Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

Karma: 1,588

I got interested in effective altruism back before it was called effective altruism, 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. I joined the Effective Altruism Forum to try to figure out where effective altruism could fit into my life these days and what it means to me. You can read my latest thoughts on effective altruism here.

I write on Substack, and used to write on Medium.

Pronouns: she/her or they/them.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 1 Oct 2026 21:59 UTC
0 points
1 ∶ 3
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Three big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0:
- corruption (i.e., the quid pro quo between FTX and Manifund, in which Austin Chen traded Caroline Ellison a job out of prison for cash obtained in the course of stealing customer funds)
- cults (e.g., Leverage Research and Dragon Army Barracks, whose former members/leaders such as Tyler Alterman and Duncan Sabien still post on the EA Forum)
- misinformation (e.g., METR’s use of fabricated data in the famous time horizons graph)
EA sadly seems sunk to me because dire problems keep mounting and most people seem to think doing nothing is the best solution. There is also a disturbingly loud chorus of voices saying no, no, corruption is actually good (it’s what having principles looks like), cults are actually good (it’s part of what makes the community unique), misinformation is actually good (we’re smarter than everyone else and need to save the world), which makes EA seem doomed. The force of immorality in EA is too strong and there is no equally strong force to stand against it.

EA today is at best morally ambiguous, if not more evil than good. Things have gotten really rotten. No one is doing enough to clean it up. And there’s apparently no floor to how much worse it can get.

One of my fears is that there will be an EA mass shooting or terrorist attack because this almost already happened with Stop AI, an EA-funded and EA-supported organization. Sam Kirchner, the Stop AI activist who threatened to do a mass shooting at OpenAI, is still missing. There is a warrant out for his arrest.

Besides that, a disturbing number of people in the EA community seem sympathetic to far-right, illiberal, racist views (e.g., the Manifest afterparties hosted by Curtis Yarvin, who holds authoritarian and white nationalist views).

So, really, that’s five big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0, including violent extremism and authoritarian, racist, far-right political views.

People who want to focus on global poverty and global health and development should probably pour their energy into things not called “EA”, like effective giving. Or more mainstream humanitarian movements like Rotary International, or Hank and John Green’s fundraising through things like Project for Awesome.

I still like the term “EA 1.0”, but it’s probably too cryptic and confusing for anyone not deeply familiar with effective altruism. “EA 1.0″ could possibly be used to describe something (e.g., in an FAQ), such as an effective giving org, but it would probably be too inaccessible to use in the name.

It can be extremely painful to think about cutting your losses with EA, but we are called on in this life to make difficult decisions, to sacrifice, and to suffer when it’s the right thing to do. And, in the long run, that ultimately makes you feel more whole and right inside than ethically compromising and ethically compromising… There is a kind of joy in morality.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 30 Sep 2026 22:53 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Maxwell Love’s comment on: Maxwell Love’s Quick Takes
Pangram says this quick take is 51% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/01232a86-af15-43a2-8e6a-047896c47336?ucc=2RxEGYyJeZr

Is it?

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 30 Sep 2026 16:07 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Explained at length here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/im59y2Au7zC5ofuKe/is-the-ai-industry-in-a-bubble

GPT-6 Astra seems to fit a trend of diminishing marginal returns for R&D investment in LLMs. I don’t know about coding, which is the most economically important domain for LLMs — and I also don’t know about math research, which LLMs are helpful for but it’s hard to imagine is economically important — but for the regular sort of prose-based web search tasks I use LLMs for, GPT-6 Astra is not (to me) noticeably better than the GPT-5.x Chain of Thought models, which are themselves not noticeably better than o3.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 29 Sep 2026 20:43 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
What are the odds the NYT, WSJ, FT, and Bloomberg all report — as part of their factual news reporting, not simply an opinion column or editorial — that the AI bubble has popped and the AI bubble has not actually popped? Surely those odds are minimal.

You could add in other news outlets like the Economist, the Washington Post, the BBC, and the CBC, or possibly other kinds of external judges such as economists or financial analysts (either surveys thereof or reputable organizations or individuals) who would all have to agree.

In terms of the definition of a financial bubble, the Wikipedia definition works perfectly well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble

Exactly operationalizing what counts as the AI bubble popping is a task that can be deferred to judges. Requiring unanimous agreement among the selected judges means their verdict is unlikely to be wrong. (You can always spend the time trying to operationalize something like this yourself, but it’s time-consuming and there’s a meaningful risk you look back on your operationalization and realize you screwed up. I prefer the simplicity and elegance of just deferring it to judges. This is just a symbolic $20 bet for charity and honourable people can acknowledge if they won a bet unfairly.)

If you think a unanimous verdict among all the aforementioned judges and even more besides is likely to be wrong, then, yeah, this bet isn’t for you. I’m always open to counteroffers, though.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 27 Sep 2026 2:41 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 2
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Will anyone take the other side of this bet? By January 1, 2034, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg will all agree the AI bubble has popped. (As in, they will all report it as news, not just publish an opinion column saying so.)

The stakes: $20 to the charity of the winner’s choice.

Why this bet? Mainly just for fun. But also to make a point.

I chose 7 years as the time horizon for the bet because I read that 5 to 7 years is the time horizon for many AI investments.

My hunch is that the AI bubble will pop within 3 years, but who knows. Markets can keep lending and investing in unprofitable ventures for a very long time.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 27 Sep 2026 2:16 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Existential Risk Is An Extraordinary Claim

Some may take the claims of a few experts or their own “vibes” as evidence that we should be very worried about existential risk, but it’s important to remember that humans have a natural proclivity towards believing that their generation could be the last. (According to Pew, “39% of adults believe that humanity is ‘living in the end times.’”)

On this topic, I can’t recommend enough a talk given by sociologist and transhumanist James J. Hughes called “Avoiding Millenialist Cognitive Biases”: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/avoiding-millennialist-cognitive-biases?video=1

Hughes also wrote an essay on the same topic in the anthology Global Catastrophic Risks.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 27 Sep 2026 2:07 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: ASB’s comment on: Are Civilizational Refuges Dead?
E2H = environment-to-human

https://defensesindepth.bio/prioritizing-environment-to-human-biological-threats/

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 27 Sep 2026 1:45 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Community (Part 1: From FTX to Manifund) | Reflective Altruism
Hi Vasco. I think we know for sure the probability that people who’ve been convicted of crimes will reoffend is far greater than for people who have never committed a crime. We don’t have to ask what if.

Beyond the risk of Caroline Ellison committing illegal or unethical acts at Manifund, and beyond the risk of Austin Chen encouraging such acts or covering them up — which are both serious, rational concerns — there is also the corruption aspect. This hire is explicitly a reward, a show of thanks, an act of loyalty on Austin Chen’s part to reciprocate the crimes committed by Caroline Ellison.

The corruption aspect would still exist if the hire were for a non-financial role or if the reward came in some other form, such as cash given by Austin to Caroline. Usually people don’t admit corrupt intent out loud but Austin took the unusual step of writing a public confession.

In my view, the effective altruist community is still underreacting to this even though the reaction has been strong and negative. This is brazen financial corruption and outright encouragement of financial crime. The underreaction of the EA community makes it seem like everything said in defense of EA about the crimes at FTX was a lie. The corruption is now happening in plain sight. No one can pretend they don’t know what’s happening. Where is the accountability? Where are the consequences? The Centre for Effective Altruism’s sanction of Manifund is a good first step, but it’s not enough.

I don’t know what the wider world’s reaction will be if or when the news spreads of just how tolerant the EA community is of financial corruption. But I can say for me, my trust in the EA community has been decimated by this. I personally no longer trust the EA community to not engage in unethical (or even illegal) financial conduct, such as self-dealing with money from EA charities, or covering up improper acts committed by others at EA charities. When a community is so tolerant of such brazen corruption, how can I trust them?

As Maya Angelou is reported to have said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 19 Sep 2026 15:07 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund
As recently as April 2025, Austin defended Sam Bankman-Fried on a podcast. In response to a host’s assertion that Sam Bankman-Fried “did [things] badly and hurt a lot of people”, Austin said:

I don’t know, still debatable. I don’t know how much we should go into the object level here, but everyone made their money back. Yes, some things broke for that to be able to happen, but all the people got 120% of the value of the crypto holdings at the time...

He followed-up by saying:

...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.

Continuing on this thread a bit later on, Austin said:

...yes, [Sam Bankman-Fried] made like big mistakes, but there were things that he did really right. Oh, I think this is a piece I talked about a lot in my post, and is important to me.

Like in some sense Sam made a lot of really, good decisions and maybe a few really bad ones. And I think it’s easy to focus on oh, those bad decisions, I would never have made those bad decisions. But I think I have a lot more sympathy for somebody like Sam because I am sometimes in a position making a lot of decisions too.

And I think oh, the hard thing is not to avoid the couple of bad decisions. The hard thing is to actually have figured out what all the right decisions you could have made, were such that you are in the position to then have to think hard about the one or two bad decisions too. I’m like, many people never get to that place for the goals that matter to them. And I think it is like something somewhat instructive to learn from the perspective of, Sam Bankman-Fried having won a lot at something. Of course.

Austin goes on further in that vein. You can listen or read the full transcript.

Austin’s post about hiring Caroline reads, to me, as if he’s still downplaying the extent of crime and wrongdoing that FTX and Alameda executives committed, similar to what he said on this podcast in April 2025.

My interpretation is that Austin’s views on this topic have not fundamentally changed since April 2025.

For context, Austin also defended Sam Bankman-Fried in November 2022, lambasting people in EA who spoke out against him:

EA leaders have posted denunciations of fraud, and distanced themselves from Sam; the most upvoted all-time EA Forum post is a community condemnation; the entire Future Fund team up and resigned.

Austin wrote that this showed a lack of “loyalty”:

...from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful. … Whatever happened to loyalty? To supporting those who have helped you in the past?

To my knowledge, he has never retracted these comments. On the contrary. On the April 2025 podcast, he reiterated this same point, saying:

I think if you abandon people who have what I viewed as earnestly try to support you and your movement. If you just turn tail on them, be like, “oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this” and we like give up on all of the stuff that he did. Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think?

And:

Maybe I am a person who someday hopes to be a billionaire and I was looking at the actions of people l in this space and be like, do I want to be their friends, their allies? If I feel like in like cases when things go badly, they will just not stand by me.

My interpretation is that Austin’s view is some combination of 1) crime and wrongdoing did not occur at FTX or Alameda to the extent that most people believe and 2) some amount of crime and wrongdoing is good or acceptable in the service of Austin’s goals and EA’s goals. He both downplays the extent of what happened at FTX and also makes an argument along the lines of you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 19 Sep 2026 14:48 UTC
−3 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund

...I generally don’t think it’s unethical to make private hiring decisions based on whatever criteria you want.

It’s unethical for Austin to give someone a job out of prison as a reward for her financial crimes, as a way of saying thanks or repaying a perceived debt (as he put it) because her crimes personally benefited him and his organizations. That’s just straight-up corruption. That rewards and incentivizes, not to mention endorses, financial crimes.

This is a quid pro quo in some sense. It may not be a quid pro quo in the sense that this was the explicit arrangement from the outset, but it’s a quid pro quo in the sense that the hire was made at least in part in exchange for the $1.5 million that Manifold and Manifund received from FTX.

The precedent this sets up is that if you commit crimes that benefit Austin, he’ll reward you when you get out of prison (if you get caught).

In terms of what’s illegal or not, I don’t know (ask a lawyer, not me), but this is absolutely unethical.

Edited to add:

Given this precedent, Caroline has reason to believe that, while working in a financial capacity at Manifund, if she commits crimes or unethical acts that benefit Manifund, Manifold, or Austin, then Austin may cover her, cover up for her, defend her, not report her, etc. Austin has again and again emphasized — publicly! — that “loyalty” and “winning” are more important than the law or business ethics. At this point, Caroline has reason to believe Austin has her back even if what she does is illegal or unethical, as long as it directly benefits Austin and his organizations.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 18 Sep 2026 18:18 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Rachel N. ’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund

Bringing it back to EA: I understand the argument that Manifund and Austin do not represent most of the EA community. But it’s reasonable that outsiders might think they do if EA orgs don’t take steps to distance themselves. I’m glad to see CEA doing so.

If the EA community endorses or even just tolerates the decision and allows Manifund, Austin, and Caroline to participate in the community, e.g., through events hosted by EA orgs like the CEA (which as far as I know has not yet been ruled out), then in that sense Manifund, Austin, and Caroline will represent the EA community.

The sanction against Manifund that Zachary Robinson announced yesterday is a great start. But there are additional straightforward steps that can and should be taken to dissociate effective altruism from the financial corruption Austin just committed and the financial crime Caroline committed and served prison time for.

If the EA community can’t agree that financial corruption or financial crime is an ethical red line and won’t take decisive action to discourage it, the EA community should be correctly understood — by everyone, including both community insiders and outsiders — as ethically compromised.

It’s not really about how things look. It’s about how things are. Caroline really did steal money. Austin really did reward her for it.

The EA community should not tolerate this:

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 18 Sep 2026 18:10 UTC
−9 points
1 ∶ 3
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund
Answers:
1. There are no controls because Manifund is only Austin Chen and Caroline Ellison, so this is 100% trust-based. I am concerned about the risk of Caroline Ellison committing financial crimes again. I take it many others are concerned about this risk as well. Between here and Austin’s Substack post, some comments have explicitly expressed concern that this is an unnecessary risk, e.g., noting how high recidivism rates are even when recidivism seems completely irrational. Beyond that, there is also the corruption aspect, which is not just a risk or a possibility — the corrupt quid pro quo has already occurred. That horse is out of the barn.
2. What an off-base thing to say. Caroline just got out of federal prison for one of the largest financial crimes in recent American history. Austin said one of the motivations for the hire is to reward her for the money FTX gave to Austin’s organizations in the course of committing these crimes. It looks completely insane and corrupt because it is completely insane and corrupt. What are you talking about?
3. What?? The only way to get top talent for financial roles is to hire people who have been convicted of financial crimes?? What are you talking about?!
4. I don’t know what specific people you’re referring to or the mistakes (as you put it) they made. So, I can’t comment.
5. People are being quite honest, open, and direct about the fact that trust and reputation are a big concern here, among other concerns such as corruption and increasing the risk of future financial crimes involving EA money. Who is pretending?
The philosopher David Thorstad’s recent blog post methodically goes through the multiple different concerns with this hire, point by point. David has a commendable amount of patience in explaining things like this.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 18 Sep 2026 14:51 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Bruce Friedrich 🔸’s comment on: Bruce Friedrich ’s Quick takes
Hi Bruce! I recently attended a Zoom book talk you gave and I really enjoyed it. :)

My answer to your question:

It can be frustrating when people just click disagree and don’t explain why, but I don’t know that making agree and disagree votes non-anonymous would make much difference. I assume if people want to explain why they disagree they’ll write a comment, and if they don’t they won’t. If disagree votes were non-anonymous, would it result in more people writing comments explaining why they disagree? Well, why would it?

In my view, agree and disagree votes and karma upvotes and downvotes are not all that meaningful, anyway. I find them be a hard-to-ignore distraction from meaningful engagement with people through words, rather than votes. If you create a points system, everybody wants to go for a high score, but that’s not the point of a forum.

Overall I would generally just caution people from investing much time or emotional energy in the EA Forum. It’s a perfectly fine place to post announcements for organizations like the Good Food Institute and answer questions. In terms of actual deep, meaningful discussion, it’s better to seek out — or even create — alternatives. The culture here is sour and trollish. Rather than enforcing norms of civility, the moderators encourage and even engage in the bad behaviour themselves. The only hope I can see of this changing would be if the Centre for Effective Altruism were to choose new people to run the forum who were committed to changing the culture. But what are the odds of that happening?

Anyway, that’s a bit of a digression.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 17 Sep 2026 20:59 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 6
in reply to: Zachary Robinson🔸’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund
Thank you, Zachary. I admire the integrity of this eloquent and incisive comment, and I admire even more that it comes with a concrete action attached. Hallelujah.

There is an additional consideration beyond what you mentioned: Austin Chen received $1.5 million in stolen cash from Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried, and others at FTX. Austin gave Caroline Ellison a job at Manifund as a reward, a repayment for this stolen cash — a repayment for the debt he feels he owes to her, as he put it. I’m not speculating on his motive; this is what Austin said, openly.

Austin is currently being sued by the FTX Recovery Trust (which represents FTX’s creditors) because they want that $1.5 million back. Unlike others in Austin’s position, he decided he wanted to keep that stolen cash. And he decided he wanted to reward and thank one of the people who stole it for stealing it for him. His words:

I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold.

This is just straight-up corruption.

Austin has repeatedly defended FTX executives generally and Sam Bankman-Fried in particular over the last 4 years. As recently as April 2025, Austin said:

...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.

What a brazen embrace of criminality. And he put his money where his mouth is when he hired Caroline.

It’s a fantastic first step to ban Manifund booths from events run by the Centre for Effective Altruism. Thank you for that. Can I suggest two further steps?

One, ban Austin and Caroline from attending these events (even if they’re not setting up a booth). Two, ban Austin and Caroline from the EA Forum. (Yes, she has an account.)

No single entity controls the entire EA ecosystem, and there’s only so much even the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism can do. But presumably you can do this.

I don’t know what else you might be doing behind the scenes, but if you haven’t considered it already, you could consider talking to leaders of other organizations to encourage them to take more steps to dissociate effective altruism from Manifund, Manifold, Austin, and Caroline. This moment is a time to show whether the EA community meant any of the things it said in the wake of FTX’s collapse, or if it was all talk.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 17 Sep 2026 7:39 UTC
−10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
A Christian, a Buddhist, and an effective altruist walk into a bar. The Devil appears and offers to buy their souls.

The Christian says, “My soul is worth more than all the treasures of the world, so there is no price you could pay me,” and leaves.

The Buddhist says, “The soul is an illusion, so I have nothing to sell you,” and leaves.

The effective altruist says, “I’ll take a cheque for $1.5 million made out to Manifold Markets Inc. and, by the way, we’re hiring.”

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 16 Sep 2026 22:34 UTC
17 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Community (Part 1: From FTX to Manifund) | Reflective Altruism
In addition to those comments you quoted from November 2022, Austin made similar comments in April 2025:

I think if you abandon people who have what I viewed as earnestly try to support you and your movement. If you just turn tail on them, be like, “oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this” and we like give up on all of the stuff that he did. Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think?

And:

...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.

It’s worth noting that Austin is being sued by the FTX Recovery Trust for $1.5 million that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, et al. gave him out of stolen customer funds. Austin explicitly said in his announcement:

I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold.

So, this decision to hire Caroline Ellison is because Austin supports her and SBF’s criminal conduct and wants to reward it because he got $1.5 million out of the arrangement. It’s corruption. What’s remarkable is that the corrupt intent is so openly stated.

If the effective altruism community at large stands by this, no one will be able to say: ‘we didn’t know any wrongdoing was occuring; we honestly thought everything was above board.’ The corruption is happening now in plain sight.

How empty everything said about FTX in defense of EA will be if the community doesn’t eject Manifund and Austin when he openly pays Caroline Ellison with the money she stole as a reward for stealing it.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 16 Sep 2026 22:06 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Turnabout is fair play.

(source)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 16 Sep 2026 21:39 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
“We should free SBF and put him to work.” –Austin Chen (2025 interview)

“I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold.” –Austin Chen on why he hired Caroline Ellison

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 16 Sep 2026 5:43 UTC
13 points
4 ∶ 1
on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund
After some reflection, I realized what may be the worst part of this decision.

Austin Chen has decided to reward and endorse Caroline Ellison’s crimes at FTX by giving her a job in exchange for the stolen money that FTX gave to Manifund. Austin explicitly said that this decision is out of “debt” to Caroline for the ill-gotten money FTX gave to Manifund. Austin’s explicitly stated reasoning is: commit crimes that benefit me and I’ll reward you.

Previously, Austin harshly criticized the EA community for its supposed disloyalty to Sam Bankman-Fried in the wake of the revelations of FTX’s fraud.

In November 2022, Austin wrote of people in EA who denounced or dissociated themselves from Sam Bankman-Fried:

But from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful.

In April 2025, Austin said:

I think if you abandon people who have what I viewed as earnestly try to support you and your movement. If you just turn tail on them, be like, “oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this” and we like give up on all of the stuff that he did. Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think?

And:

...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.

This is a corrupt way to think. This is putting money above ethics.

If someone gives you $500,000 they stole and because of this (not in spite of it!) you give them a job in return, what else is this than corruption? What else is this than a reward for the crime? And an endorsement of the crime?

Nobody can control Austin’s decisions and maybe nobody can change his mind. But EA organizations and individual members of the EA community can decide whether you can encourage criminality and engage in corruption and still be a part of the EA community. I think Austin and Manifund should be thrown out, along with Austin’s other projects, Manifold and Manifest.

Enough is enough. The line has to be drawn here.

If you’re wondering what it would mean to throw Austin and Manifund out of the EA community, here are some steps that could be taken:
- Ban Austin, Caroline, and any future Manifund employees from EA Globals and other EA conferences
- Ban Austin and Caroline from the EA Forum
- Stop working with or recommending Manifund
Only a few people have the ability to ban people from EA conferences or the EA Forum. But there are some steps anyone can take:
- Delete your Manifold account, if you have one
- Commit to not using or working with Manifund in the future
- Commit to not attending future Manifest conferences
- Commit to not working with Austin in the future
- Strongly condemn Austin’s decision to hire Caroline Ellison
The EA community has the power to decide who it includes and who it excludes. It therefore has the moral responsibility for those decisions. Criminality and corruption should not be tolerated in the EA community.
What links here?
- Yarrow Bouchard 🔸's comment on Community (Part 1: From FTX to Manifund) | Reflective Altruism by Unofficial Reflective Altruism Cross-Poster (16 Sep 2026 3:30 UTC; 22 points)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 16 Sep 2026 5:32 UTC
−2 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund
I might agree that maybe not much can be done in advance to prevent a leader of an EA organization like Manifund from going rogue, but now that he has gone rogue, what will you do?

Let’s say a leader of an EA organization stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone. What would you do then?