So far I have been running on the policy that I will accept money from people who seem immoral to me, and indeed I preferred getting money from Sam instead of Open Philanthropy or other EA funders because I thought this would leave the other funders with more marginal resources that could be used to better ends (Edit: I also separately thought that FTX Foundation money would come with more freedom for Lightcone to pursue its aims independently, which I do think was a major consideration I don’t want to elide).
To be clear, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for the other end of this tradeoff, but I currently still believe that it’s OK for EAs to take money from people whose values or virtues they think are bad (and that indeed this is often better than taking money from the people who share your values and virtues, as long as its openly and willingly given). I think the actual tradeoffs are messy, and indeed I ended up encouraging us to go with a different funder for a loan arrangement for a property purchase we ended up making, since that kind of long-term relationship seemed much worse to me, and I was more worried about that entangling us more with FTX.
To be again clear, I was not suspecting large-scale fraud. My sense was that Sam was working in a shady industry while being pretty dishonest in the way the crypto industry often is, but was primarily making money by causing tons of people to speculate in crypto while also being really good at trading against them and eating their lunch, which I think is like, not a great thing to do, but was ultimately within the law and was following reasonable deontological constraints in my opinion.
I am seriously considering giving back a bunch of the money we received. I also for pretty similar reasons think that giving that money back does definitely not entail giving that money back to FTX right now, who maybe are just staging a hack on their own servers (or are being hacked) and should not be trusted with more resources. I expect this will instead require some kind of more sophisticated mechanism of actually helping the people who lost funds (conditional on the bankruptcy proceedings not doing clawbacks, which I think is reasonable given that I think clawbacks are unlikely).
I think it personally might have been better to have a policy of refusing funds from institutions that I think are bad and have power in my social ecosystem, so that I feel more comfortable speaking out against them. I personally prefer the policy of taking their money while also having a policy of just speaking out against them anyways (Dylan Matthews did this in one of his Future Perfect articles in a way I find quite admirable), but I do recognize this is setting myself up for a lot of trust in my own future integrity, and it might be better to tie myself to a mast here.
I think the key damage caused by people in my reference class receiving funds from FTX was that they felt less comfortable criticizing FTX, and I think indeed in-retrospect I was more hesitant than I wish I would have been to speak out against Sam and FTX for this reason, and am currently spending a lot of my time trying to understand how to update and learn from this. It’s pretty plausible to me that I fucked up pretty badly here, though I currently think my fuckup was not being more public about my concerns, and not the part where I accepted Sam’s money. I also think confidentiality concerns were a major problem here, and it’s pretty plausible another component of my fuckup was to agree to too much confidentiality in a way that limited what I could say here.
In situations like this, it might be a good habit to state reservations publicly at the same time you receive the grant? Then your accepting the grant isn’t a signal that you endorse the grantmaker, and you can be less worried about your relationship with the grantmaker damaging your future ability to be candid. Either they stop giving you money, or they continue giving you money even though you badmouthed them (which makes it more clear that you have impunity to do so again in the future).
But it seems unrealistic to expect a recipient of a grant, upon receiving it, to publicly announce ethical and legal reservations about the grant-giver… and then for the grant-giver to be OK with that, and to follow through on providing the grant funding.
‘Biting the hand that feeds you’ doesn’t typically result in good outcomes.
Sure, though I think altruistic grantmakers should want their grantees to criticize them (because an altruistic grantmaker should care more about getting useful and actionable criticism than about looking good in the moment), and I think a lot of EA grantmakers walk the walk in that respect. E.g., MIRI has written tons of stuff publicly criticizing Open Phil, even though Open Phil is by far our largest all-time funder; and I don’t think this has reduced our probability of getting future Open Phil funding.
One advantage of the norm I proposed is that it can help make this a more normal and expected practice, and (for that reason) less risky than it currently is.
And since everything’s happening in public, grantmakers can accumulate track records. If you keep defunding people when they criticize you (even when the criticisms seem good and the grant recipients seem worthy, as far as others can tell), others can notice this fact and dock the grantmaker reputational points. (Which should matter to grantmakers who are optimizing this hard for their reputation in the first place.)
Fair points. I guess if any community can create a norm where it’s OK for grant receivers to criticize grantmakers, it’s the EA community.
I was really just pointing out that creating and maintaining such an open, radically honest, self-reflective, criticism-welcoming culture is very much an uphill struggle, given human nature.
Can you give some context on why Lightcone accepted a FTX Future Fund grant (a) given your view of his trustworthiness?
So far I have been running on the policy that I will accept money from people who seem immoral to me, and indeed I preferred getting money from Sam instead of Open Philanthropy or other EA funders because I thought this would leave the other funders with more marginal resources that could be used to better ends (Edit: I also separately thought that FTX Foundation money would come with more freedom for Lightcone to pursue its aims independently, which I do think was a major consideration I don’t want to elide).
To be clear, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for the other end of this tradeoff, but I currently still believe that it’s OK for EAs to take money from people whose values or virtues they think are bad (and that indeed this is often better than taking money from the people who share your values and virtues, as long as its openly and willingly given). I think the actual tradeoffs are messy, and indeed I ended up encouraging us to go with a different funder for a loan arrangement for a property purchase we ended up making, since that kind of long-term relationship seemed much worse to me, and I was more worried about that entangling us more with FTX.
To be again clear, I was not suspecting large-scale fraud. My sense was that Sam was working in a shady industry while being pretty dishonest in the way the crypto industry often is, but was primarily making money by causing tons of people to speculate in crypto while also being really good at trading against them and eating their lunch, which I think is like, not a great thing to do, but was ultimately within the law and was following reasonable deontological constraints in my opinion.
I am seriously considering giving back a bunch of the money we received. I also for pretty similar reasons think that giving that money back does definitely not entail giving that money back to FTX right now, who maybe are just staging a hack on their own servers (or are being hacked) and should not be trusted with more resources. I expect this will instead require some kind of more sophisticated mechanism of actually helping the people who lost funds (conditional on the bankruptcy proceedings not doing clawbacks, which I think is reasonable given that I think clawbacks are unlikely).
I think it personally might have been better to have a policy of refusing funds from institutions that I think are bad and have power in my social ecosystem, so that I feel more comfortable speaking out against them. I personally prefer the policy of taking their money while also having a policy of just speaking out against them anyways (Dylan Matthews did this in one of his Future Perfect articles in a way I find quite admirable), but I do recognize this is setting myself up for a lot of trust in my own future integrity, and it might be better to tie myself to a mast here.
I think the key damage caused by people in my reference class receiving funds from FTX was that they felt less comfortable criticizing FTX, and I think indeed in-retrospect I was more hesitant than I wish I would have been to speak out against Sam and FTX for this reason, and am currently spending a lot of my time trying to understand how to update and learn from this. It’s pretty plausible to me that I fucked up pretty badly here, though I currently think my fuckup was not being more public about my concerns, and not the part where I accepted Sam’s money. I also think confidentiality concerns were a major problem here, and it’s pretty plausible another component of my fuckup was to agree to too much confidentiality in a way that limited what I could say here.
In situations like this, it might be a good habit to state reservations publicly at the same time you receive the grant? Then your accepting the grant isn’t a signal that you endorse the grantmaker, and you can be less worried about your relationship with the grantmaker damaging your future ability to be candid. Either they stop giving you money, or they continue giving you money even though you badmouthed them (which makes it more clear that you have impunity to do so again in the future).
Interesting idea.
But it seems unrealistic to expect a recipient of a grant, upon receiving it, to publicly announce ethical and legal reservations about the grant-giver… and then for the grant-giver to be OK with that, and to follow through on providing the grant funding.
‘Biting the hand that feeds you’ doesn’t typically result in good outcomes.
Sure, though I think altruistic grantmakers should want their grantees to criticize them (because an altruistic grantmaker should care more about getting useful and actionable criticism than about looking good in the moment), and I think a lot of EA grantmakers walk the walk in that respect. E.g., MIRI has written tons of stuff publicly criticizing Open Phil, even though Open Phil is by far our largest all-time funder; and I don’t think this has reduced our probability of getting future Open Phil funding.
One advantage of the norm I proposed is that it can help make this a more normal and expected practice, and (for that reason) less risky than it currently is.
And since everything’s happening in public, grantmakers can accumulate track records. If you keep defunding people when they criticize you (even when the criticisms seem good and the grant recipients seem worthy, as far as others can tell), others can notice this fact and dock the grantmaker reputational points. (Which should matter to grantmakers who are optimizing this hard for their reputation in the first place.)
Fair points. I guess if any community can create a norm where it’s OK for grant receivers to criticize grantmakers, it’s the EA community.
I was really just pointing out that creating and maintaining such an open, radically honest, self-reflective, criticism-welcoming culture is very much an uphill struggle, given human nature.