(This account is negative toward your aims but positive of you personally. It seems good to state things like this when using anonymous accounts).
I think this is a crucial time to be open, and to stop playing dumb PR games that are, in my current tentative assessment of the situation, one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place.
I don’t want to cooperate with a lot of the PR-focused storytelling...We will not figure out a new direction for EA behind closed doors.
Explore with us what wrong things happened. Figure out how we should change and what lessons we should learn.
We can address this by object-level discussion. You said this.
I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all unconfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.
I think it is very unlikely that you knew of the level of outright theft of customer funds or observed actual criminality.
My guess is that you probably observed:
Accounts of the chaotic organization and operational structure
Accounts by Tara and others who left SBF on terrible terms in the past
Accounts of dubious or predatory projects in cryptocurrency (SRM, MAPS), liquidation protected trading accounts, self dealing between Alameda and FTX
Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?
Even from an unsympathetic outside view, there needs to be some cause or at least some narrative to do something like this:
It’s been a decade since Dustin and Holden has been working in philanthropy. Open Philanthropy worked closely with thousands of people, making hard decisions. There’s a vast amount of trust built up, that is more than just money. This is accumulated evidence in their favor.
Without a reason or even narrative to do so, I think even a high quality investigation or audit will be a waste of time or a distraction. All of this is bad if there are important issues or reforms in EA.
Pointing at arbitrary people or generating fear is bad.
For Karnofsky in particular:
Holden built GiveWell and Open Phil. Those are really good. And the truth is that making those built a lot of enemies and critics.
I mean, what do you really think happened with Criminal Justice Reform?
Also, if there was some dumb investigation, it will make my name mean and I’ll have to change it.
For Moskovitz in particular:
I always saw Dustin as an abstract bag of money. This was until two weeks ago when I found out there was an EA Twitter.
I think we should investigate if he is paying someone to be this funny.