While the majority of news about EA is negative right now, interestingly GWWC has had more trial members join halfway through November than the entirety of September and October and 10 times more than November last year.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/members
The forum may look gloomy right now but there’s a silver lining :)
I think there’s a few serious questions here.
Morally, if it’s found that FTX funded EA through fraudulent activity, is there an imperative to do anything about this? Return funds, support those impacted, etc… Suicide due to a lack of funds is not unprecedented in the crypto space and a ~90% loss of a leading coin may sadly result in loss of life.
How does this impact current EA initiatives relying on FTX-based funding? Is there an urgent need to find other sources of funds to cover important work here?
Is there a need to disassociate EA with FTX because of SBF (he was a director of CEA, spoken about it, and there are other links recently made public such as Will MacAskill’s texts to Elon Musk introducing SBF to be involved in the Twitter deal).
There’s a huge negative sentiment towards SBF ‘playing a white knight’ that I’ve seen on FB/Reddit/HackerNews is leading people to assume EA itself may be fraudulent. Maybe it’s water under the bridge within a week? But maybe it impacts future philanthropy and impacted EA groups losing funding lose trust.