Feel free to DM me anything you want to share but don’t want to or can’t under your own account(s), and I can share them on your behalf if I think it’s adding value to the discourse/community.
The corollary is that views shared on this account don’t necessarily reflect my own personal views, though they will usually be worded to sound like they are.
While I feel bad that this conversation is happening on a post for what I’d consider an act of service to the EA community (coming in with extra funding at short notice for those affected by the FTX events), I’m grateful you feel comfortable speaking up about your experience now, and I think this information is also potentially useful to the EA community—thank you for this! I hope you are thriving where you are now.
At the same time, I think it could be useful for a third party to help with facilitating this (especially since this is what Ula seems to prefer), otherwise I worry we’ll get into an acrimonious “your word against mine” situation. I don’t know if this is within the scope of the CEA community health team?
I consider this a good outcome—I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it, because I think your critical writing has similar problems to this post (for similar reasons to the comment Rohin made here), and I think that posts like this/yours are fairly unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause people to feel less incentivized to write posts like this one (or yours) in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
This was a disappointing comment to read from a well-respected researcher, and negatively updates me against encouraging people to working and collaborating with you in the future, because I think it reflects a callousness as well as insensitivity towards power dynamics which I would not want to see in a manager or someone running an AI alignment organization. In my opinion, it is fair game for me to make truthful comments that cause you to feel less incentivized to write comments like this in future (though I can imagine changing my mind on this).
I do not actually endorse this comment above. It is used as an illustration of why a true statement alone might not mean it is “fair game”, or a constructive way to approach what you want to say. Here is my real response:
In terms of whether it is “fair game” or not: consider some junior EA who made a comment to you, “I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”. This has basically zero implications for you. No one is going to take them seriously, unless they provide receipts and point out what they disliked. But this isn’t the case in reverse. So I think if you are someone seen to be a “powerful EA”, or someone whose opinion is taken pretty seriously, you should take significant care when making statements like this, because some people might update simply based on your views. I haven’t engaged with much of weeatquince’s work, but EA is a sufficiently small enough community that these kinds of opinions can probably a harmful impact on someone’s involvement in EA-I don’t think the disclaimers around “I no longer do grantmaking for the EAIF” are particularly reassuring on this front. For example, I imagine if Holden came and made a comment in response to someone “I find your posts unhelpful, distracting, and unpleasant. I would prefer an EA forum without your critical writing on it”, this could lead to information cascades and reputational repercussions that don’t accurately reflect weeatquince’s actual quality of work. You are not Holden, but it would be reasonable for you to expect your opinions to have sway in the EA community.
FWIW, your comment will negatively update people towards posting under their main accounts, and I think a forum environment where people feel even more inclined to make alt accounts because they are worried about reputational repercussions from someone like you coming along with a comment like “I would prefer an EA Forum without your critical writing on it” is intimidating and not ideal for community engagement. Because you haven’t provided any justification for your claim aside from Robin’s post which points at strawmanning to some extent, I don’t know what this means for my work and whether my comments will pass your bar. Why not just let other users downvote low quality comments, and if you have a particular quality bar for posts that you think the downvotes don’t capture, just filter your frontpage so you only see posts with >50 or >100 karma? If you disagree with the way people running the forum are using the karma system, or their idea for who should post and what the signal:noise ratio should be, you should take that to the EA forum folks. Because if I was a new EA member, I’d be deleting my draft posts after reading a comment like this, and find it disconcerting that I’m being encouraged to post by the mods but might bump into senior EA members who say this about my good-faith contributions.
Hi Habryka,
I found this comment disappointing to read.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230203024435/https://survivalandflourishing.fund/speculation-grants
I don’t know Michael, nor how SFF works, but a <1minute google search suggests that Michael Vassar was serving as a grantor as of Feb 2022. His name has since been removed, but it is unclear whether this is because he is no longer involved, or because he has rescinded consent to have his name listed, or because SFF no longer wish to list his name. It is reasonable to think that Michael Vassar may still be involved with SFF if you take either of the latter two interpretations.
My guess is you just totally made this up or heard a rumor from someone that did since I can’t think of an interpretation under which this is true.
This came across unnecessarily defensive to me, and I’m surprised that you missed this interpretation for someone “very closely involved with basically all SFF operations in the last 3-4 years”, given how easy this information was to find.
Additionally, did you know that Michael was involved in 2022, or had his name listed on the website? If you knew he was involved in 2022, but made the claim that you “can’t think of an interpretation that this is true” because he’s no longer involved in 2023, and accused burneraccountman of just totally making this up just because of that, this feels highly uncharitable to me (I would have expected you to clarify that you knew he was involved last year but this is no longer the case). If you did not know, then I suspect this is may be an update to how much you think you knew about “basically all SFF operations”, and how well calibrated you are about confident claims going forward.
I don’t think it’s mean, and I don’t think you should delete it (and clearly many others think it’s a good comment). However, I strongly disagree with the claim that EA leadership isn’t really a thing. I’ll also aim to explain why I think why asking questions directed at “EA leadership” is reasonable to me, even if they may not be to you.
But I’m not sure “EA Leadership” is really a thing
The coordination forum literally used to be called the “leaders forum”. The description of the first coordination forum was literally “leaders and experienced staff from established EA organizations”. The Centre for Effective Altruism organizes events called “Ëffective Altruism Global” and has the ability to prevent or very strongly recommend that organizers don’t allow people into community events.
When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff.
If you have spent millions of dollars on a PR campaign for your book and are seen as the public face of EA, people who self-identify as EA are going to take some interest in what you say when you’re seen to be representing EA, and whether or not your decisions affect them. If Will went out and said “Actually EAs believe that abortion should be outlawed with no exceptions for rape or to save the life of the mother”, and I don’t personally endorse this claim but have been talking about how I am an EA at work, the damage is done regardless of whether he’s “the CEO of EA” or just a philosopher. If he and his team has chosen to spread longtermism by writing a book and marketing it, then it comes with the responsibility of being in the public eye, and answering for things he says or actions he takes that people will interpret as “this is what EA is about”/”this is what longtermism is about”.
But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you.
There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. “EA” does not do things, “EA” did not “endorse” SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.
For any decision that specific individuals or organizations do, I personally do not have the power or influence to meaningfully push back against them. But some people in the EA community have more power and influence than me and can do so. So while there might not be a shadowy council of EA leadership, there are people who make decisions that affect and shape the EA movement in much greater ways than I can. And while there might not be a centralized loci of power, power is clearly not distributed evenly, and decisions are made in ways that affect me when I have close to no ability to influence it.
As long as people who aren’t part of the decisions being made are still identifying as EAs and helping promote it, they are implicitly trusting that people who are in positions to affect and shape the EA movement more than them are doing so in well considered ways, in ways that they are comfortable with or happy to endorse.
If people at my local meetup identify as EAs and talk positively about it and encourage new members to get more involved, and those with a lot more influence in shaping the EA movement (those who fund our groups, those who write the books and blog posts we discuss, those who take interviews on national TV or get featured in TIME magazine) are taking it in a direction my group don’t agree with or don’t understand, or something happens that makes the group question the ability of “EA leaders”, then it seems reasonable to ask questions, because they are now uncertain whether EA is a movement they still want to be part of, or want to endorse, or want to encourage others to join. In this case, transparency might leada to more accountability, or it might lead to more decentralized decision making. It’s a tradeoff against other considerations, and they obviously aren’t obliged to change anything, but it seems unreasonable to me that you’re taking issue with people even asking these questions?
If they weren’t part of decisions that contributed to these events, and they don’t know how these decisions are made, and they’re ridiculed for even asking about it, then you’re basically asking people who have no meaningful way to influence the decisons or get any insight into the thought process behind it to just “have faith” in the decisions that are being made. And when people change their jobs and careers and life plans around EA and where the movement is being taken, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask questions that help them gain clarity around whether the movement does in fact align with where they want their own life to go.
Also, suggesting that “there are no adults in the room” I think can come across pretty demeaning to all the people who have spent years of their life working on shaping the EA movement.
And if it’s true that “there are no adults in the room” in context of “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?” (i.e., if there’s no one in the EA movement who has a job that might reasonably reduce the chance of things like this or other risks to the EA movement from happening), then it would be a pretty important update for me, and probably for many others. But I doubt this is actually the case.
I disagree, I think it’s entirely possible to upvote things you disagree with, or to upvote the post, read it and update negatively, which is presumably not what you meant here by “people changed their minds”.
I think this is a very poor way to make this estimate for most reasonable interpretations of “people changed their minds
One uncharitable interpretation is that this is a way of implying a consensus where it doesn’t exist, and conflating “good epistemics” with “people who agree with me”. (“75% of people agree with us! I’m so grateful that EA epistemics are trustworthy”). Doing this may create some social pressure to conform both to the majority and to people who apparently have “good epistemics”, especially given this claim came alongside the link to the EA Forum post on your FB post, and your call for action at the bottom including voting behavior. This is subtle and not necessarily what you intended, but I thought worth pointing out because the effects may exist regardless of your intentions.
On the uncharitable case:
I think there are other examples in the post that seem reasonable at first glance but can be interpreted or misinterpreted as similar cases of creating some kind of social pressure to take the Nonlinear position. Some of these are are raised in Yarrow’s comment.
Others include:
“However, if Ben pulled a Geoffrey Hinton and was able to update based on new information despite massive psychological pressure against that, that would be an act of impressive epistemic virtue. As a community, we want to make it so that people are rewarded for doing the right but hard thing, and this is one of those times.”
“EA’s high trust culture, part of what makes it great, is crumbling, and “sharing only negative information about X person/charity” posts will destroy it.
“EA since FTX has trauma. We’re infected by a cancer of distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Frequent witch burnings. Seeing ill-intent everywhere. Forbidden questions (in EA!) Forbidden thoughts (in EA!)
We’re attacking each other instead of attacking the world’s problems.”
Most of the rest of the section titled “So how do we learn from this to make our community better? How can we make EA antifragile?”)
“This doesn’t mean EA is rife with abuse, it just means that EA is rife with humans. Humans with strong moral emotions and poor social skills on average. We should expect a lot of conflict. We need to find a better way to deal with this. Our community has been turning on itself with increasing ferocity, and we need to find a better way to recover from FTX. Let’s do what EA does best: optimize dispassionately, embody scout mindset, and interpret people charitably.”
On the charitable case:
I think it’s fairly obvious that using post upvotes is a poor way of indicating support for the Nonlinear position, because there are a lot of reasons for upvotes (or downvotes) that are unrelated to whether voters agree or disagree with the post itself.
Skimming some comments quickly (moved to footnote for ease of reading).[1]
There are obviously problems with aggregating votes which make these hard to interpret, but even if you take a looser definition, like “75% of readers now have a better net impression of Nonlinear than after Ben Pace’s post”, this still feels very unclear to me without cherry picking comments. I’m not expecting NL to have attempted to modelling consensus with agreevotes, but I think it’s clear even on skimming that opinions here are mixed (this doesn’t discount the possibility of multiple NL staff agree/disagreevoting many of these posts or comments), and ceteris paribus make it more surprising that the 75% claim was made.
Yarrow’s comment
“Even if most of what Kat says is factually true, this post still gives me really bad vibes and makes me think poorly of Nonlinear.”
has 68 agreevotes and 24 disagreevotes.
Lukas’ comment:
“I updated significantly in the direction of “Nonlinear leadership has a better case for themselves than I initially thought”,
“it seems likely to me that the initial post indeed was somewhat careless with fact-checking.”,
“I’m still confused about some of the fact-checking claims”, “I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning (in a “this is difficult work environment with definite potential for toxicity” rather than “this is outright abusive on all reasonable definitions of the word”). The replies by Nonlinear leadership didn’t change my initial opinion here by too much”
has 34 agree-votes and 4 disagreevotes.
Ollie’s comment:
I don’t have time to engage with all the evidence here, but even if I came away convinced that all of the original claims provided by Ben weren’t backed up, I still feel really uneasy about Nonlinear; uneasy about your work culture, uneasy about how you communicate and argue, and alarmed at how forcefully you attack people who criticise you.
has 78 agreevotes and 31 disagreevotes
Muireall’s comment/spot check:
From my perspective, this is between “not responsive to the complaint” and “evidence for the spirit of the complaint”. It seems an overreach to call “They told me not to spend time with my boyfriend...” a “sad, unbelievable lie” “discrediting [Chloe] as a reliable source of truth” when it is not something anyone has cited Chloe as saying. It seems incorrect to describe “advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’” as in “direct contradiction” with any of this, which instead seems to affirm that traveling with Nonlinear was conditioned on “high potential” or being among the “highest quality people”. Finally, having initially considered inviting Chloe’s boyfriend to travel with them would still be entirely consistent with later deciding not to; encouraging a visit in May would still be consistent with an overall expectation that Chloe not spend too much time with her boyfriend in general for reasons related to his perceived “quality”.
has 20 agreevotes and 3 disagreevotes
Geoffrey’s comment:
Whatever people think about this particular reply by Nonlinear, I hope it’s clear to most EAs that Ben Pace could have done a much better job fact-checking his allegations against Nonlinear, and in getting their side of the story.
has 53 agreevotes and 11 disagreevotes
Vipulnaik’s comment:
“For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. But my own take is that the post would have been stronger had these changes been made prior to publishing. Curious to hear if others agree or disagree.”
has 24 agreevotes and 2 disagreevotes
Peter’s comment:
“Personally, I have updated back to being relatively unconcerned about bad behaviour at Nonlinear”
has 9 agreevotes and 15 disagreevotes
Kerry’s comment:
“to the main charges raised by Ben, this seems about as close to exonerating as one can reasonably expect to get in such cases”
has 30 agreevotes and 26 disagreevotes
Marcus’ comment:
“Overall, I think Nonlinear looks pretty good here. I definitely think they made some mistakes, especially adding members to their work+travel arrangements, but on the whole, I think they acted pretty reasonably and were unjustly vilified.”
has 14 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
John’s comment:
I think the preliminary takeaway is that non-linear are largely innocent, but really bad at appearing that way. They derailed their own exoneration via a series of bizarre editorials, which do nothing but distract, borne out of (seemingly) righteous indignation
has 12 agreevotes and 13 disagreevotes
Do you know that they have a personality disorder? I don’t see how pushing back on internet strangers making claims about others’ mental state is an “absurd and comical set of community politeness norm.”
I agree that Torres is clearly acting in bad faith, and I think many EAs already know this. But even if they didn’t, the justification for them being a bad faith actor is NOT because of your assumption of their personality disorder or mental illness, nor their personal problems with their ex-partner. So yes, this “transmits information”, but not anything that’s relevant to how we should respond. We should choose not engage because they act in bad faith, not because you think they have a mental illness. We should think they act in bad faith because of the quality of their writing and choice of argument, not because they have problems with their ex-partner. And in this specific case, it’s very easy to show they act in bad faith without resorting to those kinds of claims.
You should also know, that by making this statement, you have in fact given them more fodder to use against EA.
I have strongly downvoted your original comment.
If Zach was previously interim CEO for EVF US and has now moved to the board, is there a new interim CEO, or is this returning to the previous model of organizations reporting directly to the board? Is Howie still interim CEO of EVF UK? Apologies if this is on the website somewhere, I couldn’t find the details.
Are you happy to share a short summary of the non-funding factors that contributed to this decision? All the best with whatever is next!
Thanks for the feedback, Michael. I have struck out the last sentence.
I think it comes from a place of bitterness about both the community health team’s inaction about this case, and what appears to be insufficient acknowledgement of the community health team’s role in allowing things to have played out the way they have. Unlike you, I no longer believe the community health team should be in a high-trust position, as that’s what contributed to this problem in the first place. If the community health team wants me to trust them going forward, I want them to show me they have a process that is at least somewhat robust to individuals making human mistakes, and not to ask me to have faith in their “hope” that they will eventually spontaneously recognize their mistakes years later, especially ones of this nature.
I don’t blame individuals for making mistakes, but I am disappointed that the comment felt more like mitigating their role here instead of acknowledgement of the problem, and wanted to point this out. I appreciate that a more empathetic approach would be reasonable; I hope you help uphold this standard to other comments and extend this empathy and support to the other women in this community.
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NJwqKSbnAgFHogaL2/key-questions-for-digital-minds#comment-S9jjzKf3AaTt62Lja
Leaving this comment up for myself and as a PSA, as the original post by Jacy was deleted shortly after this comment was posted.
Edit: received a message saying the link is broken. I’m not sure why this is, but I think this is an issue if you click the link but not if you copy+paste the link. Screenshot below in any case if this issue persists for others.
Fwiw, my read of Denise’s comment was more like “My previous impression of Owen was that he was an outstanding example of what a decent man should look like, and thus this news is especially disappointing and devastating”, rather than something like “Owen was the last decent man, and this shows that there are no decent men”.
I may chime back about the object level question around the case soon, but I do want to flag in the interim that this comment that suggests “Jacy had asked some women out on dates” is likely to be a misleading interpretation of the actual events. See also this thread, and this comment.
My view is that whether someone receives funding depends on the kind of work they are doing, as well as the level of risk they present to the community. On replaceability—he is pivoting to AI safety work. Would you say his difficult-to-replace nature in the animal space, to whatever extent this is true, translates to his AI safety work? His latest post was about establishing “a network of DM research collaborators and advisors”. Is he difficult to replace in this context also?
I think it’s fine for him to independently do research, but whether he should be associated with the EA community, receive EA funding for his work, or be in a position where he can be exposed to more victims (recruiting researchers) is less clear to me and depends on the details of what happened.
There has been no additional communication from CEA or Jacy acknowledging what actually happened, or why we can trust that Jacy has taken accountability for his actions, and is no longer a risk to members of this community, apart from the passage of time. Until then, I will point out the tension here that Jacy is someone who is barred from CEA events, but encouraged by 80,000 hours as a place to work at and is able to recruit from EAs without EAs having this knowledge, and will continue to raise this as a consideration so people can make better-informed decisions about potential risks in associating or working with Jacy.
Because of this lack of clarity, and because his organization’s current plan does seem to involve exposure to new potential victims, I’ve disagree-voted. But I don’t have a way of disagree-voting as 1 vote (it automatically gives 2), so take that into consideration also.
It was 2 years after his apology for this repeated troubling behavior that he got funding.
I will note that if you know about events that have happened 2 years prior to the SFF funding in 2022, this suggests there were incidents in 2020, which is after CEA’s ban in 2019. If this is what you mean, this should update you negatively about whether Jacy has taken sufficient steps to make positive changes in this regard.
Just a quick note that my read of the full email does not really change the context of the libel suit threat, or Habryka’s claims, especially given much of the missing information from the email was already in a public comment by Kat.
I also agree that if Nonlinear provided substantive evidence in a top-level post that dramatically changed the narrative of this story, e.g. change my personal credence of each of these claims to <15%, it would receive significant attention, such as staying on the front page on the community tab for at least 1 week, gain >150 karma etc.
What processes are in place that gives you this hope? Or do you mean you hope that you would have spontaneously reflected on this and decided to take action after not doing so for two years?
Rob,
Thanks for this clarification and acknowledgement of what happened with the podcast. Hope you’re doing better since your last post.
One question on how I should be interpreting the statements describing your views:
So it seems worth clarifying what I actually do think. In brief, I entirely agree with Matt Yglesias that:
Returns to additional money are certainly not linear at large scales, which counsels in favour of risk aversion.
Returns become sublinear more quickly when you’re working on more niche cause areas like longtermism, relative to larger cause areas such as global poverty alleviation.
This sublinearity becomes especially pronounced when you’re considering giving on the scale of billions rather than millions of dollars.
There are other major practical considerations that point in favour of risk-aversion as well.
———
While in the hypothetical your downside is meant to be capped at zero, in reality, ‘swinging for the fences’ with all your existing funds can mean going far below zero in impact.
The fact that many risky actions can result in an outcome far worse than what would have happened if you simply did nothing, is a reason for much additional caution, one that we wrote about in a 2018 piece titled ‘Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them’.
———
So between $1 billion with certainty versus a 10% chance of $15 billion, one could make a theoretical case for either option — but if it were me I would personally lean towards taking the $1 billion with certainty.
———
I regret having swept those and other complications under the rug for the sake of simplicity in a way that may well have confused some listeners to the show and seemed like an endorsement of an approach that is risk-neutral with respect to dollar returns, which would in fact be severely misguided.
Just wanted to clarify whether I’m meant to be interpreting these as “these are my views and they were my views at the time of the SBF podcast”, or “In hindsight, I agree with these views now, but didn’t hold this view at the time”, or “I think I always believed this, but just didn’t really think about this when we published the podcast”, or something else?
The reason I ask is because the post makes it sound like the first interpretation, but if these were your views and always have been, to the point where you are saying an approach that is risk-neutral with respect to dollar returns would be “severely misguided”, it seems difficult to reconcile that with the justification of publishing the relevant quote[1] as “for the sake of simplicity”.
If you are happy to publish things like “you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value”, “this is the totally rational approach” for the sake of simplicity when you actually don’t endorse the claim (or even consider it severely misguided), what does that mean about other content on 80,000 hours? What else has been published for the sake of “simplicity” that you actually don’t endorse, or consider severely misguided? I find this option hard to believe because it’s not consistent with the publication/editorial standards I expect from 80,000 hours, nor its Director of Research, and it’s an update I’m rather hesitant about making.
Sorry if this wasn’t worded as politely or kindly as it could have been, and I hope you interpret me seeking clarification here as charitable. I’m aware there may be other possibilities I’m not thinking of, and wanted to ask because I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. I’m hoping this gives you an opportunity to clarify things for me and others who might be similarly confused.
Thanks!
Edit: Added this quote from the podcast, taken from davidc’s comment below:
”But when it comes to doing good, you don’t hit declining returns like that at all. Or not really on the scale of the amount of money that any one person can make. So you kind of want to just be risk neutral.”
“If you were offered a 100% chance of $1 million to keep yourself, or a 10% chance of $15 million — it makes total sense to play it safe. You’d be devastated if you lost, and barely happier if you won.
But if you were offered a 100% chance of donating $1 billion, or a 10% chance of donating $15 billion, you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value — that is, probability multiplied by the goodness of the outcome [in this case $1.5 billion] — and so swing for the fences.
This is the totally rational but rarely seen high-risk approach to philanthropy championed by today’s guest, Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam founded the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX, which has grown his wealth from around $1 million to $20,000 million.”
For example, it seems like a long time since I’ve heard of Jacy Reese getting EA funding.
Jacy’s org received funding from the SFF in 2022, if you consider that EA funding. More weakly, his organization is also advertised on the 80,000 hours job board. He also recently tried to seek funding and recruit on the forum (until he deleted his post, plausibly due to pushback), and thus still benefits from EA institutions and infrastructure even if that doesn’t look like direct funding.
Thanks Tessa, I strongly endorse and appreciate this comment. It’s also worth noting here that the Collinses were very recently featured in an article, which has already associated EA/longtermism with these views, and also hinted at a plan or opportunistic power grab:
[Collins] also weighed in on the stunning implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX, which represented one of the largest financial hubs for the effective-altruism movement. The Collinses, who never directly associated with the top Democratic donor Bankman-Fried, spied an opportunity in his demise.
“This means our faction (more conservative, pronatalist, long-termist-civilization-building-focused, likely to self fund) is now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction in the EA space,” Simone wrote in a text message on November 12.
I was worried that this could potentially represent a risk to EA and linkposted that article, though I do not believe the article itself is worthy of engagement given the above comment-I am just leaving it here for public record in case other people come across this post later.
What about the parts of EA that isn’t Peter Singer and classical GiveWell-style EA? If those parts of EA were somewhat responsible, would it be reasonable to call that EA as well?
I don’t think the analogy is helpful. Naomi Novik presumably does not claim to emphasize the importance of understanding tail risks. Naomi presumably didn’t meet Caroline and encourage her to earn a lot of money so she can donate to fantasy authors, nor did Caroline say “I’m earning all of this money so I can fund Naomi Novik’s fantasy writing”. Naomi Novik did not have Caroline on her website as a success story of “this is why you should earn money to buy fantasy books or support other fantasy writers”. Naomi didn’t have a “Fantasy writer’s fund” with the FTX brand on it.
I think it’s reasonable to preach patience if you think people are jumping too quickly to blame themselves. I think it’s reasonable to think that EA is actually less responsible than the current state of discourse on the forum. And I’m not making a claim about the extent EA is in fact responsible for the events. But the analogy as written is pretty poor, and doesn’t really make a good case for saying EA has zero responsibility here (emphasis added):