It looks like Alice described events that took place in Puerto Rico as being in a “foreign country,” indicating she is not a US citizen.
Fermi–Dirac Distribution
Karma: 1,367
My impression is that they were working in many different countries, not only in the US
Piggybacking on your comment to say I am also curious about the visa situation. My impression is that countries typically severely restrict work by foreigners within their borders, even if it’s temporary, and even if you’re doing remote work. Maybe some Caribbean countries have different rules, but I’m worried that if they took Alice or Chloe to e.g. the US or UK on a tourist visa and made them work in those places, that would be illegal, and could make immigrating to those countries in the future much more complicated.
This post spends a lot of time touting the travel involved in Alice’s and Chloe’s jobs, which seems a bit off to me. I guess some people deeply value living in beautiful and warm locations and doing touristy things year-round, but my impression is that this is not very common. “Tropical paradises” often lack much of the convenience people take for granted in high-income countries, such as quick and easy access to some products and services that make life more pleasant. I also think most people quickly get bored of doing touristy things when it goes beyond a few weeks per year, and value being close to their family, friends, and the rest of their local community. Constantly packing and traveling can also be tiring and stressful, especially when you’re doing it for others.
Putting those things together, it’s plausible that Alice and Chloe eventually started seeing the constant travel as a drawback of the job, rather than as a benefit.
I changed the title for that reason, but it seems that people disagreed with my decision/reasoning
I changed the title because I learned that Summers likes EA
How does it frame the discussion in a bad way? I thought this was a succinct way to describe an aspect of OpenAI’s announcement that is very relevant to the EA Forum.
Sam Altman returning as OpenAI CEO “in principle”
This is incredibly short-sighted. The board’s behavior was grossly unprofessional and the accompanying blog post was borderline defamatory. And Altman is one of the most highly-connected and competent people in the Bay Area tech scene. Altman can easily start another AI company; in fact, media outlets are now reporting that he’s considering doing just that, or might even return to OpenAI by pressuring the board to resign.
In fact, Manifold is at 50% that Altman will return as CEO, and at 38% that he’ll start another AI company. It seems that the board was unable to think even just two steps ahead if they thought this would end well.
SBF found guilty on all counts
The term “global catastrophic risk” has been defined in multiple different and mutually inconsistent ways.[1] What will the Bay Area EAG focus on, specifically? And is there a specific reason why this term was chosen instead of a less ambiguous one?
- ^
That comment doesn’t even include all the definitions of “global catastrophic risk” that I’ve seen. According to Wikipedia, “[m]ost global catastrophic risks would not be so intense as to kill the majority of life on earth, but even if one did, the ecosystem and humanity would eventually recover (in contrast to existential risks),” directly contradicting a lot of other definitions people have given, especially Open Phil.
- ^
This doesn’t explain why customers who weren’t using the margin lending program lost their money. According to Can Sun, the FTX lawyer who testified[1] today, FTX Digital Markets had the responsibility to ensure the segregation of those customers’ digital assets from FTX’s assets. He testified that if FTX went bankrupt, those customers were supposed to still be able to get all of their digital assets back (because it was theirs, not FTX’s). Customer digital assets were not debt; they were the private property of customers. Since those customers don’t have their money, something must have gone wrong.
Moreover, Sun testified that he only learned that something was amiss at the same time that everybody else in the world did, at which point Sam asked him for a “legal justification” for the missing funds. He had to tell SBF that “there are no justifications but there are some theoretical explanations.” According to his testimony, he listed a few theoretical explanations, including the margin lending program, but explained that this excuse didn’t work, and SBF seemed to acknowledge that. Sun quit on the following day.
- ^
Supporting sources: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/19/ftx-trial-sun-testimony, https://x.com/innercitypress/status/1714999654989860918?s=20,
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/12/ftx-terms-service-trading-customer-funds (contemporaneous), https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-trial-day-twelve, this YouTube vlog
- ^
Levine claimed that the fraud was not in how the money ended up at Alameda, but in how FTX claimed to be safe. I think that’s wrong since the “allow_negative” flag looks fraudulent in itself. It just looks like something you’d use to implement embezzlement in computer code.
For what it’s worth, Levine’s account of what the prosecution is trying to claim in the trial also seems wrong. He claims that the prosecution agrees with him, but their opening statement in the trial sounds much more like the version of the story he claims is wrong than the version he claims is correct.
See, for example, the prosecution’s opening statements (summarized by @innercitypress):
Alameda had secret access to FTX assets. Once Alameda had it, the defendant could spend it as he pleased. How did he do it? Two ways. First, customers sometimes deposits dollars on FTX, the company would tell them it was in their accounts.
But it never made it to FTX. He set up a bank account linked to Alameda. He lied to a bank to set up an Alameda bank account. Then he lied to the customers. He took billions of dollars, the customers had no way to know.
Here’s the second way. He took customers’ crypto. Accounts that hold crypto are called digital wallets. He gave Alameda the ability to withdraw—he made sure it was written right into the computer code.
The fact that Levine is wrong is made even clearer in Ellison’s testimony. Again from @innercitypress:
AUSA: What makes you guilty?
Ellison: Alameda took several billions of dollars from FTX customers and used it for investments.
Note that she said “Alameda took several billions of dollars from FTX customers” is what makes her guilty, not “FTX lied to customers about how good their risk engine was.”
This is not at all what happened. Alameda’s “borrows” were not made via the normal margin lending program. You can see Caroline Ellison admitting so in a contemporaneous meeting that was recorded and played in court. Nishad Singh and Gary Wang explicitly wrote code to allow Alameda specifically to take customer funds from FTX via the “allow_negative” flag, according to their own sworn testimonies. It seems like Matt Levine is confusing this collapse with the Mango Markets collapse that happened around the same time, his description fits Mango much better than FTX.
Alameda also lied to investors, as Caroline Ellison testified during the trial and pleaded guilty to doing. According to her sworn testimony, it was SBF who directed her to do so.
Does Lightcone have liability insurance? Or any kind of legal insurance or something similar that covers the litigation costs involved in defamation lawsuits? I think posts like these are important, it would be sad if there wasn’t a way to easily protect whistleblowers from having to spend a lot of money fighting a defamation case.
[Deleted this comment. I am confused about why my memory differs so much from what others are saying here and I don’t want to look foolish.]
None of the early Alameda employees who witnessed Bankman-Fried’s behavior years earlier say they anticipated this level of alleged criminal fraud. There was no “smoking gun,” as one put it, that revealed specific examples of lawbreaking. Even if they knew Bankman-Fried was dishonest and unethical, they say, none of them could have foreseen a fraud of this scope.
If even they didn’t think this, I don’t think we should be surprised that core EAs didn’t either.
While I agree with a strict reading of this comment, I want to point out that there was another red flag around FTX/Alameda that several people in the EA leadership likely knew about since at least late 2021, which in my opinion was more severe than the matters discussed in the Time article and which convinced me back in 2021 that FTX/Alameda were putting a lot of effort into consistently lying to the public.
In particular, in October 2021, I witnessed (sentence spread across bullet points to give emphasis to each part of it):
A high-status, important EA (though not one of the very top people)
who had worked at Alameda after FTX was founded, and left before October 2021
publicly offhandedly implying that “FTX” was the new name for Alameda (seemingly unaware that they were supposed to be distinct companies)
in a place where another very high-status EA (this time probably one of the very top people, or close to it) clearly took note of it
I won’t give more details publicly, in order to protect the person’s privacy, but this happened in a very public place.
It wasn’t just me who was aware of this. Nate Soares reported having heard the rumor that “Alameda Research had changed its name to FTX” as well, though I think he left out one important aspect of it: that this rumor was being shared by former insiders, not by e.g. random clueless crypto people.
In case you don’t understand why the rumor was a big deal, I explained it in my comment in Nate Soares’s post. Quoting from it:
Everywhere on the public internet, Alameda Research and FTX had painted themselves as clearly different companies. Since October 2021, they’ve ostensibly had disjoint sets of CEOs. By late 2021 I had watched several interviews with SBF and followed his output closely on Twitter, and saw people talking about Alameda and FTX in several crypto Discord servers. Nowhere did anyone say that Alameda had changed its name to FTX or otherwise act as if they were the same company (though everyone knew they were close).
[...]
How could [the former Alameda employee] know less about FTX and Alameda than me, who had never worked at either company and was just watching everything by the sidelines? If it was possible for this person to think that FTX was merely the new name for Alameda, that almost certainly implied that the FTX/Alameda leadership was putting a lot of effort into consistently lying to the public.
I suspect you will not be very impressed by this, and ask me why I didn’t share my concerns widely at the time. But I was just a low-status person with no public platform and only one or two friends. I shared my concerns with my partner (in fact, more than once, because I was so puzzled by that comment) but not with people I’m not close to. [ETA: in retrospect, I think a more correct explanation would be to say that I probably stayed silent because I guessed I’d lose status if I’d spoken up. 🙁]
I’m not sure why this wasn’t taken seriously by the EA leadership. This seems to be a pretty clear example of the FTX/Alameda leadership blatantly lying to the public about their internal workings and prominent EAs knowing about that.
Strong upvote. I think there is economic research showing that people are more productive in large companies than in small ones, and that management practices significantly affect worker productivity. I haven’t looked much into this, but it suggests that small organizations could be failing to realize their potential.
5. Alameda Research had changed its name to FTX.
I basically heard the same thing in late 2021, and I am upset that I stayed silent about it even though it really alarmed me at the time.
Everywhere on the public internet, Alameda Research and FTX had painted themselves as clearly different companies. Since October 2021, they’ve ostensibly had disjoint sets of CEOs. By late 2021 I had watched several interviews with SBF and followed his output closely on Twitter, and saw people talking about Alameda and FTX in several crypto Discord servers. Nowhere did anyone say that Alameda had changed its name to FTX or otherwise act as if they were the same company (though everyone knew they were close).
And yet, one day in late 2021, I saw an EA who had worked at Alameda after FTX was founded casually conflating the two companies. They said something like, “Alameda, the company that is now called FTX, [rest of sentence].” They seemed to think that there was nothing noteworthy about what they’d just said, but it really shocked me. How could they know less about FTX and Alameda than me, who had never worked at either company and was just watching everything by the sidelines? If it was possible for this person to think that FTX was merely the new name for Alameda, that almost certainly implied that the FTX/Alameda leadership was putting a lot of effort into consistently lying to the public.
That brief sentence kept coming back to my mind, and it really made me uncomfortable. But yeah, I stayed completely silent, other than bringing that up a few times to my partner. I’m low-status, so I would likely not have achieved anything by speaking up, but perhaps I should have done so anyway.
I strongly disagree. Alice’s and Nonlinear’s perspectives are portrayed with very different implicit levels of confidence in those paragraphs. Alice’s perspective is stated as a fact—“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food,” not “Alice says nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food.” In contrast, Nonlinear’s perspective is shared as “[Nonlinear] says [x].”
I think most readers who trust Ben to be truthful would assume, from the way those paragraphs were worded, that Alice had much better evidence to support her claims, and that Nonlinear was doing some slightly deceitful reputational management by countering them. But that isn’t what turned out to be the case:
Nonlinear has evidence that on December 15, they had oatmeal, peanuts, almonds, prunes, tomatoes, cereal, an orange, mixed nuts, and quinoa (which Kat offered to cook) in the house.
On the same day, Kat had successfully purchased mashed potatoes for Alice.
On the next day, they apparently went out and purchased both Panda Express vegan noodles and vegan burgers for Alice.
At some point, Emerson went out and tried to purchase Alice more food despite his knee injury, but he couldn’t find the very specific items she requested.
Then, on December 18, it looks like Alice’s first non-vegan meal was a vegetarian pizza she ordered (rather than non-vegan food already in the house). It looks like she ordered it right after Kat reminded her that they already had vegan noodles in the fridge.
On top of all of this, apparently everybody in the house was either sick or injured, but Ben’s post only mentions that Alice was sick.
It seems that Alice/Ben have no evidence to counter any of the points above.
So the original claim that was stated as fact (“nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food”) seems very wrong. Which is sad, because it’s a very serious accusation that most people would assume was not made lightly.