Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
I got interested in EA back before it was called EA, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. Now I’m trying to figure out where EA can fit into my life these days and what it means to me.
I do not follow everything that happens in the EA world. I don’t use Twitter. I’m out of the loop. So, I don’t know if any of the people named have responded to the claims made in this Time article from March 2023:
...[Will] MacAskill had long been aware of concerns around Bankman-Fried. He was personally cautioned about Bankman-Fried by at least three different people in a series of conversations in 2018 and 2019, according to interviews with four people familiar with those discussions and emails reviewed by TIME.
He wasn’t alone. Multiple EA leaders knew about the red flags surrounding Bankman-Fried by 2019, according to a TIME investigation based on contemporaneous documents and interviews with seven people familiar with the matter. Among the EA brain trust personally notified about Bankman-Fried’s questionable behavior and business ethics were Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher who went on to lead Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic arm, the FTX Future Fund, and Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of OpenPhilanthropy, a nonprofit organization that makes grants supporting EA causes. Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
Many of the emerging issues at Alameda that were reported to EA leaders beginning in 2018—including pervasive dishonesty, sloppy accounting, and rejection of corporate controls—presaged the scandal that unfolded at FTX four years later, according to sources who were granted anonymity to avoid professional retribution or becoming entangled in Bankman-Fried’s ongoing legal drama. “I was shocked at how much of what came out about FTX rhymed with the concerns we raised in the early days,” says one person who spoke directly with MacAskill and others about Bankman-Fried in 2018. “It was the same thing. All of the same problems.”
It’s not entirely clear how EA leaders reacted to the warnings. Sources familiar with the discussions told TIME that the concerns were downplayed, rationalized as typical startup squabbles, or dismissed as “he said-she said,” as two people put it. EA leaders declined or did not respond to multiple requests from TIME to explain their reaction to these warnings and what they did in response. But by the end of 2018, Bankman-Fried’s behavior was such an open secret that EA leaders were debating Bankman-Fried’s presence on the board of the Centre for Effective Altruism. In emails among senior EA leaders, which TIME reviewed, one person wrote that they had raised worries about Bankman-Fried’s trustworthiness directly with MacAskill, and that MacAskill had dismissed the concerns as “rumor.” In 2019, Bankman-Fried left CEA’s board.
MacAskill declined to answer a list of detailed questions from TIME for this story. “An independent investigation has been commissioned to look into these issues; I don’t want to front-run or undermine that process by discussing my own recollections publicly,” he wrote in an email. “I look forward to the results of the investigation and hope to be able to respond more fully after then.” Citing the same investigation, Beckstead also declined to answer detailed questions. Karnofsky did not respond to a list of questions from TIME. Through a lawyer, Bankman-Fried also declined to respond to a list of detailed written questions. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) did not reply to multiple requests to explain why Bankman-Fried left the board in 2019. A spokesperson for Effective Ventures, the parent organization of CEA, cited the independent investigation, launched in Dec. 2022, and declined to comment while it was ongoing.
In the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation with Bankman-Fried and in the months that followed, [Tara] Mac Aulay and others warned MacAskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founder’s alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions. Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.
[Naia] Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”
“He was treating it like a ‘he said-she said,’ even though every other long-time EA involved had left because of the same concerns,” Bouscal adds.
To me, this feels like the most important part of the whole story.
This is a really good comment. It gets at a tough issue. Someone wise once told me: when we feel unsafe, we want to be right. A consequence of this is that if we want someone to admit wrongdoing, or even just to admit the validity of a different perspective, we have to make it safe for them to do so. We can’t just dogpile them. It’s clear that Kat feels unsafe and wants to be right. And, in a way, we are dogpiling her.
However, it also must be said that someone admitting wrongdoing, or admitting the validity of a different perspective, isn’t the only goal for a community faced with an instance of alleged harm. Preventing future harm is an even more important goal. If someone credibly accused of doing harm to another person can’t overcome their need to be right, the community must explore different options for preventing other people from coming to harm in the future. These options include (but aren’t limited to) exclusion from the community.
I see a number of flaws with the reasoning here.
Even if embryos/fetuses have moral value, that does not by itself mean that preventing abortions is an important cause area. An adult person’s needs, desires, preferences, health, happiness, and well-being also have moral value. More moral value, I would argue.
It seems deeply implausible that a first trimester embryo — the relevant entity to consider when talking about the majority of abortions — has as much moral value as an adult cow or pig. Well over a billion cows and pigs are slaughtered each year. On a per entity basis and on a total deaths basis, animal welfare far surpasses abortion in importance.
Any argument to the effect that not having a baby is bad for reasons unrelated to the intrinsic, immediate moral value of an embryo/fetus — such as considerations of the counterfactual life-years added to humanity’s total if a person does have a baby — leads to the implausible conclusion that each person has the moral obligation to have as many babies as possible.
Pro-life activism is not plausibly a neglected cause area in any way. There is already massive attention and resources devoted to it. Even if I fully agreed with the cause, it would be bizarre to suggest the effective altruist movement should make it a priority. By analogy, if someone said gay marriage (which I support about as strongly as I could possibly support anything) should be an EA cause area, I would find that bizarre. What do EAs have to add to this already crowded arena of politics?
When someone makes the accusation that transhumanism or effective altruism or longtermism or worries about low birth rates is a form of thinly veiled covert racism, I generally think they don’t really understand the topic and are tilting at windmills.
But then I see people who are indeed super racist talking about these topics and I can’t really say the critics are fully wrong. Particularly if communities like the EA Forum or the broader online EA community don’t vigorously repudiate the racism.
In Ben’s post, he paraphrased Nonlinear as saying (N.B.: these are Ben’s words, written from Nonlinear’s perspective, not Nonlinear’s words):
Third; the semi-employee was also asked to bring some productivity-related and recreational drugs over the border for us. In general we didn’t push hard on this. For one, this is an activity she already did (with other drugs). For two, we thought it didn’t need prescription in the country she was visiting, and when we found out otherwise, we dropped it. And for three, she used a bunch of our drugs herself, so it’s not fair to say that this request was made entirely selfishly. I think this just seems like an extension of the sorts of actions she’s generally open to.
Regarding Ben’s summary of his call with Nonlinear, of which the above is part, Ben claimed in his post:
Afterwards, I wrote up a paraphrase of their responses. I shared it with Emerson and he replied that it was a “Good summary!”.
In this Nonlinear post responding to Ben’s post, they write:
And:
Kat requested Alice bring legal medicine from a pharmacy—specifically antibiotics and one pack of ADHD medicine—not illegal drugs. These medicines are cheap and legal without a prescription in other parts of Mexico we’d visited, and she was already going to a pharmacy anyway.
And:
We shared much of this information with Ben—he knew it was legal medicine, not illegal drugs—yet he still published this misleading version. We were horrified that Ben published this knowing full well it wasn’t true. We told him we’d share these exact screenshots with him, but he refused to look at them.
So, Ben’s post claims that Nonlinear admitted to asking a “semi-employee” to bring “recreational drugs” over a border. In this post, Nonlinear now seems to emphatically deny this claim.
We have an apparent contradiction.
My questions for Nonlinear:
1) Was Ben’s paraphrase (quoted above) inaccurate?
2) Was Ben’s claim that Emerson said the summary of his call with Nonlinear (of which Ben’s paraphrase was a part) “good summary” false?
3) What were the so-called “recreational drugs”, if there were any? Were they legal drugs, obtained with a prescription, but used recreationally?
FYI, Émile’s pronouns are they/them.
[Edit: I really don’t like that this comment got downvoted and disagree voted...]
Will responded here.
his
(-___-)
Bizarrely, the OpenAI board proposed a merger with Anthropic.
A lot of people seem to think EA is this singular, exceptional, incomparable thing, unlike other movements or ideologies or group identities. But I think EA is not special or exceptional or unique at all. It is just another human enterprise with many of the flaws that human enterprises typically have.
I studied philosophy at university and, by the time I was done, I still loved philosophy (maybe just as much or even more than ever), but developed many deep frustrations and critiques with philosophy, and a little bit of cynicism or skepticism toward the field, or some aspects of it. One thing I wished philosophers and philosophy teachers asked themselves more and more pointedly was, “Why is this worth thinking about?” or “Am I wasting my time with this?”. (I imagine if you had a glass of wine or some weed in a private place with any random philosophy PhD student or professor and asked them about the structural problems in their field, there’s a good chance they would have a lot to complain about.)
At university, I got intensely involved with political activism to the point of burnout and mental destabilization. I still believe very strongly in many of the basic ideas I believed in then (e.g. trans rights, economic justice) — maybe even more so, given the subsequent years I’ve had to think on it — but I was scared and disturbed by how amped up and out of control people can get when they spend so much time talking to people in their weird little in-group and have a strong sense of self-righteousness. Very relevant to EA.
EA is something like a combination of philosophy and political activism. When I got involved in my local EA community circa 2015, from the jump, I had a certain wariness about how something like this might go astray. One thing that bothered me then and I still don’t quite get is why people want to say “I’m an EA” or say things like “EAs like to help other EAs”. Why is this part of your personal identity? Maybe it’s fine and normal to want to be part of a group or to label yourself and I’m overthinking it. Maybe it’s largely personal preference.
A thing that weirds me out today is when I see EAs having a weird superiority complex, like the apparent idea that EAs, exceptionally, care about truth and know how to get it, whereas I guess everyone else are just lying fools.
I don’t remember where I read this, but someone pointed out that a lot of EAs just like talking about philosophy and futurism, and then for some reason feel the need to justify that it’s important. (Maybe it feels wasteful or indulgent otherwise? Maybe pleasure is a sin?) My feeling is that people should just be able to enjoy talking about philosophy and futurism, just like they enjoy sports or video games or playing in a band, and that shouldn’t be frowned upon. In fact, it should be looked on as an enriching and somewhat admirable part of life. You don’t have to furiously justify things along the lines of, “Well, if my essay has a 1 in a billion chance of making things go 0.01% better for 10^52 future lives…”
You can devote yourself to an institution, an organization, a movement, an idea or ideal or ideology, a community, a subculture, a career, a cause, or a hobby and not elevate it to the point of “we are the special few this sick, sad world needs”. It can just be fallible humans trying their best, not being perfect, not always knowing for sure what’s true, not always knowing for sure what the right thing to do is.
To the extent that feels uncomfortable or even intolerable to some people, or just not good enough, I wonder if what’s missing in their lives is just being loved for who they really are, without feeling the need to prove that they deserve to be loved.
Espousing white supremacist views is in itself disrespectful to non-white people, regardless of whether the white supremacist sometimes has polite and cordial conversations on topics unrelated to race and racism with non-white people.
It’s as if trillions of dollars per year were spent on firefighting but only millions of dollars per year were spent on fire prevention.
This seems to me to be a self-serving, Manichean, and psychologically implausible account of why people write criticisms of EA.
In a nutshell: “EA has gone woke and I don’t like it!” Poorly written, poorly argued, vague, unoriginal, offensive, and wrong.
I closely read the whole post and considered it carefully. I’m struggling to sum up my reaction to this 15,000-word piece in way that’s concise and clear.
At a high level:
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.
Let me quickly try to list some of the reasons why (if anyone wants me to elaborate or substantiate any of these, please reply and ask):
Confusion, conflation, and prevarication between intent and impact.
Related to the above, the self-licensing, i.e. we are generally good people and generally do good things, so we don’t need to critically self-reflect on particular questionable actions we took.
The varyingly insensitive, inflammatory, and sensationalist use of the Holocaust poem (truly offensive) and the terms “lynching” (also offensive) and “witch-burning”.
Conflation between being depressed and being delusional.
Glib dismissal of other people’s feelings and experiences.
The ridiculous use of “photographic evidence”, which feels manipulative and/or delusional to me.
Seeming to have generally benighted views on trauma, abuse, power dynamics, boundaries, mental health, “victimhood”, resilience, narcissism, DARVO, what status means for accusations of bad behaviour, culture wars, sexism/misogyny, sexual violence, etc.[1]
The hollow-sounding professions of empathy and good will toward Alice, Chloe, and Ben while attempting to maximally character assassinate them, threatening to de-anonymize Alice and Chloe, and retaliating against Ben.
Retaliating against Ben.
General lack of self-awareness and self-reflection; engaging in a heroes/villains or angels/demons framing while paying lip service to not doing that.
Insensitively and unnecessarily bringing up Kathy Forth as an argumentation pawn and not showing concern for (or mentioning) the fact that she died by suicide.
Grandstanding about truth-seeking, scout mindset, and rationality.
Suspicious deflection away from the matter at hand to to “the world’s problems”.
Arguing that Ben’s investigation was a waste of time and (therefore) money.
Implying (or seeming to) that the fate of EA may hang in the balance over this issue.
Diagnosing people’s concern about Nonlinear as an overreaction to FTX/Alameda and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Random fun fact: I am quoted in The Coddling of the American Mind and Jonathan Haidt sent me a signed copy, which was very nice of him to do. Still, I find the book pretty cringe. It’s not that he doesn’t have a point… But, anyway, that’s a topic for another post.