I’m curious about all the downvotes as I understood Marcus to simply be saying “Building a bunker for some people somewhere should at least be on the table.”
Is even this just too toxic an idea in the current political climate? Because if you can’t save everyone, you obviously shouldn’t save anyone or something like that?
(I know Garrison has given a response below that sounds like an explanation for a downvote, but actually I can’t see any disagreement in it.)
“Value Lock-In: The Hundred Schools of Thought” (What We Owe The Future, Chapter 4)
I’d love to see a Future Fund grantee publicly pledge that in the absence of a clawback, they’ll donate the money to GiveDirectly.
I think that would be a very respectable commitment and the sort of thing an EA might do.
I don’t think anyone is obliged to do something like this. But wouldn’t it be interesting to watch EAs/the media/the general public wrestle with the ethical quandary that would put FTX in?
It’s not often you get the opportunity to confront society with a dilemma quite like this—I bet the discussion would be rather illuminating.
[A moderator had edited this comment to remove identifying information, after a moderation decision to retroactively redact the user’s identification]
Maybe you are right that the lawyers would only see their professional obligation and no ethical problem.
I’m curious where you (or others) think the line might be in similar situations though. At one point do you think a significant fraction of society would think there’s a challenging ethical quandary? How about if grantees had already donated their grants to GiveDirectly “earning to give” style and couldn’t afford to repay? Or if SBF had just donated everything to GiveDirectly? And what if GiveDirectly had already disbursed all the funds but GiveDirectly’s recipients mostly hadn’t spent them yet? Do you think still think people would just think “I don’t care how unjust the system is that put these people in poverty in the first place. You should obviously take their money and give it back to the (globally) rich.”?
These questions are less interesting to me than my original thought because they’re not about what actually happened or could happen, but they might make for a thought-provoking piece of short fiction.
I saw someone had downvoted this. I think it’s because you posted it three times.
I’ve become much more familiar with EA, historically I’ve consider the two communities to be similarly rational and I thought the two were generally a lot more similar in their beliefs than I do now.
So when I learn of a difference of opinion, I update my outside view and the extent to which I consider people the relevant experts. E.g., when I learn that Eliezer thinks pigs aren’t morally relevant because they’re not self-aware, I lose a bit of confidence in my belief that pigs are morally relevant and I become a bit less trustful that any alignment ‘solutions’ coming from the rationalist community would capture the bulk of what I care about.
I thought the final three paragraphs were the best part of this post and I wish you had led with them!
“Consider two types of thinkers...I think that ‘hero worship’ is often a problem in this community because people—including myself—have mistaken innovators for systematizers...Sounds plausible, right? Let’s take Eliezer as an example (sorry, Eliezer!)...”
This practice of “This generally pretty great person/org in our community [probably] has a FLAW!!” *upvote upvote upvote upvote* doesn’t seem very healthy to me[1], whereas “Here’s a mistake I think I’ve made and I think lots of us are making” (and sharing the post in advance with anyone identifiable singled out for criticism) seems very helpful :)
Although if Eliezer is as condescending as you make out, part of me thinks it’s fair play to be somewhat ridiculing in response. Still, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, ya know.
Could this be an instance of the rationalist tendency to “decouple”?
From one perspective, Ben is simply “Sharing information about nonlinear.” What’s wrong with providing additional information? It’s even caveated with a description of one’s epistemic status and instruction on how to update accordingly! Why don’t we all have such a “low bar for publicly sharing critical info about folks in the EA/x-risk/rationalist/etc ecosystem”?
From another perspective, Ben has chosen to “search for negative information about the Nonlinear cofounders” and then—without inviting or even permitting the accused party to share their side of the story in advance—share it in a public space full of agents whose tendency to gossip is far stronger than their tendency to update in an appropriately Bayesian manner (i.e. human beings).
I suspect Ben does in fact have some understanding of the political dimension of his decision to share this post, but I think his behaviour is more understandable when you consider that he’s embedded in a culture that encourages people to ignore the political consequences of what they say.
What has happened to this forum? A member of our community is dealing with one of the worst things that’s ever happened to her and is literally begging for simply the opportunity to share her side of the story and she’s getting downvoted?
I’m not trying to defend Kat. In fact, I think we generally don’t have that great an opinion of each other—I really have no vested interest in protecting her reputation. But at least let her defend herself.
I don’t understand how people would be at greater risk of retaliation if the post was delayed by a week?
I also want to make sure people realise that there’s a huge difference between “I will stalk you / call your family / get you fired” and “I will sue you” in terms of what counts as threats/intimidation/retaliation [edit: e.g. if Alice had threatened to sue Nonlinear that wouldn’t be considered retaliation, whereas threatening to call their family would be worrying], so I don’t think Emerson’s email is a particularly strong confirmation that the “large and substantial threat of retaliation” is real.
If Ben is worried about losing 40 hours of productive time by responding to Nonlinear’s evidence in private, he doesn’t have to. He could just allow them to put together their side of the story, ready for publishing when he publishes his own post. Similarly, if he’s worried about them manipulating him with their charisma, he could just agree to delay and then stop reading/responding to their messages. This way readers can still read both sides of the story at once, rather than read the most juicy side, tell all their friends the latest gossip, and carry on with their lives as the post drops off the frontpage.
And fwiw, Kat, I haven’t read the post. I read the beginning and end, which I hope has given me enough context to understand what kind of post it is. I intend not to read the whole post until your response is ready.
Anecdotally, among the EAs I’ve spoken to IRL about all this and among the non-EAs I’ve spoken to about it, ‘EA got used’ is by far the more common narrative. I think the mood on this forum is quite different and I thought of the OP as the EA most committed to this ‘it’s all EA’s fault’ narrative even before he made this post. So I worry that his post paints a very skewed picture (also obviously because of the research others have mentioned in the comments).
We aren’t just talking about SBF, as the whole affair included other insiders who were arguably as ‘true believers’ in EA as it is reasonable to expect (like Caroline Ellison)
Are there actually any other examples beyond SBF and his on-and-off romantic partner? I’d be a lot more concerned if there were several EAs independently plotting fraud who then joined forces, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The “SBF was psychopathic” point is interesting.
Less of a “point,” more of a “claim without any accompanying arguments/evidence presented.”
Interesting. I think I know EA as well as you do and know many EAs who know EA as well as you do and as I said, you’re the person most committed to this narrative that I could think of even before you made this post (no doubt there are others more pessimistic I haven’t come across, but I’d be very surprised if it was 25%+). I also can’t think of any who have left, but perhaps our respective circles are relevantly skewed in some way (and I’m very curious about who has!).
Point taken, though, that many of us have ‘conflicts of interest,’ if by that you mean ‘it would be better for us if EA were completely innocent and thriving’ (although as others have pointed out, we are an unusually guilt-prone community).
As you’ve linked me to this comment elsewhere, I’ll respond.
I’m not sure why EAs who knew about Caroline and Sam dating would have felt the need to ‘disclose’ this? (Unless they already suspected the fraud but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim that anyone did?)
Sam and FTX seem about as frugal as I’d expect for an insanely profitable business and an intention to give away the vast majority of tens of billions of dollars, too frugal if anything (although I actually think my disagreeing with you here is a point in favour of your broader argument—the more Sam splurged on luxuries, the less it looks like he was motivated by any kind of altruism)
What financial and other support did FTX receive after the early Alameda split by people who were ‘warned’? (There may well be a substantial amount, I just don’t think I’ve heard of any.) I’ll note, though, that it’s easy to see as ‘warnings’ now what at the time could have just looked like a messy divorce.
Admittedly I don’t know much about how these things work, but yet again this looks like hindsight bias to me. Would this have been a priority for you if you had no idea what was coming? If the firewalling was delayed for whatever reason, would you have refused to award grants until it had been? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s obvious. Also wouldn’t they still be vulnerable to clawbacks in any case?
Again, I just don’t think I know anything about this. In fact I don’t think I knew Sam was under government investigation before November. I’d be curious if you had details to share, especially regarding how serious the allegations were at the time and which meetings he was invited to.
I would love this to be brought back!