I’d be interested to hear some concrete examples? I expect Will to spin and cherry-pick some things in ways that I wouldn’t, but you might have something more serious in mind (or less serious, if your bar for instrumental dishonesty is low enough)...
I’d love to see a longer write-up somewhere that provides more evidence and details about any or all of these claims—I don’t know who you are and don’t currently know how much weight to put on them. I could see them turning out to be totally true, or totally false, depending on how honest and rigorous you (and/or your sources, if this isn’t direct info) are.
There are plenty of views held by EA leadership that would be bad if they were to be brought up on, say, Trevor Noah’s show. Do you really want explicit examples here? I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I don’t think this by itself is that problematic because it’s a common mode of dishonesty, and if it were the only problem I would think MacAskill is just engaging in marketing, where deception can be a prerequisite for success. However, for me this is only one piece of the puzzle.
The reasons I’m suspicious of MacAskill in particular are:
His willingness to deceive both the public and ordinary EAs on many occasions: about the views of EA leadership and his own views in particular, about the fact that SBF’s “frugal lifestyle” image was fabricated, potentially about events that took place at early Alameda, etc.
His close relationship with SBF: the fact that he was the one to offer SBF an EA job after SBF left Jane Street, the support given by EA organizations to Alameda Research early on, including both substantial financial resources and human capital; along with e.g. his intermediation between SBF and Elon Musk
The shady nature of Future Fund grantmaking channels when he would have been in a position to know who received funding from where
The Guzey confidential draft leak episode
Vague “bad rumors” about him that have been circulating recently—I can’t elaborate on this further because I also don’t know the origin of these rumors, but you might hear such things if you go to real-life EA meetups and it still seems like relevant Bayesian evidence
Conditional on the above, the fact that his initial reaction to the FTX scandal was both delayed and ambiguous makes him look even worse
None of this is conclusive evidence, but together they paint a picture of the utilitarian who is convinced he is doing good and who has no problems employing deception and lying as part of his toolkit.
I have some more evidence that I can’t share here due to confidentiality concerns, but none of it is more decisive than the public evidence I’m able to share above. I think the evidence is clear that MacAskill is instrumentally dishonest in many important situations, and there’s unclear but suggestive evidence that he was dishonest about SBF’s character or information he may have had about the leadership of FTX and Alameda Research.
If you have a highly favorable view of MacAskill, the above is probably insufficient to update you to an extent that you would agree with me about his character. In this case I would implore people to have more reasonable priors and to hold EA leadership to higher standards.
I don’t care if you’re personally rude to me or not. I’m just a throwaway account and I assure you that my feelings won’t be hurt by you failing to be polite on an online forum. If my comment comes across as rude, keep in mind that I don’t write anything I don’t mean to say—I legitimately would not share a confidential draft with you given the views you’ve expressed in this thread so far, because I consider you to be insufficiently trustworthy.
Setting that aside, what I want to understand is how you think Guzey somehow comes across worse in this incident than MacAskill and Wise. I think it’s very hard to tell a story of this incident in which MacAskill was not intentionally deceptive on an issue with only trivial stakes. Julia Wise was at best incompetent and at worst complicit ex post after having leaked the draft by accident, as she didn’t reveal that the draft had been leaked to Guzey.
She looks even worse because this incident wasn’t added to the page of CEA’s mistakes until after Guzey discussed the incident in public 3 years after it took place. I can imagine Wise acting in good faith throughout this episode, but I can’t imagine the same for MacAskill, and it’s MacAskill that I really care about.