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.
EliezerYudkowsky
Karma: 3,632
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?
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.
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?
You could plausibly claim it gets disclosed to Sequoia Capital, if SC has shown themselves worthy of being trusted with information like that and responding to it in a sensible fashion eg with more thorough audits. Disclosing to FTX Future Fund seems like a much weirder case, unless FTX Future Fund is auditing FTX’s books well enough that they’d have any hope of detecting fraud—otherwise, what is FTXFF supposed to do with that information?
EA generally thinking that it has a right to know who its celebrity donors are fucking strikes me as incredibly unhealthy.
Somebody else in that thread was preemptively yelling “vote manipulation!” and “voting ring!”, and as much as it sounds recursively strange, this plus some voting patterns (early upvotes, then suddenly huge amounts of sudden downvoting) did lead me to suspect that the poster in question was running a bunch of fake accounts and voting with them.
We would in fact be concerned if it turned out that two people who were supposed to have independent eyes on the books were in a relationship and didn’t tell us! And we’d try to predictably conduct ourselves in such a mature, adult, understanding, and non-pearl-clutching fashion that it would be completely safe for those two people to tell the MIRI Board, “Hey, we’ve fallen in love, you need to take auditing responsibility off one of us and move it to somebody else” and have us respond to that in a completely routine, nonthreatening, and unexcited way that created no financial or reputational penalties for us being told about it.
That’s what I think is the healthy, beneficial, and actually useful for minimizing actual fraud in real life culture, of which I do think present EA has some, and which I think is being threatened by performative indignation.
Yep, well-picked nit, I was just told about that myself. Perfectly good substantive disagreement with the original thesis, imo, you don’t need to downplay it that much.
It also makes sense that the money would’ve come from the Alameda side (maybe in 2020 or early 2021 according to Wayback, somebody said) rather than the FTX side. Alameda would have had the Bay Areans, while FTX’s philanthropic side was constructed (exclusively?) out of Oxfordians.
...are you suggesting that nobody ought to dare to defend aspects of our current culture once somebody has expressed concerns about them?
Apparently there was a $132K Alameda donation to MIRI in 2020 or early 2021. Didn’t actually know that.
Well, obviously they donated less to MIRI after they turned evil, and the stopping of MIRI donations was a huge red flag that we all should have noticed. Sage nod.
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.