Strikes me as…premature? We’ll have a lot more clarity in the coming days, and resigning + questioning the ethics at FTX when we still fundamentally don’t know what happened doesn’t seem particularly productive.
If FTX just took risks and lost, this will look very dumb in hindsight. And if there turn out to be lots of unethical calls, we’ll have more than enough time to criticize them all to our hearts’ content. But at least we’ll have the facts.
EDIT: See Ben’s comment in the thread below on his experience as Zoe’s advisor and confidence in her good intentions.
(Opening disclaimer: this was written to express my honest thoughts, not to be maximally diplomatic. My response is to the post, not the paper itself.)
I’d like to raise a point I haven’t seen mentioned (though I’m sure it’s somewhere in the comments). EA is a very high-trust environment, and has recently become a high-funding environment. That makes it a tempting target for less intellectually honest or pro-social actors.
If you just read through the post, every paragraph except the last two (and the first sentence) is mostly bravery claims (from SSC’s “Against Bravery Debates”). This is a major red flag for me reading something on the internet about a community I know well. It’s much easier to start an online discussion about how you’re being silenced than to defend your key claims on the merits. Smaller red flags were: explicit warnings of impending harms if the critique is not heeded, and anonymous accounts posting mostly low-quality comments in support of the critique (shoutout to “AnonymousEA”).
A lot of EAs have a natural tendency to defend someone who claims they’re being silenced, and give their claims some deference to avoid being uncharitable. And it’s pretty easy to exploit that tendency.
I don’t know Zoe, and I don’t want to throw accusations of exaggeration or malfeasance into the ring without cause. If these incidents occurred as described, the community should be extremely concerned. But on priors, I expect a lot of claims along these lines, i.e. “Please fund my research if you don’t want to silence criticism” to come from a mix of unaligned academics hoping to do their own thing with LTist funding, and less scrupulous Phil Torres-style actors.
Yes, I’m leaving myself more vulnerable to a world where LTist orgs do in fact silence criticism and nobody hears about it except from brave lone researchers. But I’d like to see more evidence in support of that case before everyone gets too worried.