Hi Rob,
Thank you for writing this post. I am also highly disappointed that no institutional post-mortem has been conducted, so I’m glad that you’re speaking out about it. Now that the verdict has been officially handed down to SBF, there’s no excuse for there not to be an investigation anymore.
Maybe somehow there are good excuses (and yes, they are excuses) for why a formal investigation has not taken place. But no matter how florid or sophisticated they are, they won’t change my mind that a public investigation should take place. Pretty much no matter what, the reputation of the core EA leadership is going to take a hit if no public and formal investigation is carried out, at least in my eyes.
Regarding comments about psychopathy/sociopathy: I recently did a bunch of research on malevolence, so I feel confident in speaking on the subject. The term “sociopathy” seems to be the less well-defined term, so I would somewhat advise against using it, at least until greater clarity arises. However, psychopathy is a fairly established construct in the literature with a few widely-used instruments from the academy, so if you’re choosing between using psychopathy or sociopathy, I would say use psychopathy. But even psychopathy is a pretty confused term because it captures so many different characteristics (including callousness, grandiosity, impulsivity, and criminality) which don’t necessarily coincide. My opinion is that the cleanest way of talking about all this is to list out more specific and well-defined traits, such as callousness.
But, and I stress this, just because he wasn’t a violent criminal doesn’t prove he was a good, compassionate person. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that deficiencies in empathy/caring for others have distinct origins from violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions. Indeed, the main distinguishing point between psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is that psychopathy has a component that does not theoretically relate to violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions (according to an authority on Psychopathy). It would be most adaptive for a person to be able to abide by the most explicit and universal social norms (e.g., don’t kill people) but still do harm in covert, neutral, or even socially desirable ways (e.g., being the CEO of a giant meat company). This is the type of malevolent person I expect SBF is, if he indeed is malevolent.
I also intend to publish a post on this topic, but I thought I’d clarify here since I saw a discussion regarding sociopathy in the comments.
This kind of reminds me of a psychological construct called the Militant Extremist Mindset. Roughly, the mindset is composed of three loosely related factors: proviolence, vile world, and Utopianism. The idea is that elevated levels in each of the three factors is most predictive of fanaticism I think (total) utilitarianism/strong moral realism/lack of uncertainty/visions of hedonium-filled futures fall into the utopian category. I think EA is pretty pervaded but vile world thinking, including reminders about how bad the world is/could be and cynicism about human nature. Perhaps what holds most EAs back at this point is a lack of proviolence—a lack of willingness to use violent means/cause great harm to others; I think this can be roughly summed up as “not being highly callous/malevolent”.
I think it’s important to reduce extremes of Utopianism and vile world in EA, which I feel are concerningly abundant here. Perhaps it is impossble/undesirable to completely eliminate them. But what might be most important is something that seems fairly obvious: try to screen out people who are capable of willfully causing massive harm (i.e., callous/malevolent individuals).
Based on some research I’ve done, the distribution of malevolence is relatively highly right-skewed, so screening for malevolence probably affects the fewest individuals while still being highly effective. It also seems that callousness and a willingness to harm others for instrumental gain are associated with abnormalities in more primal regions of the brain (like the Amygdala) and are highly resistant to interventions. Therefore, changing the culture is very unlikely to robustly “align” them. And intuitively, a willingness to cause harm seems to be the most crucial component, while the other components seem to be more channeling malevolence towards a more fanatical bent.
Sorry I’m kind of just rambling and hoping something useful comes out of this.