It does look increasingly to me like MIRI maybe couldn’t have plausibly benefited much from FTX, because the process whereby SBF selected EAs to work with was such as to exclude Bay Area people who knew about the early Alameda breakup, and this caused FTX money to go to Oxford-respectable longtermism and not to places like MIRI, not even dropping a mil there for old time’s sake while spending $135m on a stadium. I pinged SBF a couple of times to see if he wanted to have a conversation at some point; he never responded. I think there’s a legit sense in which SBF wasn’t one of ours, and it’s not clear to me that MIRI ought to be so easily lumped in with the groups that did potentially benefit.
This isn’t your fault, but you almost certainly “benefitted”—any (increased) funding from other EA funders is a counterfactual result of FTX generously funding other groups that otherwise would have competed for funds. And many regrantors certainly helped MIRI more indirectly by funding things you would have wanted that helped MIRI’s agenda in various ways.
This is not really a disagreement but rather nitpicking, but I noticed that according to https://intelligence.org/topcontributors/ MIRI did receive a donation from Alameda Research. Not a large one, but some money from the SBF ecosystem arrived at MIRI, apparently. But this does not really contradict the speculations you make about SBF avoiding certain Bay Area people.
Yep, well-picked nit, I was just told about that myself. Perfectly good substantive disagreement with the original thesis, imo, you don’t need to downplay it that much.
It also makes sense that the money would’ve come from the Alameda side (maybe in 2020 or early 2021 according to Wayback, somebody said) rather than the FTX side. Alameda would have had the Bay Areans, while FTX’s philanthropic side was constructed (exclusively?) out of Oxfordians.
Separate from the “Alameda did donate” point, I wouldn’t have predicted SBF to be excited about MIRI, because I modeled SBF and Future Fund as having very Will-MacAskill-y views of AI risk. (And of a constellation of other claims that are entangled with MIRI’s coolness, like “is causal decision theory good?”) That’s a very un-MIRI-ish set of heuristics and beliefs about the world, compared to the modal longtermist EA’s heuristics and beliefs.
I strongly think that those views are wrong, but they provide an alternative explanation for SBF liking Oxford more than the Bay, and I feel more wary of saying “the Bay shouldn’t help pay back money stolen by SBF and given to EA” insofar as SBF merely factually disagreed with rationalists a lot. (Also, I guess I lean toward the Bay helping out regardless.)
Apparently there was a $132K Alameda donation to MIRI in 2020 or early 2021. Didn’t actually know that.
Well, obviously they donated less to MIRI after they turned evil, and the stopping of MIRI donations was a huge red flag that we all should have noticed. Sage nod.
It does look increasingly to me like MIRI maybe couldn’t have plausibly benefited much from FTX, because the process whereby SBF selected EAs to work with was such as to exclude Bay Area people who knew about the early Alameda breakup, and this caused FTX money to go to Oxford-respectable longtermism and not to places like MIRI, not even dropping a mil there for old time’s sake while spending $135m on a stadium. I pinged SBF a couple of times to see if he wanted to have a conversation at some point; he never responded. I think there’s a legit sense in which SBF wasn’t one of ours, and it’s not clear to me that MIRI ought to be so easily lumped in with the groups that did potentially benefit.
This isn’t your fault, but you almost certainly “benefitted”—any (increased) funding from other EA funders is a counterfactual result of FTX generously funding other groups that otherwise would have competed for funds. And many regrantors certainly helped MIRI more indirectly by funding things you would have wanted that helped MIRI’s agenda in various ways.
This is not really a disagreement but rather nitpicking, but I noticed that according to https://intelligence.org/topcontributors/ MIRI did receive a donation from Alameda Research. Not a large one, but some money from the SBF ecosystem arrived at MIRI, apparently. But this does not really contradict the speculations you make about SBF avoiding certain Bay Area people.
Yep, well-picked nit, I was just told about that myself. Perfectly good substantive disagreement with the original thesis, imo, you don’t need to downplay it that much.
It also makes sense that the money would’ve come from the Alameda side (maybe in 2020 or early 2021 according to Wayback, somebody said) rather than the FTX side. Alameda would have had the Bay Areans, while FTX’s philanthropic side was constructed (exclusively?) out of Oxfordians.
Separate from the “Alameda did donate” point, I wouldn’t have predicted SBF to be excited about MIRI, because I modeled SBF and Future Fund as having very Will-MacAskill-y views of AI risk. (And of a constellation of other claims that are entangled with MIRI’s coolness, like “is causal decision theory good?”) That’s a very un-MIRI-ish set of heuristics and beliefs about the world, compared to the modal longtermist EA’s heuristics and beliefs.
I strongly think that those views are wrong, but they provide an alternative explanation for SBF liking Oxford more than the Bay, and I feel more wary of saying “the Bay shouldn’t help pay back money stolen by SBF and given to EA” insofar as SBF merely factually disagreed with rationalists a lot. (Also, I guess I lean toward the Bay helping out regardless.)
Apparently there was a $132K Alameda donation to MIRI in 2020 or early 2021. Didn’t actually know that.
Well, obviously they donated less to MIRI after they turned evil, and the stopping of MIRI donations was a huge red flag that we all should have noticed. Sage nod.
For the sake of completeness, here’s a thread with all the financial interactions between MIRI and FTX/Alameda/SBF: https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1595893840484843521