I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
Jason
Karma: 14,043
I didn’t vote, but maybe a sense that the poster should have tried asking the organizers privately first (and mentioned in the post if that hadn’t worked?)
Definitely seek legal advice in the country and subdivision (e.g., US state) where Greg lives!
You may think of this as a bet, but I’ll propose an alternative possible paradigm: it’s may be a plain old promissory note backed by a mortgage. That is, a home-equity loan with an unconditional balloon payment in five years. Don’t all contracts in which one party must perform in the future include a necessarily implied clause that performance is not necessary in the event that the human race goes extinct by that time? At least, I don’t plan on performing any of my future contractual obligations if that happens . . . .
So even assuming this wouldn’t be unenforceable as gambling, it might run afoul of the rules for mortgage lending (e.g., because the implied interest rate [~14.4%?] is seen as usurious, or because it didn’t comply with local or national laws regulating mortgage lending). That is a pretty regulated industry in general. It would definitely need to follow all the formalities for secured lending against real property: we require those formalities to make sure the borrower knows what he is getting into, and to give notice to other would-be lenders that they would be further back in line on repayment.
I should also note that it is pretty difficult in many places to force a sale on someone’s primary residence if you hold certain types of security interests (as opposed to, e.g., a primary mortgage). So you might be holding a lien that doesn’t have much practical value unless/until Greg decides to sell and there is value after paying off whoever is ahead in line on payment. Again, I can only advise seeking legal counsel in the right jurisdiction.
The off-the-wall thought I have is that Greg might be able to get around some difficulties by delivering a promissory note backed by a recorded security interest to an unrelated charity. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, everyone would need legal advice from someone licensed in the jurisdiction before embarking on any approach in this rather unusual and interesting scenario.
The pendency of the CC statutory inquiry would explain hesitancy on the part of EVF UK or its projects to conduct or cooperate with an “EA” inquiry. A third-party inquiry is unlikely to be protected by any sort of privilege, and the CC may have means to require or persuade EVF UK to turn over anything it produced in connection with a third-party “EA” inquiry. However, it doesn’t seem that this should be an impediment to proceeding with other parts of an “EA inquiry,” especially to the extent this would be done outside the UK.
However, in the abstract—if any charity’s rationale for not being at least moderately open and transparent with relevant constituencies and the public is “we are afraid the CC will shut us down,” that is a charity most people would run away from fast, and for good reason. If the choice is between having a less-than “soul-searching postmortem” or none at all, I’ll take the former. Also, I strongly suspect everything EVF has said about the whole FTX situation has been vetted by lawyers, so the idea that someone is going to write an “official” postmortem without legal vetting is doubtful. Finally, I worry the can is going to continue being kicked down the road until EVF is far into the process of being dismantled, at which time the rationale may evolve into “we’re disbanding anyway, what’s the point?”
As much as I may appreciate a good wager, I would feel remiss not to ask if you could get a better result for amount of home equity at risk by getting a HELOC and having a bank be the counterparty? Maybe not at lower dollar amounts due to fixed costs/fees, but likely so nearer the $250K point—especially with the expectation that interest rates will go down later in the year.
To be fair, doing this properly would take a lot of time, resources, and buy-in from people with information. So do-it-yourself is only an option for a few people.
What does it mean for “losses” to have “come” (or not) at a specific point in time in this context?
I can accept that depositor losses had not “come” if FTX would have been able to pay depositors the fiat or crypto in their accounts in a matter of a few days. I specify that time period because depositors should have understood that a few days’ delay might be necessary for non-fraud reasons like technical failure.
Beyond that, I’d probably say the loss had come but that there were prospects for mitigation. If a thief takes my car, I’d normally say the loss occurred when I was deprived of my right (here, of possession). That I might get the car back from the person to whom the thief sold, or cash compensation from the thief’s bank account, does not negate the timing of that loss.
Agree on PR stunt—as long as one party has standing in this kind of litigation, it doesn’t generally matter whether the others do.
Thanks! Has there been any consideration of somehow “de-aging” posts from March 30 or March 31, or serious posts from April 1, in the future? I felt that some of those got short shrift because of the influx of / activity on all the April Fools’ posts.
It is vaguely analogous to there being a server shutdown for 1-2 days, which the system doesn’t account for when deciding what posts to show on the homepage. I understand hesitancy to mess with what the algorithm puts on the homepage, but with this being an annual occurrence adjustments could be done in an open and transparent manner.
So I think there are three plausible paths forward as far as how to read Will’s silence:
One could draw an adverse inference, assuming that the information he has would be bad. One argument in favor of this would be that his prior assertion that he couldn’t talk because of concerns about interfering with the EVF internal investigation comes across as less than forthcoming if he was never really planning on talking after that was done.
One could simply decide on the evidence that is known—which basically means taking the Time article at face value, because it has not been effectively contested and is quoted to named sources.
One could assume that information exists that would exonerate Will, or mitigate things, that he nevertheless isn’t in a position to share for legal reasons.
I’m not anyone’s lawyer, and Will should definitely listen to his lawyers rather than semi-pseudonymous Forum commenters! But as a community member, I am somewhat more inclined to a mix between 1 or 2 for him than I would be for most other actors. The reason is that a potential plaintiff’s attorney already has a good bit of information in the public domain with which to construct a complaint that would make it past a motion to dismiss and into discovery. The Time article exists, and its contents can be pled in a complaint and will be assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. Will’s connection to FTXFF is well known.
For someone without that publicly-available information, silence helps them avoid alerting plaintiffs’ attorneys that they are a potential target, and probably makes it much harder for them to assemble enough information for a complaint that they can sign off on that will meet the standards for surviving a motion to dismiss. [Citations to US federal-law sources, because that’s my background.] Competent attorneys do not need Will’s help to figure out that he might be a target, and I’m not convinced they need his help to marshal information for a complaint either. So the tactical disadvantage to speaking out might be limited to potentially making things a little easier for the other side in discovery?[1]
[EDIT to clarify: None of this is to doubt that ~anyone remotely involved in FTX/SBF stuff was given legal advice that “talking isn’t going to help your personal legal situation, and may hurt.” Almost any lawyer would have given that advice; their client is the person, not EA! However, my guesses about the marginal additional legal risk that a person would incur by speaking out are relevant to the credence that I am willing to place on each of the three inferences above. This is particularly true as we are now ~18 months from the FTX explosion.]
- ^
I am not opining on—and indeed, have no opinion on—whether anyone has a viable case against Will, and if so whether anything that happened prior to the formation of FTXFF would be relevant to that case. I am merely applying the framework I have used for other leaders, which recognizes that getting sued is disruptive, stressful, and expensive, and thus gives significant weight to a desire not to be sued or a desire to get any case that is filed dismissed prior to discovery.
Can you link to a discussion of the suit in question? I don’t think that would be an accurate characterization of the suit I am aware of (complaint analyzed here). That suit is about roughly about aiding SBF in making specific transfers in breach of his fiduciary duty to Alameda. I wouldn’t say it is about “endors[ing]” in the ordinary meaning of the word, or that it relied on allegations that Nick should have known about the criminal frauds going on at FTX.
That being said, I do agree more generally that “people who had a role at FTXFF” tend to be at the top of my mental lists of people who should worry most about the possibility of individual suits and people who have probably been advised by counsel to keep their mouths shut.
I wonder if anyone else will getting a thinly veiled counterpart—given that the lead character of the show seems somewhat based on MacKenzie Scott, this seems to be maybe a thing for the show.
At least often. I don’t know if would be safe to assume that there will ~always be convergence—for instance, switching to higher-welfare breeds that grow less efficiently and less rapidly might plausibly not be net positive from a climate perspective. Cultured meat might not be if its production were extremely energy intensive.
Yeah, I didn’t vote either way, which is fine. I’m just confused about how to interpret the votes of those who did! Did they agree/disagree on both parts, or vote based on which part they thought was primary?
That’s fair.
Broader concerns about sovereignty and the integrity of the extradition system likely played a role. Although it’s understandable why US prosecutors asked for provisional arrest and extradition despite not having obtained an indictment for campaign-finance violations yet, it’s also understandable to me why the Bahamas wants to signal its expectation that the US comply with the treaty as written—especially where the argument that the first extradition was good enough for these charges is legally weak.
Note that the US could have asked for permission to proceed on other charges—see Article 14(b) of the treaty—but I think that may have required going back through the Bahamas legal system again, and probably delaying the trial. Hence, the prosecution severed off those charges, and then decided not to proceed after getting its conviction on others. I don’t know Bahamas campaign or extradition law, but there would also be difficulties if the offense was deemed one of a political character (Article 3(1)(a)) or was one that was not a criminal offense punishable by more than a year in prison under Bahamas law (Article 2(1)).
Also, I don’t think “completely uninvestigated” is a correct characterization—they were investigated enough to be presented to a grand jury, which indicted SBF for campaign-finance violations. Federal prosecutors do not generally indict without a pretty good investigation first, especially in high-profile cases. I think we have a pretty decent idea of what he did (see pp. 18-22 of the prosecution’s sentencing memo). Moreover, Salame and Singh—who don’t have extradition-related issues—pled guilty to campaign-finance violations.
One problem here is that a solution that operates continuously and provides “value way before an extinction level event plays out” is likely to be much more complex—and have considerably more points of potential failure—than a simpler solution.
Imagine I have a requirement that I be able to receive radio transmissions during an emergency. I could build a fairly simple emergency radio and pressure-test it. It doesn’t provide me any value in ordinary times, so it just sits there on the shelf between pressure tests. It’s cheap, so I could build several for redundancy. I could also build a smartphone with radio capacity—this would be operated continuously and provide value in normal times. It is also much more complex and has many more failure modes than a simple radio. Many of those failure modes are common to both the ordinary-times use and the emergency-times use. But some are less so—I might not be using the radio feature on my cellphone much at all in normal times because that particular function doesn’t provide much if any pre-emergency value.
I think you’re likely accepting a significantly higher level of failure modes for a better opportunity to detect and fix them. It’s not clear to me if this is a good tradeoff or not. If you go back to the cellphone analogy, most things have to evolve and grow to continue providing enough value to justify their maintenance and operation. Maybe we could have a super-high-reliability smartphone if we locked in 2010 capabilities and worked on iterating the flaws out of it. But a 2010-level smartphone isn’t going to get much use. And adding new features and capabilities adds new points of failure, so manufacturers are stuck playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
I’m reminded of the troubles that the US government has had with getting cell phones up to the point that they can handle classified information. The poor user experience of cell phones approved for even secret information famously contributed to getting a former Secretary of State into some trouble. As of 2016, phones appeared to have only been approved to the secret level (not top secret, or ~”above top secret” like certain SCIs). In contrast, we’ve had landline devices cleared for all security levels since at least 1987 (I didn’t check older devices). The security reliability risks are apparently a lot easier to manage with the simpler devices.
For similar reasons, the solution with pre-emergency value will likely be much more expensive to develop and operate. All critical components need to be hardened / highly reliable. The more you expect those components to do, the bigger / more complex they are going to be. If the power facility needs to power a small town, it will be much more expensive to harden than a solution for a bunker. If you rely on a different power solution for emergency situations and only harden that solution, then a critical system isn’t going to be regularly operated. It’s probably going to be considerably more expensive to run and maintain a hardened system than a standard one even in normal times—so normal-time operation is likely to also require some significant subsidies. As a result, you’re going to have to put a lot of eggs in a single basket for cost reasons alone.
- so I’m saying it should not only be pressure tested but be in continuous operation in order to flush out failure modes before a catastrophic scenario plays out, it needs to be providing value way before an extinction level event plays out.
This seems to rely on an assumption that the failure modes that would exist in “normal mode” are related or correlated, to a fairly high degree, to the failure modes that could show up in “catastrophic mode.” That’s not obvious to me.
Grassroots projects like this seem like a natural extension of this, where a community as a whole decides where they need resources in order to uplift everyone.
This makes sense, but I don’t think it gets us very far on the question of whether to fund this particular project.
There are many grassroots projects in developing countries, and it is often difficult for a Westerner to evaluate the effectiveness of those projects (at least where their theory of impact is more complex than bednets --> less malaria). It’s even difficult for us to assess the relative extent of informed public support for a grassroots project from afar. Those issues are less formidable with GiveDirectly; if the main theory of impact is to benefit Person X, we have both theoretical reasons and experiential evidence that giving Person X money is a good way to accomplish that. That doesn’t necessarily scale well to supporting grassroots work.
That being said, I can see a decent theoretical argument for (as it were) GiveDirectly for Communities—give a community a certain amount of money, and let the community decide what needs that money should go to. I can see a number of practical problems with that, though. I think your average Westerner is going to be considerably worse at evaluating projects valued at ~50 times GDP per capita than in making their own consumption/investment decisions, and I suspect that may be true in many places. The quality of many decisions made by various democratic political systems also gives me pause. So I think there would need to be evaluation and selection of proposals rather than the total deference of the GiveDirectly approach.
Ideally, we would have evaluation organizations that were more local to the populations that were being served, rather than having the big GH/D evaluator be in the United States. That should give us evaluators with more local knowledge, and (to be honest) those with a cost structure and business processes that would make evaluating five-to-six figure projects more feasible.
On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the differential scrutiny applied to different projects.
On the other hand, there are conceptual models in which this scrutiny makes sense. In one of them, money has been pre-committed by donors ex ante to cause areas. So money in the global health/development (GH/D) bucket (or maybe the neartermism bucket) is only competing for funding against projects in the same bucket (while the HPMOR and Wytham projects were in something like a “longtermism community growth” (LCG) bucket).
As a practical matter, this is approximately true—in the context of an appeal on the Forum for funds, Anthony’s project is very likely to receive funds that would counterfactually have gone to other GH/D work (and there’s a good chance they would have counterfactually gone to GiveWell-style work). In contrast, the odds of someone like me giving money to HP fanfic distribution or Wytham are ~0.
Relatedly, one could see the GH/D and LCG fields as too methodologically different for this kind of comparison to be fitting. There’s a certain appeal to that, since the numbers in LCG cost-effectiveness analyses tend to be much less grounded in data than GH/D numbers. And if you make the “number of future lives potentially saved” high enough, the LCG project will always win even if the “chance of preventing catastrophe” is miniscule indeed. Of course, one extension to this approach would be to argue that (e.g.) EA-style GH/D projects and non-EA-style GH/D projects are also too methodologically different for this kind of analysis—and that would leave us with no common yardstick to evaluate projects in GH/D itself.
This comment shows the challenge of the agreevote/disagreevote system:
I agree with the direction toward showing more cost-effectiveness analyses in other fields versus reducing their importance in global health/development.
I do not think the fanfic CEA is plausible, even at the 2-minute level, for some of the reasons identified by @titotal. That being said, the people funding fanfic distribution were probably interested in “people drawn to AI safety / x-risk mitigation” as their outcome variable / theory of impact, not donations made or individual lives saved. So the BOTEC is simultaneous too kind to and too demanding of that project.
That’s fair, although asking privately first doesn’t mean not raising the issue publicly.
Because of how the Forum software works, many more people may see the original question rather than the organizer’s response. (This is also true of many ways of raising issues.) So I think one upside of asking privately first, and posting the answer along with the concern, is ensuring that as many people as possible see the answer. Doing so also would prevent potential anxiety if the answer is that the (proposed?)[1] regulations would have no effect on non-new construction, which seems likely to be the case.
It’s unclear if anything has actually changed yet. In August 2023, it was said that “[t]he changes will be made through Building Regulations and accompanying guidance” (emphasis mine).