Jonas V

Karma: 7,983

I’ve helped set up the Atlas Fellowship, a program that researches talent search and scholarships for exceptional students.

Previously, I ran EA Funds and the Center on Long-Term Risk. My background is in medicine (BMed) and economics (MSc). See my LinkedIn.

You can best reach me at jonas@atlasfellowship.org.

I appreciate honest and direct feedback.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s. (I think this is generally how everyone uses the EA Forum; others who don’t have such a disclaimer likely think about it similarly.)

Jonas V Mar 18, 2023, 7:30 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
What if the investor decided to invest knowing there was an X% chance of being defrauded, and thought it was a good deal because there’s still an at least (100-X)% chance of it being a legitimate and profitable business? For what number X do you think it’s acceptable for EAs to accept money?
Fraud base rates are 1-2%; some companies end up highly profitable for their investors despite having committed fraud. Should EA accept money from YC startups? Should EA accept money from YC startups if they e.g. lied to their investors?
I think large-scale defrauding unsuspecting customers (who don’t share the upside from any risky gambles) is vastly worse than defrauding professional investors who are generally well-aware of the risks (and can profit from FTX’s risky gambles).
(I’m genuinely confused about this question; the main thing I’m confident in is that it’s not a very black-and-white kind of thing, and so I don’t want to make my bet about that.)

Jonas V Mar 18, 2023, 6:27 PM
12 points
5 ∶ 5
in reply to: Jack Lewars’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I think that’s false; I think the FTX bankruptcy was hard to anticipate or prevent (despite warning flags), and accepting FTX money was the right judgment call ex ante.

Jonas V Mar 18, 2023, 6:25 PM
4 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jack Lewars’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I expect a 3-person board with a deep understanding of and commitment to the mission to do a better job selecting new board members than a 9-person board with people less committed to the mission. I also expect the 9-person board members to be less engaged on average.
(I avoid the term “value-alignment” because different people interpret it very differently.)

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 10:09 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
That was an example; I’d want it to exclude any type of fraud except for the large-scale theft from retail customers that is the primary concern with FTX.

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 10:06 PM
27 points
7 ∶ 5
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I think 9-member boards are often a bad idea because they tend to have lots of people who are shallowly engaged, rather than a smaller number of people who are deeply engaged, tend to have more diffusion of responsibility, and tend to have much less productive meetings than smaller groups of people. While this can be mitigated somewhat with subcommittees and specialization, I think the optimal number of board members for most EA orgs is 3–6.

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 6:50 PM
18 points
3 ∶ 3
in reply to: Jack Lewars’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
no lawyers/accountants/governance experts
I have a fair amount of accounting / legal / governance knowledge and as part of my board commitments think it’s a lot less relevant than deeply understanding the mission and strategy of the relevant organization (along with other more relevant generalist skills like management, HR, etc.). Edit: Though I do think if you’re tied up in the decade’s biggest bankruptcy, legal knowledge is actually really useful, but this seems more like a one-off weird situation.

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 6:44 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I would be willing to take the other side of this bet, if the definition of “fraud” is restricted to “potentially stealing customer funds” and excludes thinks like lying to investors.

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 6:41 PM
55 points
14 ∶ 6
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
You seem to imply that it’s fine if some board members are not value-aligned as long as the median board member is. I strongly disagree: This seems a brittle setup because the median board member could easily become non-value-aligned if some of the more aligned board members become busy and step down, or have to recuse due to a COI (which happens frequently), or similar.

Jonas V Mar 17, 2023, 6:38 PM
42 points
9 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jack Lewars’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
TL;DR: You’re incorrectly assuming I’m into Nick mainly because of value alignment, and while that’s a relevant factor, the main factor is that he has an unusually deep understanding of EA/x-risk work that competent EA-adjacent professionals lack.
I might write a longer response. For now, I’ll say the following:
- I think a lot of EA work is pretty high-context, and most people don’t understand it very well. E.g., when I ran EA Funds work tests for potential grantmakers (which I think is somewhat similar to being a board member), I observed that highly skilled professionals consistently failed to identify many important considerations for deciding on a grant. But, after engaging with EA content at an unusual level of depth for 1-2 years, they can improve a lot (i.e., there were some examples of people improving their grantmaking skills a lot). Most such people never end up attaining this level of engagement, so they never reach the level of competence I think would be required.
- I agree with you that too much of a focus on high status core EAs seems problematic.
- I think value-alignment in a broader sense (not tracking status, but actual altruistic commitment) matters a great deal. E.g., given the choice between personal prestige and impact, would the person reliably choose the latter? I think some high-status core EAs who were on EA boards were not value-aligned in this sense, and this seems bad.
EDIT: Relevant quote—I think this is where Nick shines as a board member:
For example, if a nonprofit’s mission is “Help animals everywhere,” does this mean “Help as many animals as possible” (which might indicate a move toward focusing on farm animals) or “Help animals in the same way the nonprofit traditionally has” or something else? How does it imply the nonprofit should make tradeoffs between helping e.g. dogs, cats, elephants, chickens, fish or even insects? How a board member answers questions like this seems central to how their presence on the board is going to affect the nonprofit.

Jonas V Mar 16, 2023, 4:46 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I agree with you: When I wrote “knew specifics about potential fraud”, I meant it roughly in the sense you described.
To my current knowledge, Nick did not have access to evidence that the funds were likely fraudulently obtained. (Though it’s not clear that I would know if it were the case.)

Jonas V Mar 15, 2023, 11:11 PM
42 points
16 ∶ 7
in reply to: Jonas V’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
Overall, I think Nick did the right thing ex ante when he chose to run the Future Fund and accept SBF’s money (unless he knew specifics about potential fraud).
If he should be removed from the board, I think we either need an argument of the form “we have specific evidence to doubt that he’s trustworthy” or “being a board member requires not just absence of evidence of untrustworthiness, but proactively distancing yourself from any untrustworthy actors, even if collaborating with them would be beneficial”. I don’t buy either of these.

Jonas V Mar 15, 2023, 7:33 PM
79 points
29 ∶ 25
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed”
I would still like an argument that they shouldn’t be removed from boards, when almost any other org would. I would like the argument made and seen to be made.
Here’s my tentative take:
- It’s really hard to find competent board members that meet the relevant criteria.
- Nick (together with Owen) did a pretty good job turning CEA from a highly dysfunctional into a functional organization during CEA’s leadership change in 2018/2019.
- Similarly, while Nick took SBF’s money, he didn’t give SBF a strong platform or otherwise promote him a lot, and instead tried to independently do a good (not perfect, but good enough!) job running a philanthropic organization. While SBF may have wanted to use the philanthropy to promote the FTX/SBF brand, Nick didn’t do this. [Edit: This should not be read as me implying that Will did those things. While I think Will made some mistakes, I don’t think this describes them.]
- Continuity is useful. Nick has seen lots of crises and presumably learnt from them.
So, while Will should be removed, Nick has demonstrated competence and should stay on.
(Meta note: I feel frustrated about the lack of distinction between Nick and Will on this question. People are a bit like “Will did a poor job, therefore Nick and Will should be removed from the board.” Please, discuss the two people separately.)
What links here?
- AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation by EV UK Board (Mar 16, 2023, 4:24 PM; 7 points)
- Ubuntu's comment on Time Article Discussion—“Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed” by Nathan Young (Mar 18, 2023, 11:30 AM; 4 points)

Jonas V Mar 15, 2023, 7:23 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Should EVF consider appointing new board members?
I think it’s very reasonable to remove Will, and much less clear whether to remove Nick. I would like to see some nuanced distinction between the two of them. My personal take is that Nick did an okay job and should probably stay on the relevant boards. Honestly I feel pretty frustrated by the lack of distinction between Will and Nick in this discussion.

Jonas V Feb 22, 2023, 6:50 PM
22 points
6 ∶ 2
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: A statement and an apology
Personally, I think it’s useful if this decision is made by people who competently investigate the case and gather all the information, not by people acting primarily based on public information like this post. Even though I know Owen well, I personally find it hard to say how likely Owen is to make mistakes again; it seems plausible to me that he can learn from his mistakes and continue to be highly involved in the community without causing any further issues, and it also seems possible that he would continue to make similar mistakes. It seems to me that the main way to find out would be by seeking out conversations and investigating.
I personally think the community health team (after implementing some improvements) would be suitable for deciding his future involvement. Even though they didn’t deal with this particular case well, I think overall their track record seems strong, and I think they can learn from this case. They have a lot more relevant context than external investigators.

Jonas V Feb 22, 2023, 12:35 AM
61 points
36 ∶ 4
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: A statement and an apology
As a friend pointed out, relying on Owen’s own judgment regarding whether or when to restart mentorship, event organizing, and funding recommendations seems a really bad idea given that the problematic cases happened in the first place due to errors in Owen’s judgment. I think it should go without saying that these decisions should be made by a separate body.
(I don’t think these two types of judgments are perfectly correlated, but they seem somewhat correlated. Also I don’t mean to take a stance on whether/how Owen should be involved in the future; I think it’s good to consider the full range of options.)

Jonas V Feb 21, 2023, 5:03 PM
39 points
14 ∶ 2
in reply to: CuriousEA’s comment on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
Yeah, it being more pervasive and entangled with EA culture than I thought is one of my takeaways, and I’ve been spending some time to reflect and think about ways I could help improve things.

Jonas V Feb 21, 2023, 7:18 AM
17 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
Ok, sorry in case that was a bit of a strawman!

Jonas V Feb 21, 2023, 2:21 AM
115 points
63 ∶ 2
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account
From my personal perspective: While the additional context makes the interaction itself seem less bad, I think the fact that it involved Owen (rather than, say, a more tangentially involved or less influential community member) made it a lot worse than what I would have expected. In addition, this seems the ~~first~~ second time (after this one*) I hear about a case that the community health team didn’t address forcefully enough, which wasn’t clear to me based on the Time article.
* edited based on feedback that someone sent me via DM, thank you
(edit: I think you acknowledge this elsewhere in your comment)

Jonas V Feb 21, 2023, 12:52 AM
4 points
8 ∶ 2
in reply to: lilly’s comment on: EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation
I’m curious why some people disagree-voted on this comment.

Jonas V Feb 17, 2023, 4:25 AM
14 points
1 ∶ 1
on: High School Student Opportunities
Hi Ammar, would love to get your application to the Atlas Fellowship! It’s not part of the EA movement but discusses EA-relevant ideas and rationality topics. Applications will likely open in a few weeks. https://www.atlasfellowship.org/
EA-ish/impact-focused programs for high schoolers: LEAF, Non-Trivial
Rationality-focused programs for high schoolers: ESPR, SPARC, WARP.