Oliver Balfour

Karma: 77

Oliver Balfour 6 Apr 2023 3:35 UTC
34 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: pseudonym’s comment on: Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research
Does Redwood have a clear termination process including warnings before a termination where reasonable
I think I’m an unusual case, but I found out a short term contract had been ended early through an automated email, and I received no response when contacting several Redwood staff to check if I had been terminated.
I think this is very uncharacteristic though: they’re all good people and I’m net optimistic about Redwood’s future. I think they can improve their communication around hiring/trialling/firing processes though.
Edit: I’ve chatted with Buck and it seems like this was a communication problem.

Oliver Balfour 12 Nov 2022 15:43 UTC
34 points
8 ∶ 0
in reply to: alexflint’s comment on: We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable
Evan do we really have enough information to conclude this?
I realise I have 18 hours more information at hand, but I think yes, we can conclude this with high confidence:
1. SBF claimed FTX had enough cash to cover all withdrawals and FTX US was totally fine (tweets deleted; see https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-removes-assets-are-fine-flood-from-twitter).
2. Now they are both in bankruptcy proceedings, along with Alameda. Proceedings (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.deb.188448/gov.uscourts.deb.188448.1.0.pdf). Several executives SBF reached out to to discuss bailouts have shared that the deposit windfall is $5-10b (can’t find the link any more, but I’ve seen this claimed by several people). SBF has resigned.
3. $200M-1B of FTX’s reserves have been withdrawn after bankruptcy filing. FTX claims they were hacked. (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/12/ftx-crypto-wallets-see-mysterious-late-night-outflows-totalling-more-than-380m/).
I don’t think that merely lending out deposits is ‘fraudulent in spirit’.
I don’t think the bank analogy is super accurate, because fractional reserve banking is heavily regulated: you can only loan so much, you’re restricted in how risky these loans can be, and you have the FDIC backstopping deposits in the case of crises/fraud. On the other hand, it seems very likely FTX violated their own ToS to loan most of their reserves to SBF’s insolvent crypto prop shop. There’s no backstop and no accountability

Oliver Balfour 12 Nov 2022 15:23 UTC
17 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kevin_Cornbob’s comment on: We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable
Counterpoint to this: a lot of VC investments in crypto were very dodgy. I can’t recall exact project names, but I remember regularly seeing news of the form “a16z just backed us with 300M!” on projects which are clearly zero-sum and don’t have the market cap to generate >300M in fees, like blockchain games. VC investment doesn’t seem like as strong a signal in the crypto space as in other spaces.

Oliver Balfour 4 Jul 2022 3:39 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Why AGI Timeline Research/Discourse Might Be Overrated

I’d guess most ‘placing well-intentioned people at important-seeming AI companies’ efforts to date have been net-negative.

Could you please elaborate on this? The reasoning here seems non-obvious.

Oliver Balfour 9 Jun 2022 2:00 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Global health is important for the epistemic foundations of EA, even for longtermists
Absolutely. I’m exactly in that boat—I became convinced of some basic EA principles after reading Singer’s work in 1st year uni last year but I don’t think I would have committed to donating a large chunk of my salary and stuck to it for instance if GWWC didn’t exist. I wouldn’t be here if the community hadn’t made it so tractable. I also was initially skeptical of the longtermist perspective—had EA been presented to me in terms other than the power law distribution of global health charity effectiveness it’s also much less likely I’d be here (I’m now a longtermist :P)