In 2021 I tried asking about SBF among what I suppose you could call “EA leadership”, trying to distinguish whether to put SBF into the column of “keeps compacts but compact very carefully” versus “un-Lawful oathbreaker”, based on having heard that early Alameda was a hard breakup. I did not get a neatly itemized list resembling this one on either points 1 or 2, just heard back basically “yeah early Alameda was a hard breakup and the ones who left think they got screwed” (but not that there’d been a compact that got broken) (and definitely not that they’d had poor capital controls), and I tentatively put SBF into column 1. If “EA leadership” had common knowledge of what you list under items 1 or 2, they didn’t tell me about it when I asked. I suppose in principle that I could’ve expended some of my limited time and stamina to go and inquire directly among the breakup victims looking for one who hadn’t signed an NDA, but that’s just a folly of perfect hindsight.
My own guess is that you are mischaracterizing what EA leadership knew.
Huh, I am surprised that no one responded to you on this. I wonder whether I was part of that conversation, and if so, I would be interested in digging into what went wrong.
I definitely would have put Sam into the “un-lawful oathbreaker” category and have warned many people I have been working with that Sam has a reputation for dishonesty and that we should limit our engagement with him (and more broadly I have been complaining about an erosion of honesty norms among EA leadership to many of the current leadership, in which I often brought up Sam as one of the sources of my concern directly).
I definitely had many conversations with people in “EA leadership” (which is not an amazingly well-defined category) where people told me that I should not trust him. To be clear, nobody I talked to expected wide-scale fraud, and I don’t think this included literally everyone, but almost everyone I talked to told me that I should assume that Sam lies substantially more than population-level baseline (while also being substantially more strategic about his lying than almost everyone else).
I do want to add to this that in addition to Sam having a reputation for dishonesty, he also had a reputation for being vindictive, and almost everyone who told me about their concerns about Sam did so while seeming quite visibly afraid of retribution from Sam if they were to be identified as the source of the reputation, and I was never given details without also being asked for confidentiality.
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.
Do you know if anybody attempted to propagate this information to any of the EAs who were promoting SBF publicly? (If so, do you know if they succeeded in conveying that information to them?)
And just to check, did any of the people who warn you privately promote SBF/FTX publicly?
I ask because it seems weird for a lot of EAs to be passing around warnings about SBF being untrustworthy while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly; I very much hope these sets were disjoint, but also it’s weird for them to be so disjoint, I would have expected better information flow.
Yep, I was and continue to be confused about this. I did tell a bunch of people that I think promoting SBF publicly was bad, and e.g. sent a number of messages when some news article that people were promoting (or maybe 80k interview?) was saying that “Sam sleeps on a bean bag” and “Sam drives a Corolla” when I was quite confident that they knew that Sam was living in one of the most expensive and lavish properties in the Bahamas and was definitely not living a very frugal livestyle. This was just at the same time as the Carrick stuff was happening, and I would have likely reached out to more people if I hadn’t spent a lot of my social energy on pushing back on Carrick stuff at the time (e.g. ASB’s piece on Carrick’s character).
Overall, I did not message many people, and I personally did not speak out very publicly about my broader concerns. I also think a lot of that promotion was happening in a part of the EA ecosystem I interface much less with (80k, UK EAs, Will, etc.), and I’ve had historically somewhat tense relationships to that part of the ecosystem, so I did not have many opportunities to express my concerns.
My understanding is that the answer is basically 2.
I’d love to share more details but I haven’t gotten consent from the person who told me about those conversations yet, and even if I were willing to share without consent I’m not confident enough of my recollection of the details I was told about those conversations when they happened to pass that recollection along. I hope to be able to say more soon.
EDIT: I’ve gotten a response and that person would prefer me not to go into more specifics currently, so I’m going to respect that. I do understand the frustration with all of the vagueness. I’m very hopeful that the EA leaders who were told about all of this will voluntarily come forward about that fact in the coming days. If they don’t, I can promise that they will be publicly named eventually.
My guess is different parts of leadership. I don’t think many of the people I talked to promoted SBF a lot. E.g. see my earlier paragraph on a lot of this promotion being done by the more UK focused branches that I talk much less to.
That could very well be and there are a lot of moving parts. That is why I think it is important for people who supposedly warned leadership to say who was told and what they were told. If we are going to unravel this this all feels like necessary information.
The people who are staying quiet about who they told have carefully considered reasons for doing so, and I’d encourage people to try to respect that, even if it’s hard to understand from outside.
My hope is that the information will be made public from the other side. EA leaders who were told details about the events at early Alameda know exactly who they are, and they can volunteer that information at any time. It will be made public eventually one way or another.
The incentives for them to do so include 1) modelling healthy transparency norms, 2) avoiding looking bad when it comes out anyway, 3) just generally doing the right thing.
I personally commit to making my knowledge about it public within a year. (I could probably commit to a shorter time frame than that, that’s just what I’m sure I’m happy to commit to having given it only a moment’s thought.)
If insiders were making serious accusations about his character to EA leadership and they went on to promote him that would be weird to me. Especially if many people did it which is what has been claimed. Of course I have no idea who “leadership” is because no one is being specific.
To be fair sometimes people make accusations that are incorrect? Your decision procedure does need to allow for the possibility of not taking a given accusation seriously. I don’t know who knew what and how reasonable a conclusion this was for any given person given their state of knowledge, in this case, but also people do get this wrong sometimes, this doesn’t seem implausible to me.
My decision procedure does allow for that and I have lots of uncertainties, but it feels that given many insiders claim to have warned people in positions of power about this and Sam got actively promoted anyway. If multiple people with intimate knowledge of someone came to you and told you that they thought person X was of bad character you wouldn’t have to believe them hook line and sinker to be judicious about promoting that person.
Maybe this is the most plausible of the 3 and I shouldn’t have called it super implausible, but it doesn’t seem very plausible for me, especially from people in a movement that takes risks more seriously than any other that I know.
I found this comment annoying enough to read that I felt compelled to give a simplified version:
In 2021, I asked about SBF among some “senior EA people”. I had heard that Alameda had had a hard breakup, and I didn’t know whether SBF cheated his partners or whether he was merely a punctilious negotiator who nonetheless keeps his word. Based on what I heard, I classified SBF more as a punctilious negotiator than as a cheater, and I definitely didn’t hear about them having poor capital controls at the beginning.
My own guess is that you are mischaracterizing what EA leadership knew.
This removes some nuance, but maybe adds some clarity.
I did not say that it’d be good if somebody was a ruthless negotiator.
If you’re going to paraphrase somebody, please be more careful to paraphrase things they actually said, by dereferencing, and not add implications you thought they meant.
It suggests that my categorization of “EA leadership” was probably too broad and that fewer people knew the details of the situation than I believed.
That means there is a question of how many people knew. I am confident that Nick Beckstead and Will MacAskill knew about the broken agreement and other problems at Alameda. I am confident they are not the only ones that knew.
Why are you confident of that? In general, I think there’s just less time and competence and careful checking to go around, in this world, than people would want to believe. This isn’t Hieronym’s To The Stars or the partially Hieronym-inspired world of dath ilan.
In 2021 I tried asking about SBF among what I suppose you could call “EA leadership”, trying to distinguish whether to put SBF into the column of “keeps compacts but compact very carefully” versus “un-Lawful oathbreaker”, based on having heard that early Alameda was a hard breakup. I did not get a neatly itemized list resembling this one on either points 1 or 2, just heard back basically “yeah early Alameda was a hard breakup and the ones who left think they got screwed” (but not that there’d been a compact that got broken) (and definitely not that they’d had poor capital controls), and I tentatively put SBF into column 1. If “EA leadership” had common knowledge of what you list under items 1 or 2, they didn’t tell me about it when I asked. I suppose in principle that I could’ve expended some of my limited time and stamina to go and inquire directly among the breakup victims looking for one who hadn’t signed an NDA, but that’s just a folly of perfect hindsight.
My own guess is that you are mischaracterizing what EA leadership knew.
Huh, I am surprised that no one responded to you on this. I wonder whether I was part of that conversation, and if so, I would be interested in digging into what went wrong.
I definitely would have put Sam into the “un-lawful oathbreaker” category and have warned many people I have been working with that Sam has a reputation for dishonesty and that we should limit our engagement with him (and more broadly I have been complaining about an erosion of honesty norms among EA leadership to many of the current leadership, in which I often brought up Sam as one of the sources of my concern directly).
I definitely had many conversations with people in “EA leadership” (which is not an amazingly well-defined category) where people told me that I should not trust him. To be clear, nobody I talked to expected wide-scale fraud, and I don’t think this included literally everyone, but almost everyone I talked to told me that I should assume that Sam lies substantially more than population-level baseline (while also being substantially more strategic about his lying than almost everyone else).
I do want to add to this that in addition to Sam having a reputation for dishonesty, he also had a reputation for being vindictive, and almost everyone who told me about their concerns about Sam did so while seeming quite visibly afraid of retribution from Sam if they were to be identified as the source of the reputation, and I was never given details without also being asked for confidentiality.
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.
That’s very surprising!!
Do you know if anybody attempted to propagate this information to any of the EAs who were promoting SBF publicly? (If so, do you know if they succeeded in conveying that information to them?)
And just to check, did any of the people who warn you privately promote SBF/FTX publicly?
I ask because it seems weird for a lot of EAs to be passing around warnings about SBF being untrustworthy while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly; I very much hope these sets were disjoint, but also it’s weird for them to be so disjoint, I would have expected better information flow.
Yep, I was and continue to be confused about this. I did tell a bunch of people that I think promoting SBF publicly was bad, and e.g. sent a number of messages when some news article that people were promoting (or maybe 80k interview?) was saying that “Sam sleeps on a bean bag” and “Sam drives a Corolla” when I was quite confident that they knew that Sam was living in one of the most expensive and lavish properties in the Bahamas and was definitely not living a very frugal livestyle. This was just at the same time as the Carrick stuff was happening, and I would have likely reached out to more people if I hadn’t spent a lot of my social energy on pushing back on Carrick stuff at the time (e.g. ASB’s piece on Carrick’s character).
Overall, I did not message many people, and I personally did not speak out very publicly about my broader concerns. I also think a lot of that promotion was happening in a part of the EA ecosystem I interface much less with (80k, UK EAs, Will, etc.), and I’ve had historically somewhat tense relationships to that part of the ecosystem, so I did not have many opportunities to express my concerns.
It would be useful to say whether any of the people you told would be considered ‘EA leadership’; and if so, who.
How can both of these be true:
You (and others, if all of the accounts I’ve been reading about are true) told EA leadership about a deep mistrust of SBF.
EA decided to hold up and promote SBF as a paragon of EA values and on of the few prominent faces in the EA community.
If both of those are true, how many logical possibilities are there?
The accounts that people told EA leadership are false.
The accounts are true and EA leadership didn’t take these accounts seriously.
EA leadership took the accounts seriously, but still proceeded to market SBF.
I find them all super implausible so I don’t know what to think!
My understanding is that the answer is basically 2.
I’d love to share more details but I haven’t gotten consent from the person who told me about those conversations yet, and even if I were willing to share without consent I’m not confident enough of my recollection of the details I was told about those conversations when they happened to pass that recollection along. I hope to be able to say more soon.
EDIT: I’ve gotten a response and that person would prefer me not to go into more specifics currently, so I’m going to respect that. I do understand the frustration with all of the vagueness. I’m very hopeful that the EA leaders who were told about all of this will voluntarily come forward about that fact in the coming days. If they don’t, I can promise that they will be publicly named eventually.
My guess is different parts of leadership. I don’t think many of the people I talked to promoted SBF a lot. E.g. see my earlier paragraph on a lot of this promotion being done by the more UK focused branches that I talk much less to.
That could very well be and there are a lot of moving parts. That is why I think it is important for people who supposedly warned leadership to say who was told and what they were told. If we are going to unravel this this all feels like necessary information.
The people who are staying quiet about who they told have carefully considered reasons for doing so, and I’d encourage people to try to respect that, even if it’s hard to understand from outside.
My hope is that the information will be made public from the other side. EA leaders who were told details about the events at early Alameda know exactly who they are, and they can volunteer that information at any time. It will be made public eventually one way or another.
I respect that people who aren’t saying what they know have carefully considered reasons for doing so.
I am not confident it will come from the other side as it hasn’t to date and there is no incentive to do so.
May I ask why you believe it will be made public eventually? I truly hope that is the case.
The incentives for them to do so include 1) modelling healthy transparency norms, 2) avoiding looking bad when it comes out anyway, 3) just generally doing the right thing.
I personally commit to making my knowledge about it public within a year. (I could probably commit to a shorter time frame than that, that’s just what I’m sure I’m happy to commit to having given it only a moment’s thought.)
What do you find super implausible about 2?
If insiders were making serious accusations about his character to EA leadership and they went on to promote him that would be weird to me. Especially if many people did it which is what has been claimed. Of course I have no idea who “leadership” is because no one is being specific.
To be fair sometimes people make accusations that are incorrect? Your decision procedure does need to allow for the possibility of not taking a given accusation seriously. I don’t know who knew what and how reasonable a conclusion this was for any given person given their state of knowledge, in this case, but also people do get this wrong sometimes, this doesn’t seem implausible to me.
My decision procedure does allow for that and I have lots of uncertainties, but it feels that given many insiders claim to have warned people in positions of power about this and Sam got actively promoted anyway. If multiple people with intimate knowledge of someone came to you and told you that they thought person X was of bad character you wouldn’t have to believe them hook line and sinker to be judicious about promoting that person.
Maybe this is the most plausible of the 3 and I shouldn’t have called it super implausible, but it doesn’t seem very plausible for me, especially from people in a movement that takes risks more seriously than any other that I know.
I found this comment annoying enough to read that I felt compelled to give a simplified version:
This removes some nuance, but maybe adds some clarity.
Edit: Reworded, see original here.
I did not say that it’d be good if somebody was a ruthless negotiator.
If you’re going to paraphrase somebody, please be more careful to paraphrase things they actually said, by dereferencing, and not add implications you thought they meant.
I didn’t say I was paraphrasing you, I said I was giving a simplified version. I also pointed out the sentence was not in the original.
Adding in an unflattering sentiment that was not said or clearly implied in the original is not “simplifying”.
Ok, fine, reworded. You can still find the original here.
I consider this credible.
It suggests that my categorization of “EA leadership” was probably too broad and that fewer people knew the details of the situation than I believed.
That means there is a question of how many people knew. I am confident that Nick Beckstead and Will MacAskill knew about the broken agreement and other problems at Alameda. I am confident they are not the only ones that knew.
Why are you confident of that? In general, I think there’s just less time and competence and careful checking to go around, in this world, than people would want to believe. This isn’t Hieronym’s To The Stars or the partially Hieronym-inspired world of dath ilan.