Thank you for writing this. It’s barely been a week, take your time.
There’s been a ton of posts on the forum about various failures, preventative measures, and more. As much as we all want to get to the bottom of this and ensure nothing like this ever happens again, I don’t think our community benefits from hasty overcorrections. While many of the points made are undoubtedly good, I don’t think it will hurt the EA community much to wait a month or two before demanding any drastic measures.
EA’s should probably still be ambitious. Adopting rigorous governance and oversight mechanisms sometimes does more harm than good. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I’m still reflecting and am far from having fully formed beliefs yet, I am confused about just how many strong views there have been expressed on the forum. Alone correctly recalling my thoughts and feelings around FTX before the event is difficult. I’m noticing a lot of finger pointing and not a lot of introspection.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m pretty horrified at just how similar my thinking seems to have been to SBF’s. If a person who seemingly agreed with me on so many moral priorities was capable of doing something so horrible, how can I be sure that I am different?
I’m going to sit with that thought for a while, and think about what type of person I want to strive to be.
This was incredibly upsetting for me to read. This is the first time I’ve ever felt ashamed to be associated with EA. I apologize for the tone of the rest of the comment, can delete it if it is unproductive, but I feel a need to vent.
One thing I would like to understand better is to what extent this is a bay area issue versus EA in general. My impression is that a disproportionate fraction of abuse happens in the bay. If this suspicion is true, I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’d really appreciate it if the bay area could get its shit together.
In my spare time I do community building in Denmark. I will be doing a workshop for the Danish academy of talented highschool students in April. How do you imagine the academy organizers will feel seeing this in TIME magazine?
What should I tell them? “I promise this is not an issue in our local community”?
I’ve been extremely excited to prepare this event. I would get to teach Denmark’s brightest high schoolers about hierarchies of evidence, help them conduct their own cost-effectiveness analyses, and hopefully inspire a new generation to take action to make the world a better place.
Now I have to worry about whether it would be more appropriate to send the organizers a heads up informing them about the article and give them a chance to reconsider working with us.
I frankly feel unequipped to deal with something like this.