Just to clarify, I agree that EA should not have been expected to detect or predict FTX’s fraud, and explicitly stated that[1]. The point of my post is that other mistakes were likely made, we should be trying to learn from those mistakes, and there are worrisome indications that EA leadership is not interested in that learning process and may actually be inhibiting it.
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“I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX’s massive fraud.”
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.