Thanks for this interesting tool. I’d suggest that you suggest to submitters not to send compound statements in the section “What makes a good statement.” E.g., “It’s really bad that EAs don’t feel comfortable questioning longtermism. This points to deeper groupthink inside EA.” If it’s a premise-conclusion statement, you could also make clear that voters should pass unless they accept the premise.
Hadrian
Karma: 132
Do you mean that FTX grantees should attempt to make the victims whole by paying the amount they received from FTX back to the estate, or that “EA” at large—so organizations and people with no relation to FTX, but who consider themselves “EA”—should do so?
What happens to those $500 mil shares depends almost entirely on Anthropic’s governing documents, which are not public AFAICT. It could be they are entirely non-voting class shares. The FTX estate/bankruptcy trustee will try to liquidate them, i.e. will try to sell the shares. Whether there are limitations on who they can sell the shares to also depends on Anthropic’s governing documents. I know Anthropic has some bespoke governance structure, but I don’t know the specific terms.
From the little I know about Anthropic, getting anything like dollar-for-dollar on those shares is going to be very hard.
Also, my guess is that these shares were held by SBF and he just intermingled his funds with FTX’s based on the leaked balance sheet. Which isn’t to say that they won’t be taken by the FTX estate—very likely they will—but it’s a complication because they’ll have to prove they can reach SBF’s personal assets first (at this point, won’t be hard).
I think I agree with you in some cases, but can you explain why you think that way for all of the funds? Does it matter whether or not the money was actually spent by the recipient on the project that they received the grant to do? For example, if I received a grant to spend three months full time doing scientific research and publishing my findings to the public, and I quit my job to do this, should I be obligated to return the funds? This is the circumstance of many of the people affected, including some of the people who commented here.
I do agree with you that if I received funding to do a particular project, and I haven’t done that project and have no intention of doing it now, I should absolutely return the money.
I’m not Molly and I’m sure she’d know better than I, but I’m pretty confident that part of this post only applies to grantees who received their grant from one of the FTX entities that is now bankrupt—this is what she means by “the debtor group.”
Essentially, if you received money from an FTX entity in the debtor group anytime on or after approximately August 11, 2022, the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back.
I’m not a bankruptcy lawyer, and I know how frustrating of an answer this is, but if the grant came from a non-debtor entity like FTX Foundation Inc., I think it’s very unclear what’s going to happen because a lot depends on information we don’t know yet. The exact sources and timing of any transfers to FTX Foundation may matter. The fact that the corporate form was, clearly, not respected within FTX complicates things further. But the fact that FTX Foundation Inc. was not bankrupt would not by itself confer immunity from the possibility of clawback. That’s 11 U.S.C. 550(a)(2).
The date would be Nov. 11, and I’m pretty confident it’s 90 days, see 11 U.S.C. 547(b)(4), but Molly can correct me. I think Aug. 11 may be a typo.
I just wanted to say I think your comments responding to a lot of the questions about the legal fallout are very helpful. They balance emphasizing the uncertainty of the situation with being informative very well.
As Jason noted, this definitely happens and is allowed, see 11 U.S.C. 550(a)(2). Some cases where this has happened are In re Laines, 352 B.R. 397 (Bankr. E.D. Va. 2005); In re Lindley, 121 B.R. 81 (Bankr. N.D. Okla. 1990); In re Crabtree, 49 B.R. 806 (Bankr. E.D. Tenn. 1985).
Was the entity that wrote you the grant in the debtor group? That list is here, though note that reportedly it has some errors already. If it is, then it will depend on when that entity transferred the grant to you. If it is not, it gets very complicated and basically I’m not sure.
I will say—and this is absolutely not legal advice, etc., etc. - just because they can ask you to return the money doesn’t mean they will. If it was a trivial amount, it would be quite surprising. Different bankruptcy lawyers have different approaches to something like this, though.
Re: 1, the Future Fund was a collection of various entities, grants were distributed from a variety of different entities. Some came from FTX Foundation Inc. It did not file for bankruptcy. Assuming 1) the entity that wrote the grant did not file for bankruptcy, but 2) the money ultimately came from a now bankrupt entity, grantees may still be asked to return money. This is because under 11 U.S.C.A. § 550(a)(2), the bankruptcy trustee can recover the transferred property—here, money in the form of a grant—from subsequent transferees of the initial transferee (i.e., the entity that wrote the grant), and the grantee would be a subsequent transferee.
There are many, many factors that will determine whether they will actually ask the grantee to return the money, including the cultural practices of the law firms who end up on this case. So I don’t mean to suggest one way or the other whether this is likely to happen, just that the fact the grantmaking entity itself is not bankrupt would not insulate the grantee from potential clawback if the money ultimately came from an entity that has filed for bankruptcy, which almost all FTX business entities have.
Yes agreed the litigation potential could be much higher here, but depends very much on details we don’t know yet and what’s to come. Withdrawals continued to go forward and deposits are safe, the only significant damages so far it seems is the drop in FTT, but that keeps us in typical crypto-implosion territory, my understanding is trading volume in FTT is not high.
Also, this would only matter for SBF’s wealth if they were able to go after him personally at this point assuming he is 100% out of FTX, which unless things were extremely shady and bad under the hood will not happen. If they go after FTX (and sale goes through), that’s Binance’s problem now.
There have not actually been many exchanges that went under, but there’s been lawsuits re: Luna and 3AC, the two other big crypto stories this year (this one trumps both by a long shot). The only other example of a big exchange scandal I know is BitMEX , and while I don’t know of any civil lawsuits the founders, one of them a major EA funder, were criminally indicted in the US.
Could someone explain why we would expect Alameda to be solvent and have value, if a huge chunk of their assets were collateralized FTT (the story that triggered this)? They would have been facing many margin calls right?ETA—Statement in post to which this was responsive I think has been removed. But yeah if anyone thinks Alameda has any value, genuinely interested in understanding
Thanks for sharing. I’m hesitant about this post’s thesis because I think conflating the aesthetic with the political is the reason why so many efforts at improving things fail. People end up supporting policy ideas based on empirical premises that are narratively compelling but wrong. There are many examples, but blank slatism comes to mind. Beyond empirical beliefs, there are broader concepts like tradition, individualism, or nationalism which IMO lack justification for being inherently good, but people have mood-affiliated themselves into worldviews and ideologies built around them anyways because of their intense aesthetic appeal. Mixing up the two also makes for bad aesthetics. There are exceptions but I think most propaganda is bad art.
Even aside from the epistemic effects, I’m not sure cultivating an associated aesthetic style would make effective altruism more persuasive. Some ideas have more aesthetic potential than others. I think effective altruism does not have that much. (I think longtermism has a lot.) You said that effective altruism’s lack of a visual aesthetic makes you less interested in it, but a bad visual aesthetic is probably worse than none, no? High modernism’s core ideological commitments don’t seem insane on their face but someone could reasonably look at a Le Corbusier building and think whatever worldview shares a bed with that can’t be right.
In fact, it seems to me like many very successful social and intellectual movements lack a distinct visual aesthetic. Visual symbols and slogans and recurring subject matter, yes. But I can’t think of distinct visual styles for, e.g., liberalism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Enlightenment, law and economics, feminism, other stuff.
Re: this -
Q: Does this entail any financial risk?
A: No. As long as you only bet the bonus money and don’t gamble your own funds, there’s no way to end up with less than you started. I recommend making one bet on each site, then withdrawing your money and closing your accounts immediately after each bet ends.
I don’t think this is accurate because most of these free bet offers require that you gamble your own funds to unlock the bonus (in VA, all but one require this—BetMGM, Barstool, and Unibet), and none of these sportsbooks lets you withdraw the bonus. There is a long discussion coming to this conclusion in KaseyShibayama’s comment thread but I really think it’s worth amending the actual post since I know there are EA’s who have lost money on this.
ETA: the T&C of the sportsbook promos I use as examples below have changed since I posted, so don’t rely on this comment to figure out what the promos are/what the optimal strategy is
Just wanted to pipe up because I think this may not be clear to people reading this post — unless you fully hedge, this is not a risk-free opportunity, and if you are pursuing the recommended strategy in this post there’s a very good chance you will lose money. I wanted to comment since I know at least three EA’s who have lost a couple thousand dollars taking advantage of these promos. One very smart person who skimmed this post thought it was describing “free money,” and unless I’ve misunderstood something (very possible!) it’s not — the better way to view this opportunity is, “the E(V) of legal sports betting is always negative, but with these promotions, it’s positive.” If you have a lot of money such that you can afford to be risk-neutral, then hell yeah and go forth, but if you don’t, it’s rational for you to be risk-averse and this might not be a good idea.
If it’s unclear how this is risky, consider that the most common type of free bet promo is one where (1) you unlock the free bet only if you lose your first real-money bet and (2) your free bet doesn’t return the stake. In this case, as the post points out, the optimal strategy is to choose long odds on both bets. This is probably obvious, but that means you are more likely than not to lose your money.
To take full advantage of the offer you’d be making uncorrelated bets on multiple sportsbooks, but that will lessen the risk, not eliminate it. I live in DC — the four “free bet” options in Virginia are Barstool ($1000), BetMGM ($1000), Caesars ($1500), and Unibet ($500). (As of this comment Fanduel no longer has the free bet promo at least in VA.) Barstool, BetMGM, and Unibet unlock the free bet only if you lose the first (real-money) bet. Caesars unlocks the free bet upon deposit. Of the four, only Barstool returns the stake on the free bet. So the optimal strategies for the four in order of first (real-money) bet and second (free) bet are:
Barstool: Long, short
BetMGM: Long, long
Caesars: Short, long
Unibet: Long, long
I’m too lazy to plug in sample numbers but you can hopefully deduce from this that (1) you have a good chance of ending up positive, since it’s optimal to go short on Barstool and Caesars, but (2) it’s still pretty easy to end up in the red. And that’s with 2⁄4 offers that come as close as you can get to free money (Barstool and Caesars, though note Barstool has a −200 line limit, limiting how short you can go).
Of course if you’re risk-averse you can choose a different, non-E(V)-maximizing strategy, but I think some people might understandably just follow what’s recommended here.
Sorry if this was obvious to everyone, I just know some people at least were surprised that you could lose money on this. I don’t think the post is misleading, though I probably would have made clearer at the top that this is not even close to a risk-free endeavor, especially considering the marketing language around these promos already can make them seem otherwise.
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Thanks for your efforts here. How likely do you think it is that the farm will succeed in creating a commercially viable product, apart from public pressure? Sounds like there are significant biological and ecological barriers.
Also, unrelatedly, seems to me like octopus and squid would be relatively easier to create vegan alternatives to. People mostly likely them for the texture, there isn’t really a flavor. But I know nothing about the science of alt protein.