I’d regard incentive to discount highly immoral business practices (e.g. what happened with Alameda in 2018) as stemming from a conflict of interest (i.e. interest 1: promote integrity in EA; interest 2: get lots of money from SBF for EA. These were in conflict!)
I wouldn’t say orthogonal, more upstream. If SBF had been shunned from the community in 2018, would we be in this situation now? Sure, he might still have committed massive fraud with the ends of gaining wealth and influence, but the focus would be on the Democrats, or whatever other group became his main affiliation.
No, you’re thinking about it entirely wrong. If everyone who did something analogous to Alameda 2018 was shunned, there probably wouldn’t be any billionaire EA donors at all. It was probably worse than most startups, but not remarkably worse. It was definitely not a reliable indicator that a fraud or scandal was coming down the road.
Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn were already EA ~billionaire donors well before 2018. They haven’t done anything analogous to what SBF/FTX/Alameda did. What examples are you thinking of?
Strongly disagree. That criticism is mostly orthogonal to the actual problems that surfaced. Conflicts of interest were not the problem here.
I’d regard incentive to discount highly immoral business practices (e.g. what happened with Alameda in 2018) as stemming from a conflict of interest (i.e. interest 1: promote integrity in EA; interest 2: get lots of money from SBF for EA. These were in conflict!)
Again, that’s orthogonal to the actual problems that surfaced.
I wouldn’t say orthogonal, more upstream. If SBF had been shunned from the community in 2018, would we be in this situation now? Sure, he might still have committed massive fraud with the ends of gaining wealth and influence, but the focus would be on the Democrats, or whatever other group became his main affiliation.
No, you’re thinking about it entirely wrong. If everyone who did something analogous to Alameda 2018 was shunned, there probably wouldn’t be any billionaire EA donors at all. It was probably worse than most startups, but not remarkably worse. It was definitely not a reliable indicator that a fraud or scandal was coming down the road.
Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn were already EA ~billionaire donors well before 2018. They haven’t done anything analogous to what SBF/FTX/Alameda did. What examples are you thinking of?
Those two are perfectly good examples. They did. Every successful startup does something approximately that bad, on the way to the top.