want explicit examples here? I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I don’t think this by itself is that problematic because it’s a common mode of dishonesty, and if it were the only problem I would think MacAskill is just engaging in marketing, where deception can be a prerequisite for success. However, for me this is only one piece of the puzzle.
The reasons I’m suspicious of MacAskill in particular are:
His willingness to deceive both the public and ordinary EAs on many occasions: about the views of EA leadership and his own views in particular, about the fact that SBF’s “frugal lifestyle” image was fabricated, potentially about events that took place at early Alameda, etc.
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, including both substantial financial resources and human capital; along with e.g. his intermediation between SBF and Elon Musk
The shady nature of Future Fund grantmaking channels when he would have been in a position to know who received funding from where
The Guzey confidential draft leak episode
Vague “bad rumors” about him that have been circulating recently—I can’t elaborate on this further because I also don’t know the origin of these rumors, but you might hear such things if you go to real-life EA meetups and it still seems like relevant Bayesian evidence
Conditional on the above, the fact that his initial reaction to the FTX scandal was both delayed and ambiguous makes him look even worse
None of this is conclusive evidence, but together they paint a picture of the utilitarian who is convinced he is doing good and who has no problems employing deception and lying as part of his toolkit.
I have some more evidence that I can’t share here due to confidentiality concerns, but none of it is more decisive than the public evidence I’m able to share above. I think the evidence is clear that MacAskill is instrumentally dishonest in many important situations, and there’s unclear but suggestive evidence that he was dishonest about SBF’s character or information he may have had about the leadership of FTX and Alameda Research.
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. In this case I would implore people to have more reasonable priors and to hold EA leadership to higher standards.
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.
There are plenty of views held by EA leadership that would be bad if they were to be brought up on, say, Trevor Noah’s show. Do you really want explicit examples here? I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I, at least, would be happy for those of examples.
North Dimension is an example of what I mean. In general, the way FTX & Alameda Research structured their business affairs was extremely messy, and we’ve found out more about this since the Chapter 11 filing by FTX and affiliated entities. I think MacAskill was in a position to know about some of this and chose not to say anything. At the very least he would have known which entities are used to disburse funding to grantees, and he may also have known more about the informal way in which FTX conducted business dealings in general.
I also believe people over at CEA may have known this, because to my knowledge the Future Fund was partnering with CEA to process grants at some point. Integrating their infrastructure would have required CEA to have some exposure to exactly how FTX handles payments. The fact that nobody has thought it important to clarify this situation following the revelations that e.g.
FTX employees asked for their salary through Slack messages
at some point FTX customers had to wire money to Alameda’s bank accounts to deposit money at FTX
is quite strange to me.
By itself this is not a red flag; I think someone elsewhere in the comments called it a “yellow flag”. It has to be seen in the context of the other observations I mentioned to be worthwhile.
OK! I’m sad about that, and very much want to make EA a space where people can rationally spill their guts more and not fear big social costs.
Hmm. In the quoted article he says:
“Heavily considering what you show as well as what you do, especially if you’re in a position of high visibility. ‘Signalling’ is often very important! For example, the funding situation means I now take my personal giving more seriously, not less. I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call.”
This could mean ‘I think it’s great that Sam is so frugal overall (with the Corolla being just one example), since that sends a great signal’, but a more literal reading is just ‘I think it’s great that Sam was frugal in one particular way (the Corolla), because this sends a great signal’. Like, I come away with
twothree questions:When Will wrote this (in May 2022? sometime earlier?), did he know how unrepresentative the Corolla was in a ton of ways?
(
I assume so, butPlausibly so, but it would be nice to confirm?)If Will knew the Corolla was unrepresentative, did he intend to deceive the reader into thinking the Corolla was representative?
(This isn’t obvious to me at all. If Will knew SBF was unfrugal and had praised SBF in the article for his frugality, then I’d go “yeah, trying to trick the reader”. But the thing Will actually praised was SBF’s signaling, not his frugality; this is not the phrasing I’d have chosen if I were trying to trick readers into thinking SBF is amazingly frugal.)
Did Will think it mattered how representative the Corolla is, for purposes of signaling to the larger public?
Like, a cynical take on the Corolla is “SBF is trying to trick people by being frugal in one or two minor ways and then plastering the Internet with those cherry-picked examples, while being totally unfrugal otherwise”.
A less cynical take is “SBF is willing to spend huge amounts when he thinks it’s useful for EA, but a nicer car wouldn’t actually help even a tiny bit with any EA thing, so he picked the Corolla just on the merits, not trying to paint a coherent picture or push a narrative”. Like, it’s not as though it would have been more virtuous for SBF to buy a fancier car.
If Will had the cynical model of SBF’s motives, then I definitely object to him singling this out as a good example of EA virtue signaling; good EA virtue signaling should be honest, not dishonest and cherry-picked!!
But if Will had the less-cynical model, then I don’t actually object to him mentioning it to other EAs, as a good thing for us to emulate. I do think that letting the Corolla example catch on and go viral, without regularly chiming in with examples of SBF being less frugal (given that it’s in fact unrepresentative!), would be very bad. But I don’t actually know the details here, and if he just mentioned it in an 80K page the one time and wasn’t running around bragging about it to everyone, and didn’t have the cynical model, then I’m not bothered. Examples of marginal virtue (“Bob did a good thing that one time!”) are fine, as long as they don’t metastasize into false “that good thing is a major defining feature of Bob!” mythologies.
I’d be interested to hear some concrete examples? I expect Will to spin and cherry-pick some things in ways that I wouldn’t, but you might have something more serious in mind (or less serious, if your bar for instrumental dishonesty is low enough).
This argument seems structurally valid to me. Like, if you think that a friend of yours is a drug addict, then hearing them claim to have hardline anti-drug views out of the blue could be a negative update (“oh jeez, they’re lying now too”), where hearing them come clean and talk about their past mistakes would update you to thinking they may be on the path to changing their behavior.
To an innocent who has no idea Carol is an addict, the drug confession would be a shocking negative update; to the person who knows Carol better, it’s an important positive update.
I’d indeed expect this to cost you more than if you just wrote an article criticizing SBF. Not sure how to operationalize this into a bet.
Interesting!
To be clear, I’m not making a claim about the exact intensity levels. I just think that there was a large pressure to only say positive things before, and that there’s a large pressure to only say negative things now. I don’t feel confident about which of those pressures was larger.
I’d love to see a longer write-up somewhere that provides more evidence and details about any or all of these claims—I don’t know who you are and don’t currently know how much weight to put on them. I could see them turning out to be totally true, or totally false, depending on how honest and rigorous you (and/or your sources, if this isn’t direct info) are.
There are plenty of views held by EA leadership that would be bad if they were to be brought up on, say, Trevor Noah’s show. Do you really want explicit examples here? I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I don’t think this by itself is that problematic because it’s a common mode of dishonesty, and if it were the only problem I would think MacAskill is just engaging in marketing, where deception can be a prerequisite for success. However, for me this is only one piece of the puzzle.
The reasons I’m suspicious of MacAskill in particular are:
His willingness to deceive both the public and ordinary EAs on many occasions: about the views of EA leadership and his own views in particular, about the fact that SBF’s “frugal lifestyle” image was fabricated, potentially about events that took place at early Alameda, etc.
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, including both substantial financial resources and human capital; along with e.g. his intermediation between SBF and Elon Musk
The shady nature of Future Fund grantmaking channels when he would have been in a position to know who received funding from where
The Guzey confidential draft leak episode
Vague “bad rumors” about him that have been circulating recently—I can’t elaborate on this further because I also don’t know the origin of these rumors, but you might hear such things if you go to real-life EA meetups and it still seems like relevant Bayesian evidence
Conditional on the above, the fact that his initial reaction to the FTX scandal was both delayed and ambiguous makes him look even worse
None of this is conclusive evidence, but together they paint a picture of the utilitarian who is convinced he is doing good and who has no problems employing deception and lying as part of his toolkit.
I have some more evidence that I can’t share here due to confidentiality concerns, but none of it is more decisive than the public evidence I’m able to share above. I think the evidence is clear that MacAskill is instrumentally dishonest in many important situations, and there’s unclear but suggestive evidence that he was dishonest about SBF’s character or information he may have had about the leadership of FTX and Alameda Research.
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. In this case I would implore people to have more reasonable priors and to hold EA leadership to higher standards.
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.
I, at least, would be happy for those of examples.
What do you mean by this?
North Dimension is an example of what I mean. In general, the way FTX & Alameda Research structured their business affairs was extremely messy, and we’ve found out more about this since the Chapter 11 filing by FTX and affiliated entities. I think MacAskill was in a position to know about some of this and chose not to say anything. At the very least he would have known which entities are used to disburse funding to grantees, and he may also have known more about the informal way in which FTX conducted business dealings in general.
I also believe people over at CEA may have known this, because to my knowledge the Future Fund was partnering with CEA to process grants at some point. Integrating their infrastructure would have required CEA to have some exposure to exactly how FTX handles payments. The fact that nobody has thought it important to clarify this situation following the revelations that e.g.
FTX employees asked for their salary through Slack messages
at some point FTX customers had to wire money to Alameda’s bank accounts to deposit money at FTX
is quite strange to me.
By itself this is not a red flag; I think someone elsewhere in the comments called it a “yellow flag”. It has to be seen in the context of the other observations I mentioned to be worthwhile.