And it makes you wonder why companies would go to these known-worse-auditors, especially if they can afford the best auditing like FTX should have been able to, if they don’t have something to hide.
Complying with an audit is expensive, and not just in money.
A thorough audit in progress is going to disrupt the workflow of all or most of your company in order to look at their daily operations more closely. This reduces productivity and slows down the ability to change anything, even if nothing improper is happening. It is expensive and disruptive.
A thorough audit is also going to recommend changes. Not just changes required to be technically in compliance, but ones which will make it easier to audit for compliance in the future and ones which remove something that could potentially be mistaken for bad behavior in a dim light. Making those changes is expensive and disruptive.
If you don’t need extremely high levels of trust from your customers and partners, choosing to receive a thorough audit means you’re paying a bunch of unnecessary costs. Much better to get a more lax audit, which is less disruptive to have ongoing and less disruptive to handle once the results are in. Better still if it also costs less money.
The correct audit is the one that provides your customers and clients—and/or your own management—with exactly as much trust and reassurance as you need them to get and no more. Anything less and you lose business that doesn’t trust you; anything more and you’re paying a cost for a benefit you don’t actually benefit from.
These goals are not good goals.
Encourage people to start thinking about the future in more positive terms.
It is actively harmful for people to start thinking about the future in more positive terms, if those terms are misleading and unrealistic. The contest ground rules frame “positive terms” as being familiar, not just good in the abstract—they cannot be good but scary, as any true good outcome must be. See Eutopia is Scary:
Receive inspiration for our real-world policy efforts and future projects to run / fund.
It is actively harmful to take fictional evidence as inspiration for what projects are worth pursuing. This would be true even if the fiction was not constrained to be unrealistic and unattainable, but this contest is constrained in that way, which makes it much worse.
Identify potential collaborators from outside of our existing network.
Again, a search which is specifically biased to have bad input data is going to be harmful, not helpful.
Update our messaging strategy.
Your explicit goal here is to look for ‘positive’, meaning ‘non-scary’, futures to try to communicate. This is lying—no such future is plausible, and it’s unclear any is even possible in theory. You say
but this is not true. Lots of effort goes into thinking about it. You just don’t like the results, because they’re either low-quality (failing in all the old ways utopias fail) or they are high-quality and therefore appropriately terrifying.
The best result I can picture emerging from this contest is for the people running the contest to realize the utter futility of the approach they were targeting and change tacks entirely. I’m unsure whether I hope that comes with some resignations, because this was a really, spectacularly terrible idea, and that would tend to imply some drastic action in response, but on the other hand I’d hope FLI’s team is capable from learning from its mistakes better than most.