DPiepgrass

Karma: 1,081

I’m a senior software developer in Canada (earning ~US$70K in a good year) who, being late to the EA party, earns to give. Historically I’ve have a chronic lack of interest in making money; instead I’ve developed an unhealthy interest in foundational software that free markets don’t build because their effects would consist almost entirely of positive externalities.

I dream of making the world better by improving programming languages and developer tools, but AFAIK no funding is available for this kind of work outside academia. My open-source projects can be seen at loyc.net, core.loyc.net, ungglish.loyc.net and ecsharp.net (among others).

DPiepgrass 20 Aug 2026 23:06 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Effective Altruism and End-Times Fascism
Yeah, I have noticed multiple left-wing sources directly misrepresenting the ideas of Effective Altruism and the Guardian article certainly does that:
There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.
This sounds absurd on its face―I’ve always supported “redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now”.
Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole.
Also obvious BS.
They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun.
wtf could they possibly be talking about?
Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience...
ahh yes, the dark philosophy of trying to figure out how to make the future go well, prevent human extinction, raise the prosperity floor, reduce suffering etc… you would think that the alt-Right, with its celebration of cruelty, would be our natural enemies, but in fact they ignore us and certain leftists want to be our enemies instead. Why?
Personally I spend a lot of my time fighting against misinformation, a problem that EA has largely ignored. Well, the more we become the target of it, perhaps the more we will be motivated to think about the problem. I think that the high popularity of disinformation/misinformation’s is one of the biggest, most consequential phenomena in the world, so we ought to pay a lot of attention to it.
Financial motivations for misinformation are best-known: tobacco companies not wanting people to believe that smoking causes lung cancer, Exxon Mobil not wanting people to know that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, Andrew Wakefield wanting people to believe that the MRR vaccine is hazardous because he has a patent on a would-be competing vaccine.
But while people think of Wakefield as the father of “vaccines cause autism”, that wasn’t his original angle. It seems like he wanted to steer discourse in a direction that would let him to sell his competing vaccine, but when his fraudulent activities were exposed, he found himself pulled toward the nascent anti-vax movement and accidentally turned into a figurehead: I guess they fed off Wakefield’s popularity while Wakefield fed off their desire for thought leaders.
Which brings us to the second and much more common kind of misinformation, in which the incentives are social, not financial. Most people who preach that humans can’t cause global warming have no financial motivation either. Anti-EA misinformation is roughly 100% of this second type. How does such misinformation work? How can it be countered? I don’t really know, but if anybody wants to study this, color me interested!
This reminds me of my Mormon upbringing; many church talks were given on how important it was to be kind and virtuous in order to maintain and improve the church’s reputation. Does it help? Not sure. They’re surviving, but many people don’t like them. Gemini says growth has slowed down, with +42% new wards in the decade ending 2000 vs +8.8% for 2020, despite the church’s strong missionary program. In any case, seems better to have a missionary program than not. This also reminds me how much I wish I had an EA “church” building I could attend with my kids...

DPiepgrass 5 Sep 2025 14:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Matt_Sharp’s comment on: The catastrophic situation with USAID just got worse—why the EA community should care
Notably, we have zero sway in the current administration. Arguably, most Republicans have zero sway too. Even Marco Rubio is acting like someone else, apparently to avoid being fired. I’m reminded of Prof. Gerdes, a conservative YouTuber whom I follow simply because he ends every video by saying “thank you for being the kind of person who cares about Ukraine”—which is just not something a 2025 Republican would say. Indeed, he eventually mentioned that he “just couldn’t” vote for Trump a second time. I wish I could be politically powerful, but I don’t even have a single EA friend. So, political donations don’t seem in the cards this year.

DPiepgrass 1 Sep 2025 7:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Nnaemeka Emmanuel Nnadi’s comment on: I Am Not a Good Fit: Reflections on My Journey with EA and Global Priorities
Thanks for your answer; it sounds like you basically understand the game the same way I do. Unfortunately, I can’t offer useful advice, because I’m an Earning-To-Give engineer with no experience in science work, grantmaking or grant-receiving. (There’s a project I’d like funding for, but haven’t worked hard on pitches because I’m contractually “locked in” to my current job.)

DPiepgrass 31 Aug 2025 10:13 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
on: I Am Not a Good Fit: Reflections on My Journey with EA and Global Priorities
How do you go about the “pitch”? That is, how do you try to convince EA grantmakers to give you funding? EAs tend to be interested in the most effective interventions, or at least “hits-based” interventions (ideas that have high expected value after multiplying by a low probability of success).
Now, funders should maybe also be interested in community-building funding, where a grant is given not so much because a project is likely to make an outsized difference in the world, but simply because an EA (GWWC signatory?) wants to use their expertise to do good in a specific way, and they have been unable to get funding to do so through conventional channels, without there being an apparent good reason for that (i.e. the project seems worthwhile and deserving). I don’t know if there’s a standard way of thinking about this question, but I’ve had some rejections from EA orgs myself, and I suspect it’s easy for EA orgs to undervalue the EA community itself.
And of course, when it comes to African EAs in Africa, cost-effectiveness might be doubled or tripled by the low cost of living, and there is additional value to the local economy in keeping educated people in Africa rather than encouraging them to move somewhere with more grants.

DPiepgrass 24 Jul 2025 0:52 UTC
2 points
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on: Who’s hiring?
I work for a small Canadian software company that needs a new C#/TypeScript engineer. Everyone at the company normally works remote. IMO the software is not that interesting―typical Alberta software, water management for oil & gas―but our code is fairly well-factored, the frontend is pretty, and you could probably be paid to do some research into AI, and/or integrate some sort of nonlinear/MIP solver technology, or something involving hydraulic modeling.
My employer doesn’t want to pay much more than the going rate for Alberta. That won’t seem great to Americans, but you might snag some equity, we are near an inflection point, and we expect to grow quickly (“small business” quickly, not “startup” quickly). Intellect is a must.
Consider this job if you are strong in C# or TypeScript, you like remote, the pay is acceptable and you’d want to work with me personally (I wrote perhaps ~75% of the product).
Who am I, then? I could say many things. I’m a rationalist EA who, in the past, wrote a Super Nintendo emulator, the MilliKeys keyboard for PalmPilots, the FastNav GPS system (with turn-by-turn directions, traffic-sensitive routing, etc.), and I used to build a set of open-source projects called “Loyc”. My personal page is at david.loyc.net. I am a writer with no audience and I will let you be the judge of whether this is because my writing is boring, or some other reason. YouTube must think I’m spicy, because they often censor me. Finally, I describe my approach to software here ― TL;DR: I value appropriately small code. After more than 4 years our core product―which serves three different submarkets―is about 125,000 lines of code excluding tests and blank lines. It would be less if I’d had full control of it, and 10,000 of those lines are comments ― ideally we’d have more. In my experience, many/most devs would’ve used 500,000 lines for this.
Our software stack includes .NET 8, EF Core, PostgreSQL, HiGHS (LP/MIP solver), Leaflet, React 18, MobX, MUI, Chart.js, Docker, ansible, Traefik, Dart (oops) and Flutter, among other things. You don’t need skill in any of those, though you must be strong in C# or TypeScript, and I’m looking for multiparadigmatic competency ― e.g. you can switch between OOP and functional programming depending on what best fits the situation, or you have a knack for UX design, or something. Nice-to-haves include “vibe coding” skills (because I don’t know how), sysadmin/prod/Linux skills, strong communication skills (detail, precision, and accuracy without ambiguity) and open-source contributions you can use to demo your skills.

[Question] Who’s hiring?

DPiepgrass24 Jul 2025 0:43 UTC

19 points

1 comment1 min readEA link

DPiepgrass 28 Jan 2025 13:46 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Preparing Effective Altruism for an AI-Transformed World
A key implication here is that we need models of how AI will transform the world with many qualitative and quantitative details. Individual EAs working in global health, for example, cannot be expected to broadly predict how the world will change.
My view, having thought about this a fair bit, is that there is an extremely broad range of outcomes ranging from human extinction, to various dystopias, to utopia or “utopia”. But there are probably a lot of effects that are relatively predictable, especially in the near term.
Of course, EAs in field X can think about how AI affects X. But this should work better after learning about whatever broad changes superforecasters (or whoever) can predict.

DPiepgrass 7 Dec 2024 6:30 UTC
30 points
4 ∶ 1
on: dpiepgrass’s Shortform
After following the Ukraine war closely for almost three years, I naturally also watch China’s potential for military expansionism. Whereas past leaders of China talked about “forceful if necessary” reunification with Taiwan, Xi Jinping seems like a much more aggressive person, one who would actually do it―especially since the U.S. is frankly showing so much weakness in Ukraine. I know this isn’t how EAs are used to thinking, but you have to start from the way dictators think. Xi, much like Putin, seems to idolize the excesses of his country’s communist past, and is a conservative gambler: that is, he will take a gamble if the odds seem enough in his favor. Putin badly miscomputed his odds in Ukraine, but Russia’s GDP and population were 1.843 trillion and 145 million, versus 17.8 trillion and 1.4 billion for China. At the same time, Taiwan is much less populous than Ukraine and its would-be defenders in the USA/EU/Japan are not as strong naval powers as China (yet would have to operate over a longer range). Last but not least, China is the factory of the world―if they should decide they want to do world domination military-style, they can probably do that fairly well while simultaneously selling us vital goods at suddenly-inflated prices.
So when I hear China ramped up nuclear weapon production, I immediately think of it as a nod toward Taiwan. If we don’t want an invasion of Taiwan, what do we do? Liberals have a habit of magical thinking in military matters, talking of diplomacy, complaining about U.S. “war mongers”, and running protests with “No Nukes” signs. But the invasion of Taiwan has nothing to do with the U.S.; Xi simply *wants* Taiwan and has the power to take it. If he makes that decision, no words can stop him. So the Free World has no role to play here other than (1) to deter and (2) to optionally help out Taiwan if Xi invades anyway.
Not all deterrents are military, of course; China and USA will surely do huge economic damage to each other if China invades, and that is a deterrent. But I think China has the upper hand here in ways the USA can’t match. On paper, USA has more military spending, but for practical purposes it is the underdog in a war for Taiwan^[1]. Moreover, President Xi surely noticed that all it took was a few comments from Putin about nuclear weapons to close off the possibility of a no-fly-zone in Ukraine, NATO troops on the ground, use of American weapons against Russian territory (for years), etc. So I think Xi can reasonably―and correctly―conclude that China wants Taiwan more than the USA wants to defend it. (To me at least, comments about how we can’t spend more than 4% of the defense budget on Ukraine “because we need to be ready to fight China” just shows how unserious the USA is about defending democracy.) Still, USA aiding Taiwan is certainly a risk for Jinping and I think we need to make that risk look as big and scary as possible.
All this is to say that warfighting isn’t the point―who knows if Trump would even bother. The point is to create a credible deterrent as part of efforts to stop the Free World from shrinking even further. If war comes, maybe we fight, maybe we don’t. But war is more likely whenever dictators think they are stronger than their victims.
I would like more EAs to think seriously about containment, democracy promotion and even epistemic defenses. For what good is it to make people more healthy and prosperous, if those people later end up in a dictatorship that conscripts them or their children to fight wars―including perhaps wars against democracies? (I’m thinking especially of India and the BJP party, here. And yes, it’s still good to help them despitee the risk, I’m just saying it’s not enough and we should have even broader horizons.)
Granted, maybe we can’t do anything. Maybe there’s no tractable and cost-effective thing in this space. There are probably neglected things―like, when the Ukraine war first started, I thought Bryan Caplan’s “make desertion fast” idea was good, and I wish somebody had looked at counterpropaganda operations that could’ve made the concept work. Still, I would like EAs to understand some things.
1. The risks of geopolitics have returned―basically, cold-war stuff.
2. EAs overly focus on x-risk and s-risk over catastrophic risk. Technically, c-risk is way less bad than x-risk, but it doesn’t feel less bad. c-risk is more emotionally resonant for people, and risk management tasks probably overlap a lot between the two, so it’s probably easier to connect with policymakers over c-risk than x-risk.
3. I haven’t heard EAs talk about “loss-of-influence” risk. One form of this would be AGI takeover: if AGIs are much faster, smarter and cheaper than us (whether they are controlled by humans or by themselves), a likely outcome is one in which normal humans have no control over what happens: either AGIs themselves or dictators with AGI armies make all the decisions. In this sense, it sure seems we are the hinge of history, as future humans may have no control, and past humans had an inadequate understanding of their world. But in this post I’m pointing to a more subtle loss of control, where the balance of power shifts toward dictatorships until they decide to invade democracies that are more and more distant from their sphere of influence. If global power shifts toward highly-censored strongman regimes, EAs’ influence could eventually wane to zero.
1. ^
  just my opinion, but this video raises some of the key points

DPiepgrass 6 Nov 2024 20:12 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: dpiepgrass’s Shortform
I’ve been thinking that there is a “fallacious, yet reasonable as a default/fallback” way to choose moral circles based on the Anthropic principle, which is closely related to my article “The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It Out”. It’s based on the idea that consciousness is “real” (part of the territory, not the map), in the same sense that quarks are real but cars are not. In this view, we say: P-zombies may be possible, but if consciousness is real (part of the territory), then by the Anthropic principle we are not P-Zombies, since P-zombies by definition do not have real experiences. (To look at it another way, P-Zombies are intelligences that do not concentrate qualia or valence, so in a solar system with P-zombies, something that experiences qualia is as likely to be found alongside one proton as any other, and there are about 10^20 times more protons in the sun as there are in the minds of everyone on Zombie Earth combined.) I also think that real qualia/valence is the fundamental object of moral value (also reasonable IMO, for why should an object with no qualia and no valence have intrinsic worth?)
By the Anthropic principle, it is reasonable to assume that whatever we happen to be is somewhat typical among beings that have qualia/valence, and thus, among beings that have moral worth. By this reasoning, it is unlikely that the sum total |W| of all qualia/valence in the world is dramatically larger than the sum total |H| of all qualia/valence among humans, because if |W| >> |H|, you and I are unlikely to find ourselves in set H. I caution people that while reasonable, this view is necessarily uncertain and thus fallacious and morally hazardous if it is treated as a certainty. Yet if we are to allocate our resources in the absence of any scientific clarity about which animals have qualia/valence, I think we should take this idea into consideration.
P.S. given the election results, I hope more people are doing now the soul-searching we should’ve done in 2016. I proposed my intervention “Let’s Make the Truth Easier to Find” on EA Forum in March 2023. It’s necessarily a partial solution, but I’m very interested to know why EAs generally weren’t interested in it. I do encourage people to investigate for themselves why Mr. Post Truth himself has roughly the same popularity as the average Democrat―twice.

DPiepgrass 29 Sep 2024 22:19 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Consolidation of EA criticism?
Also: critical feedback can be good. Even if painful, it can help a person grow. But downvotes communicate nothing to a commenter except “f**k you”. So what are they good for? Text-based communication is already quite hard enough without them, and since this is a public forum I can’t even tell if it’s a fellow EA/rat who is voting. Maybe it’s just some guy from SneerClub―but my amygdala cannot make such assumptions. Maybe there’s a trick to emotional regulation, but I’ve never seen EA/rats work that one out, so I think the forum software shouldn’t help people push other people’s buttons.

DPiepgrass 29 Sep 2024 21:43 UTC
19 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Consolidation of EA criticism?
I haven’t seen such a resource. It would be nice.
My pet criticism of EA (forums) is that EAs seem a bit unkind, and that LWers seem a bit more unkind and often not very rationalist. I think I’m one of the most hardcore EA/rationalists you’ll ever meet, but I often feel unwelcome when I dare to speak.
Like:
- I see somebody has a comment with −69 karma. An obvious outsider asking a question with some unfair assumptions about EA. Yes, it was brash and rude, but no one but me actually answered him.
- I write an article (that is not critical of any EA ideas) and, after many revisions, ask for feedback. The first two people who come along downvote it, without giving any feedback. If you downvote an article with 104 points and leave, it means you dislike it or disagree. If you downvote an article with 4 points and leave, it means you dislike it, you want the algorithm to hide it from others, you want the author to feel bad, and you don’t want them to know why. If you are not aware that it makes people feel bad, you’re demonstrating my point.
- I always say what I think is true and I always try to say it reasonably. But if it’s critical of something, I often get downvote instead of a disagree (often without comment).
- I describe a pet idea that I’ve been working on for several years on LW (I built multiple web sites for it with hundreds of pages, published NuGet packages, the works). I think it works toward solving an important problem, but when I share it on LW the only people who comment say they don’t like it, and sound dismissive. To their credit, they do try to explain to me why they don’t like it, but they also downvote me, so I become far too distraught to try to figure out what they were trying to communicate.
- I write a critical comment (hypocrisy on my part? Maybe, but it was in response to a critical article that simply assumes the worst interpretation of what a certain community leader said, and then spends many pages discussing the implications of the obvious trueness of that assumption.) This one is weird: I get voted down to −12 with no replies, then after a few hours it’s up to 16 or so. I understand this one―it was part of a battle between two factions of EA―but man that whole drama was scary. I guess that’s just reflective of Bay Area or American culture, but it’s scary! I don’t want scary!
Look, I know I’m too thin-skinned. I was once unable to work for an entire day due to a single downvote (I asked my boss to take it from my vacation days). But wouldn’t you expect an altruist to be sensitive? So, I would like us to work on being nicer, or something. Now if you’ll excuse me… I don’t know I’ll get back into a working mood so I can get Friday’s work done by Monday.

DPiepgrass 29 Sep 2024 20:01 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: GPT5 won’t be what kills us all
Okay, not a friendly audience after all! You guys can’t say why you dislike it?
Story of my life… silent haters everywhere.
Sometimes I wonder, if Facebook groups had downvotes, would it be as bad, or worse? I mean, can EAs and rationalists muster half as much kindness as normal people for saying the kinds of things their ingroup normally says? It’s not like I came in here insisting alignment is easy actually.

DPiepgrass 29 Sep 2024 19:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Søren Elverlin’s comment on: GPT5 won’t be what kills us all
I only mentioned human consciousness to help describe an analogy; hope it wasn’t taken to say something about machine consciousness.
I haven’t read Superintelligence but I expect it contains the standard stuff―outer and inner alignment, instrumental convergence etc. For the sake of easy reading, I lean into instrumental convergence without naming it, and leave the alignment problem implicit as a problem of machines that are “too much” like humans, because
- I think AGI builders have enough common sense not to build paperclip maximizers
- Misaligned AGIs―that seem superficially humanlike but end up acting drastically pathological when scaled to ASI―are harder to describe so instead I describe (by analogy) something similar: humans outside the usual distribution. I argue that psychopathy is absence of empathy, so when AGIs surpass human ability it’s way too easy to build in a machine like that. (Indeed, I could’ve said, even normal humans can easily turn off their empathy with monstrous results, see: Nazis, Mao’s CCP).
I don’t incorporate Yudkowsky’s ideas because I found the List of Lethalities to be annoyingly incomplete and unconvincing, and I’m not aware of anything better (clear and complete) that he’s written. Let me know if you can point me to anything.

GPT5 won’t be what kills us all

DPiepgrass28 Sep 2024 17:11 UTC

3 points

3 comments1 min readEA link

(dpiepgrass.medium.com)

DPiepgrass 19 Aug 2024 19:07 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Forum update: 10 new features (Oct 2023)
My feature request for EA Forum is the same as my feature request for every site: you should be able to search within a user (i.e. a user’s page should have a search box). This is easy to do technically; you just have to add the author’s name as one of the words in the search index.
(Preferably do it in such a way that a normal post cannot do the same, e.g. you might put ”foo authored this post” in the index as @author:foo but if a normal post contains the text “@author:foo” then perhaps the index only ends up with @author (or author) and foo, while the full string is not in the index (or, if it is in the index, can only be found by searching with quotes a la Google: "@author:foo")

DPiepgrass 6 May 2024 14:06 UTC
9 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Émile P. Torres’s history of dishonesty and harassment
I didn’t see a message about kneecaps, or those other things you mentioned. Could you clarify? However, given Torres’ history of wanton dishonesty ― I mean, prior to reading this article I had already seen Torres lying about EA ― and their history of posting under multiple accounts to the same platform (including sock puppets), if I see an account harassing Torres like that, I would (1) report the offensive remark and (2) wonder if Torres themself controls that account.

DPiepgrass 14 Apr 2024 3:20 UTC
10 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
Sorry if I sounded redundant. I’d always thought of “evaporative cooling of group beliefs” like “we start with a group with similar values/goals/beliefs; the least extreme members gradually get disengaged and leave; which cascades into a more extreme average that leads to others leaving”―very analogous to evaporation. I might’ve misunderstood, but SBF seemed to break the analogy by consistently being the most extreme, and actively and personally pushing others away (if, at times, accidentally). Edit: So… arguably one can still apply the evaporative cooling concept to FTX, but I don’t see it as an explanation of SBF himself.

DPiepgrass 14 Apr 2024 1:27 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philanthropy’s large grants be longer than 1 paragraph?
What if, instead of releasing very long reports about decisions that were already made, there were a steady stream of small analyses on specific proposals, or even parts of proposals, to enlist others to aid error detection before each decision?

DPiepgrass 14 Apr 2024 1:16 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
You know what, I was reading Zvi’s musings on Going Infinite...
Q: But it’s still illegal to mislead a bank about the purpose of a bank account.
Michael Lewis: But nobody would have cared about it.
He seems to not understand that this does not make it not a federal crime? That ‘we probably would not have otherwise gotten caught on this one’ is not a valid answer?
Similarly, Lewis clearly thinks ‘the money was still there and eventually people got paid back’ should be some sort of defense for fraud. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be.
...
Nor was Sam a liar, in Lewis’s eyes. Michael Lewis continued to claim, on the Judging Sam podcast, that he could trust Sam completely. That Sam would never lie to him. True, Lewis said, Sam would not volunteer information and he would use exact words. But Sam’s exact words to Lewis, unlike the words he saw Sam constantly spewing to everyone else, could be trusted.
It’s so weird. How can the same person write a book, and yet not have read it?
And it occurred to me that all SBF had to do was find a few people who thought like Michael Lewis, and people like that don’t seem rare. I mean, don’t like 30% of Americans think that the election was stolen from Trump, or that the cases against Trump are a witch hunt, because Trump says so and my friends all agree he’s a good guy (and they seek out pep talks to support such thoughts)? Generally the EA community isn’t tricked this easily, but SBF was smarter than Trump and he only needed to find a handful of people willing to look the other way while trusting in his Brilliance and Goodness. And since he was smart (and overconfident) and did want to do good things, he needed no grand scheme to deceive people about that. He just needed people like Lewis who lacked a gag reflex at all the bad things he was doing.
Before FTX I would’ve simply assumed other EAs had a “moral gag reflex” already. Afterward, I think we need more preaching about that (and more “punchy” ways to hammer home the importance of things like virtues, rules, reputation and conscientiousness, even or especially in utilitarianism/consequentialism). Such preaching might not have affected SBF himself (since he cut so many corners in his thinking and listening), but someone in his orbit might have needed to hear it.

DPiepgrass 13 Apr 2024 23:20 UTC
13 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Thomas Kwa🔹’s comment on: Understanding FTX’s crimes
this almost confirms for me that FTX belongs on the list of ways EA and rationalist organizations can basically go insane in harmful ways,
I was confused by this until I read more carefully. This link’s hypothesis is about people just trying to fit in―but SBF seemed not to try to fit in to his peer group! He engaged in a series of reckless and fraudulent behaviors that none of his peers seemed to want. From Going Infinite:
He had not been able to let Modelbot rip the way he’d liked—because just about every other human being inside Alameda Research was doing whatever they could to stop him. “It was entirely within the realm of possibility that we could lose all our money in an hour,” said one. One hundred seventy million dollars that might otherwise go to effective altruism could simply go poof. [...]
Tara argued heatedly with Sam until he caved and agreed to what she thought was a reasonable compromise: he could turn on Modelbot so long as he and at least one other person were present to watch it, but should turn it off if it started losing money. “I said, ‘Okay, I’m going home to go to sleep,’ and as soon as I left, Sam turned it on and fell asleep,” recalled Tara. From that moment the entire management team gave up on ever trusting Sam.
Example from Matt Levine:
There is an anecdote (which has been reported before) from the early days of Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm that Bankman-Fried started before his crypto exchange FTX, the firm whose trades with FTX customer money ultimately brought down the whole thing. At some point Alameda lost track of $4 million of investor money, and the rest of the management team was like “huh we should tell our investors that we lost their money,” and Bankman-Fried was like “nah it’s fine, we’ll probably find it again, let’s just tell them it’s still here.” The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless.
It sounds like SBF drove away everyone who couldn’t stand his methods until only people who tolerated him were left. That’s a pretty different way of making an organization go insane.
It doesn’t seem like this shouldn’t be an EA failure mode when the EA community is working well. Word should have gotten around about SBF’s shadiness and recklessness, leading to some kind of investigation before FTX reached the point of collapse. The first person I heard making the case against SBF post-collapse was an EA (Rob Wiblin?), but we were way too slow. Of course it has been pointed out that many people who worked with / invested in FTX were fooled as well, so what I wonder about is: why weren’t there any EA whistleblowers on the inside? Edit: was it that only four people plus SBF knew about FTX’s worst behaviors, and the chance of any given person whistle-blowing in a situation like that is under 25%ish? But certainly more people than that knew he was shady. Edit 2: I just saw important details on who knew what. P.S. I will never get used to the EA/Rat tendency to downvote earnest comments, without leaving comments of their own...