If you are unable to adduce any evidence for that particular figure, I think your reply should not be “take it with a hefty pinch of salt” but to either reach out to the person in a position to confirm or disconfirm it, or else issue a retraction.
Pablo
Karma: 8,546
The source appears to be Émile P. Torres. Gideon, could you confirm that this is the case? Also, could you clarify if you ever reached out to Will MacAskill to confirm the accuracy of this figure?
Very impressive first issue!
A request: when I print an article as a PDF, the notes are omitted. I understand that the margins on an A4 page are not wide enough to include sidenotes, but why not turn them into footnotes?
Thanks for this analysis.
It may be premature to conclude that EA doesn’t have any brand value anymore, though the recent crisis has definitely been disastrous for the EA brand, and may justify rebranding.
I think it’s perfectly fine to call someone the founder of EA Norway—an organization—but I continue to believe it is inappropriate to call them the founder “of the Norwegian EA movement”. I don’t share your intuition that starting the first EA group in a region makes you the founder of the EA movement in that region. For example, I started the first LW group in the Spanish-speaking world but it would be bizarre to call me the “founder of the Spanish-speaking rationalist movement”. Expressions that seem more appropriate to me to convey what I take “founder” to be trying to communicate are “a key figure in the Norwegian EA movement” and “an early figure in the Norwegian EA movement”. Or you could just say “started the first Norwegian EA chapter” or “co-founded EA Norway”.
I’m happy to continue this discussion, but I also feel uneasy about diverting attention away from Eirik’s impressive accomplishment. The karma system and filtering algorithms have made my original comment more visible than I intended it to be.
It just seems to me that EA is not the sort of thing that can be “founded” by a couple of people. It’s like claiming that someone “founded” science or the enlightenment. By extension, it strikes me as inappropriate to credit someone as the “founder” of a local branch of EA, just as it would be inappropriate to credit someone for “founding” the French scientific movement or the German enlightenment movement.
Yes, based on Kelsey’s subsequent tweets, it seems like it would be a stretch to call their relationship one of friendship. If they were not friends, the main apparent reason against releasing the conversation is that Sam would probably have declined to give consent if Kelsey had asked for it. But based on Sam’s extensive experience with journalists, it’s hard to see how he could not have formed the expectation that, by engaging in an exchange with Kelsey, he was tacitly consenting to the publication of that exchange. Maybe he was deluded about the nature of their relationship and falsely believed that they were friends. Overall, it now seems to me that Kelsey probably did nothing wrong here.
Mmh, I’m not sure that’s the correct interpretation of Dylan’s tweet. I read him as saying that Vox is not less likely to publish stuff that reflects poorly on you if you are a sponsor, not that being a sponsor makes it more likely that they’ll publish that stuff.
You also have to consider the implications of holding onto the information rather than publishing it. I think it would be far worse for Future Perfect, who SBF gave money to, to be seen as trying to hide information about his internal mindset.
I don’t think this consideration should have influenced Kelsey’s decision to publish the conversation. Indeed, if it was improper for her to release the exchange with SBF, it is even worse if she did so out of a concern that this would improve her reputation or Vox’s. (I doubt this influenced her decision, though.)
In the Vox piece, Kelsey says she emailed Sam to confirm he had access to his Twitter account and this conversation had been with him. It’s not completely clear to me that Sam should have interpreted this as an implicit request for permission. In his reply, Sam only confirmed that it was him who had responded and not an impersonator (“Still me, not hacked!”); he doesn’t give an indication that he is consenting to the release of the conversation. See also Peter Slattery’s comment.
Congratulations!
I hope this isn’t inappropriate given the celebratory context, but I want to push back against the idea that the EA movement, or any of its local versions, has a “founder”. Just as I think it is incorrect to call Will MacAskill (or anyone else) the “founder of the EA movement”, I think it is incorrect to call Eirik Mofoss the “founder of the Norwegian EA movement”. Our movement may have leaders, but it has no founders.
Agree with much of what you say here. (Though I don’t think we currently have strong enough evidence to single out specific EA leaders as being especially responsible for the recent tragic events; at least I don’t think I personally have that kind of information.)
As a substitute, or complement, to an investigative EA newspaper, what do you think about an “EA rumours” prediction market?[1] Some attractive features of such a market:
It turns private information held by individual people with privileged access to sources into public information available to the entire EA community, increasing the likelihood that the information will reach those for whom it is most valuable and actionable.
It potentially reduces community drama by turning “hot” debates influenced by tribal allegiances and virtue signaling into “cold” assignments of probability and assessments of evidence.
It makes rumours more accurate, by incentivizing users to estimate their probability correctly.
It makes false rumours less damaging to their targets, by explicitly associating them with a low probability.
I think this market would need judicious moderation to function well and avoid being abused. But overall it seems to me like it might be an idea worth exploring further, and of the sort that could make future events in the same reference class as the FTX debacle less likely to happen.
- ^
By ‘market’, I do not necessarily mean a real-money prediction market like Polymarket or PredictIt; it could also be a play-money market like Manifold Markets or a forecasting platform like Metaculus.
It’s easier than that:+ > FTX crisis > hide.
You keep saying that classical utilitarianism combined with short timelines condones crime, but I don’t think this is the case at all.
The standard utilitarian argument for adhering to various commonsense moral norms, such as norms against lying, stealing and killing, is that violating these norms would have disastrous consequences (much worse than you naively think), damaging your reputation and, in turn, your future ability to do good in the world. A moral perspective, such as the total view, for which the value at stake is much higher than previously believed, doesn’t increase the utilitarian incentives for breaking such moral norms. Although the goodness you can realize by violating these norms is now much greater, the reputational costs are correspondingly large. As Hubinger reminds us in a recent post, “credibly pre-committing to follow certain principles—such as never engaging in fraud—is extremely advantageous, as it makes clear to other agents that you are a trustworthy actor who can be relied upon.” Thinking that you have a license to disregard these principles because the long-term future has astronomical value fails to appreciate that endangering your perceived trustworthiness will seriously compromise your ability to protect that valuable future.
dishonesty and illegality at FTX had positive EV
What‽ This is not at all the case. The apparent fraud at FTX was massively bad in expectation (regardless of whether the consequences are evaluated from a classical utilitarian or a common-sense morality perspective).
ETA: “Qualy the lightbulb” agrees:
In retrospect, I think my original comment was insufficiently clear. Anyway, thanks for the dialogue.
I was disagreeing with “This just isn’t plausible on reasonable priors.” which seemed to mean that you disagreed with Stuart’s comment.
Stuart’s comment was in reply to the claim that “It’s not clear to me how the Future Fund people, who to my knowledge are not forensic accountants or crypto experts, would have had a better ability to pick up on funny business.” I disagreed with Stuart’s comment in the sense that I disputed the reasonableness of expecting unsophisticated outsiders to do better because sophisticated investors sometimes perform poorly. I did not mean to dispute that sophisticated investors sometimes perform poorly; indeed, there’s plenty of evidence of that, including the evidence you provide in your comment.
I am making a comparative, not an absolute, claim: however bad the professionals may be, it is unreasonable to expect outsiders to do better.
This just isn’t plausible on reasonable priors. You need to assume that multiple investment firms working in different sectors, whose survival in a highly competitive environment in large part depends on being skilled at scrutinizing a company’s financials, would miss warning signs that should have been apparent to folks with no relevant domain expertise. See also Eliezer’s Twitter thread.
ETA: Alexander:
Some people are asking whether people who accepted FTX money should have “seen the red flags” or “done more due diligence”. Sometimes this is from outsider critics of effective altruism. More often it’s been effective altruists themselves, obsessively beating themselves up over dumb things like “I met an FTX employee once and he seemed to be frowning, why didn’t I realize that this meant they were all committing fraud?!” Listen: there’s a word for the activity of figuring out which financial entities are better or worse at their business than everyone else thinks, maximizing your exposure to the good ones, and minimizing your exposure to the bad ones. That word is “finance”. If you think you’re better at it than all the VCs, billionaires, and traders who trusted FTX—and better than all the competitors and hostile media outlets who tried to attack FTX on unrelated things while missing the actual disaster lurking below the surface—then please start a company, make $10 billion, and donate it to the victims of the last group of EAs who thought they were better at finance than everyone else in the world. Otherwise, please chill.
Why would a retraction be misleading? A valid reason for retracting a statement is failure to verify it. There is no indication in these cases that the statement is false.
If someone can’t provide any evidence for a claim that very likely traces back to Emile Torres, and they can’t be bothered to send a one-line email to Will’s team asking for confirmation, then it seems natural to ask this person to take back the claim. But I’m also okay with an edit to the original comment along the lines you suggest.