Happy to share some thoughts (and not thereby signalling that I plan not to say more about the object-level):
Independent investigations are by their nature somewhat weird
You get someone coming in with less context, which makes it harder for them to discover things (relative to someone with more context)
But they also get to dodge group think or similar issues
There are, as I see it, two different purposes of independent investigations:
actually gaining insight into the situation
being able to credibly signal that the conclusions are fair/independent/untainted by bias or groupthink
There’s a spectrum of different notions of “independent” which could be at play here:
Independent = largely but not completely unconnected with the FTX cluster
Independent = unconnected with the FTX cluster, but still in the EA sphere
Independent = unconnected with EA
The greater the independence, the higher the costs of the investigation, but if it’s done well, the more robust the benefits
Whether it’s worth having an independent investigation, and of what kind, depends on:
The relative costs of different types of investigation
How much people might reasonably learn
How much pain there is from distrust that might be helpfully dispelled by an independent investigation
What risks, if any, are thereby created? (ammunition for media hit-pieces? chance of sparking vexatious lawsuits?)
In this case:
Given the existence of the EV-commissioned investigation by Mintz (at significant expense), it seems somewhat weird to me that EV didn’t publish more of a summary of the findings
I think there are lots of reasons they might not have wanted to publish the full investigation, and feel relatively sympathetic to their not having done that
I can imagine there are various risks-of-exposure from publishing even a summary, and they may have been advised by professionals whose job it is to monitor and guard against exposure (lawyers and/or PR folks) to play it safe
Nevertheless my guess is that if I were privy to the considerations, I would have thought that the better path involved sharing rather more with the EA community
At this point I don’t think it’s likely to be worth another fully-independent investigation, as from a law firm
They’re very expensive
Some of the most interesting questions will ultimately be judgement calls, which means that in order to derive value from it you have to have high trust in the judgement of the people performing the investigation
Some of the trust it would facilitate doesn’t seem threatened (e.g. there doesn’t seem to be any concern that there was a huge cover-up or anything)
I do think it might well be worth an investigation by someone (or some few) in EA, but not connected to FTX
Partially because there seems to be a good amount of appetite for it from the EA community; partially because I think that’s probably at the sweet spot of “people most likely to have useful critical takes about how to do things”
The principal challenge IMO is finding someone(s) who will:
Have good sensible takes on things
Be sufficiently non-consequentialist that their takes can be trusted to be “fair assessments” not “things they think will be most likely to lead to good outcomes”
Have minimal (if any) conflicts of interest
Ideally no connections to FTX
Also not beholden to anyone who might be reasonably criticised by an investigation (or whom outside observers might suspect of having that status)
Can credibly signal the above, so that their takes can be trusted by a broader audience
Be willing to spend time on it (and motivated to do a good job)
I think if there was someone who looked good for this, and it looked like a serious and legitimate attempt at an independent investigation, then it probably wouldn’t be too challenging to get people to put in some money to pay for their time, and it wouldn’t be too challenging to secure cooperation from enough people-that-they’d-like-to-interview
This is then kind of a headhunting task; but who would take responsibility for that?
It ideally shouldn’t be the folks who have too much in the way of connections with FTX
Else the choice of person might be seen as suspect?
There’s maybe a problem where a lot of the central community infrastructure does have some FTX connections, and other folks don’t naturally read this as their responsibility?
My read is that you can apply the framework two different ways:
Say you’re worried about any take-over-the-world actions, violent or not—in which case this argument about the advantages of non-violent takeover is of scant comfort;
Say you’re only worried about violent take-over-the-world actions, in which case your argument fits into the framework under “non-takeover satisfaction”: how good the AI feels about its best benign alternative action.