The point there isn’t so much, “He could not have had any EA thoughts in his head at all”, which I doubt is really true—though also there could’ve just been pressure from coworkers, and office politics around it, resolving in something like the Future Fund so that they were doing anything. My point is just that this nightmare is probably not one of a True Sincere Committed EA Act Utilitarian doing these things; that person would’ve tried to take more money off the table, earlier, for the Future Fund. Needing an e-sports site named after your company—that’s indeed something that other businesses do for business reasons; and if it feeds your business, that’s real, that’s urgent, that has to happen now. The philanthropy side was evidently not like that.
EliezerYudkowsky
I was passing through the Bahamas and asked if FTX wanted me to talk to the EAs they had on fellowships there. They paid for my hotel room and an Airbnb when the hotel got full, for a week. I’m not sure but I don’t think I remember getting to see SBF at all while I was at the hotel. Didn’t go swimming or sunning or any such because I am not a very outdoors person. It does not seem entirely accurate to characterize this as “was hosted by SBF in the Bahamas”.
The Future Fund basically turned down all my ideas until the regrantor program started; I made two recommendations and I expect neither of them will pay out now unless they moved very fast.
Unless I specifically defend an idea, I think that a lot of what gets said in the San Francisco Bay Area is also not something I’d accept as my fault. Eg there was a lot of drug use involved in this going wrong, which I’m sure did not start from me, and I’ve suggested increasingly loudly and openly of late that people cut back on the drug use; maybe it’s Bay-associated idk, but it sure is not Yudkowsky-endorsed.
I did think Will MacAskill was from the Singer side of things, so I admit to being surprised if the highly-legible side of effective altruism got nothing, unless it was a room-for-more-funding issue with Givewell+OpenPhil having already snapped up all the fruit hanging lower than GiveDirectly. I will consider myself tentatively corrected on that point unless I hear otherwise or have investigated.
I agree that if I, personally, had steered SBF into crypto, and uncharacteristically failed to add on a lot of “hey but please don’t scam people, only do this if you find a kind of crypto you can feel good about” I might consider myself more at fault. I even think that the Singer side of EA in fact does less talking about deontology, less writing of fiction that exemplifies the feelings and reasoning behind that deontology, less cautioning of people against twisting up their brains by chasing good ideas; on my view, the Singer side explicitly starts by trying to twist people’s brains up internally, and at some point we should all maybe have a conversation about that.
The thing is, if you want to be sane about this sort of thing, even so and regardless I think Peter Singer himself would not have approved this, would obviously not have approved this. When somebody goes that far off the rails, I just don’t see how you could reasonably hold responsible people who didn’t tell them to do that and would’ve obviously not wanted them to do that.
I don’t, in fact, take federal charges like that seriously—I view it as a case of living in a world with bad laws and processes—but I do take seriously the notion of betraying an investor’s investment and trust.
Okay; I agree then that it’s reasonable to say of Ben Delo that Hayes and cofounders were accused of trying to defraud two early investors, that Ben Delo is accused of taunting them with a meme, and that they settled out of court.
I do note that this is pretty different from what Vaughan was previously accusing Delo of, which sounded pretty plausibly like a “victimless crime”.
If it’s as the plaintiffs represent, I agree that’s pretty damning. Is it known, aside from the complaint itself, that the plaintiffs are telling the truth and the whole truth? Don’t suppose you have a link to the meme taunt?
I wish I lived in a society where this question was not necessary, but: Was this a “victimless crime”; else, who were the victims and what did they lose?
Who’s at fault for FTX’s wrongdoing
We still don’t have a clue about Ben Delo, afaik.
Golly, I didn’t even realize that.
Unless you know the reporter, and you know that their coverage about subjects that you personally are well-informed about has been accurate and fair (not just plausible-sounding coverage of things you don’t know) then Rule 1 is don’t talk to reporters.
I almost always don’t. If it seems plausibly important I offer to answer their questions off-the-record, if they’re really looking for knowledge rather than a money misquote; and so far only one reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has taken me up on that—been interested in knowledge at all.
Mostly, I think EAs are beating themselves up too much about FTX; but separately among the few problems that I think EA actually does have, is producing really lengthy writeups of things, that don’t simplify well and don’t come with tldrs, a la the incentives in the academic paper factory; and that life wisdom that produces distrust of complicated things that don’t simplify well, is produced in part by watching complicated things like FTX implode, and drawing a lesson of (bounded defeasible) complexity-distrust from that.
Okay, fine, a couple of caveats:
Distrust complicated stories that don’t have much simpler versions that also make sense, unless they’re pinned down very precisely by the evidence. When two sides of a yes-no question both complain the other side is committing this sin, you now have a serious challenge to your epistemology and you may need to sit down and think about it.
Distrust complicated designs unless you can calculate very precisely how they’ll work or they’ve been validated by a lot of testing on exactly the same problem distribution you’re drawing from.
An Important Lesson of the FTX Implosion...
Standard reply is that a visible bet of this form would itself be sus and would act as a subsidy to the prediction market that means bets the other way would have a larger payoff and hence warrant a more expensive investigation. Though this alas does not work quite the same way on Manifold since it’s not convertible back to USD.
I think EAs could stand to learn something from non-EAs here, about how not to blame the victim even when the victim is you.
...by not saying anything in favor of protecting some aspect of our current culture, when somebody else has just recently expressed concerns about it? That’s a rule?
I was not being serious there. It was meant to show—see, I could blame myself too, if I wanted to be silly; now don’t be that silly.