EA Meta for 7 years!
COO of Ambitious Impact (previously Charity Entrepreneurship).
Co-Founder of High Impact Professionals. We enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in donating their time, skills and resources effectively.
Ex-CTO and MD of Germany for Founders Pledge. Big on promoting Effective Giving.
Originally from New York, living in Berlin.
Strongly agree with these points and think the first is what makes the overwhelming difference on why EA should have done better. Multiple people allege (both publicly on the forum and people who have told me in confidence) to have told EA leadership that SBF was doing thinks that strongly break with EA values since the Alameda situation of 2018.
This doesnāt imply we should know about any particular illegal activity SBF might have been undertaking, but I would expect SBF to not have been so promoted throughout the past couple of years. This is especially surprising given my perception of EAās high risk-aversion to doing marketing of the movement over the years.
Even if we put everything else to the side, I was shocked to find out that SBF had a $40m property in the Bahamas and felt very naive to have believed the much more popular stories that he merely drove and old car and slept on a beanbag in front of his desk. Surely many other EAs who had visited the Bahamas had been to his penthouse suite or had caught wind of it and could have corrected the mistaken image somehow or posed it as a risk to the movement.
I respect that people who arenāt saying what they know have carefully considered reasons for doing so.
I am not confident it will come from the other side as it hasnāt 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.
I agreeāI donāt think that the FTX debacle should define cause areas per se and I think all of the cause areas on the EA menu are important and meaningful. I meant more to say that EA has played more fast and loose over the years and gotten a bit too big for its britches and I think that is somehow correlated with what happened, although like everyone else I am working all of this out in my head like everyone else. Just imagine that Will was connecting SBF with Elon Musk as one example that was made public and only because it had to be, so we can assume it was one of many behind the scenes dealing where billions are on the line. My point isnāt to condemn anyone with that example, my point is more that I think a humble and sobering shift back to something that would generate ideas of āboring old malaria netsā (and not the cause area per se) feels like it would do the EA movement good. Loose thoughts in my head from someone trying to work it out.
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.
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 wouldnāt 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 shouldnāt have called it super implausible, but it doesnāt seem very plausible for me, especially from people in a movement that takes risks more seriously than any other that I know.
I donāt mean to claim that you think it should replace discussion. I think just reading your text I felt that you bracketed off the discussion/āreflection quite quickly and moved on to what things will be like after which feels very quick to me. I think the discussions in the next few months will (I hope) change so many aspects of EA that I donāt feel like we can make any meaningful statements about the shape of what comes next.
I see from your comment here that you also want to be motivational in the face of people being disheartened by the movement. I can see that now and think that that aspect is great.
I strongly disagree with this. While there is some trivial sense of the word āambitionā Iād endorse, I think it is time for the EA community to slow down, forget mega projects and reflect. And maybe do some boring, old school stuff, like buying malaria nets.
Truly sorry to hear about your experience and thank you for sharing it.
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 āleadershipā is because no one is being specific.
So massive is too big of a word, but the qualifier in some sense letās everything in and isnāt powerful.
I think it is morally correct and that people would agree with it, but I donāt think if it as strong evidence for the claim āwe are against this type of behavior.ā
I donāt think leadership needed to know how the sausage was made to be culpable to some degree. Many people are claiming that they warned leadership that SBF was not doing things above board and if true then has serious implications, even if they didnāt know exactly what SBF was up to.
Not I am not claiming that anyone, specific or otherwise, knew anything.
Iād personally prefer it, in the future, if you wouldnāt focus on the blog posts and quotes. I think they just act as very weak evidence, and your use makes it feel a bit like otherwise.
Especially when they contain massive qualifiers like āthe ends do not ALWAYS justify the meansā
Iāll go with you part of the way, but I also think that experts, traders, and even investors were further from SBF than at least some of the people in the equation here, which seems more and more true the more accounts I hear about people from Alameda saying they warned top brass. I wouldnāt expect an investor to have that kind of insight.
How can both of these be true:
You (and others, if all of the accounts Iāve 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 didnāt take these accounts seriously.
EA leadership took the accounts seriously, but still proceeded to market SBF.
I find them all super implausible so I donāt know what to think!
I strongly believe it is hyperrelevant to know who knew what, when so that these people are held to account. I donāt think this is too much to ask, nor does it have to be arduous in the way you described of getting every name with max fidelity. I see so many claims that ākey EA members knew what was going onā and never any sort of name associate with it.
Bless your heart, GiveWell. Keep chugging along doing object-level work amidst the chaos.
What is the main bottleneck to CE scaling up faster?
How do you measure the counterfactual impact of CE?
I donāt think anyone asking for more information about what people knew believes that central actors knew anything about fraud. If that is what you think, then maybe therein lies the rub. It is more that strong signs of bad ethics are important signals and your example of Kerry is perhaps a good one. Imagine if people had concerns with someone on the level of what they had with Kerry (plausible in the case of SBFāthat is what it important to find out) and despite that promoted Kerry to be one of the few faces of the movement. That would be problematic and it is important to figure out what happened. Thatās not a witch hunt.
Also, it is very surprising to me that you donāt hold the belief that many people treat e.g. Will as a central figure to defer to. Given what youāve written it sounds like you are quite central so maybe get exposed to different people who have more eye-to-eye contact with Will, but it is certainly my experience that most people confer star power on Will. You are right that that doesnāt make it Willās fault. I am just trying to claim that I donāt think you claim that people donāt treat him like a philosopher king hasnāt been my experience at all.