I’m an artist, writer, and human being.
To be a little more precise: I make video games, edit Wikipedia, and write here and on LessWrong!
I’m an artist, writer, and human being.
To be a little more precise: I make video games, edit Wikipedia, and write here and on LessWrong!
Thanks for this; it’s a nicely compact summary of a really messy situation that I can quickly share if necessary.
This is a fair critique imo, I’m updating against SBF using EA for sociopathic reasons. That being said, only slightly updating towards him using EA ideology as his main motivator to commit fraud, as that still may very well not be the case.
my best guess is that more time delving into specific grants will only rarely actually change the final funding decision in practice
Has anyone actually tested this? It might be worthwhile to record your initial impressions on a set number of grants, then deliberately spend x amount of time researching them further, and calculating the ratio of how often further research makes you change your mind.
This is really interesting—thanks for sharing!
Quick note that I misread “refuges” as “refugees,” and got really confused. In case anyone else made the same mistake, this post is talking about bunkers, not immigrants ;)
Do we know how much impact Sam Bankman-Fried‘s personal philosophy is going to have on FTX’s grant-making choices? This is a lot of financial power for a single organization to have, so I expect the makeup of the core team to have an outsized effect on the rest of the movement.
+1 on this. It is painfully clear that we need to radically improve our practices relating to due diligence moving forward.
My brother was recently very freaked out when I asked him to pose a set of questions that he thinks an AI wouldn’t be able to answer, and GPT-3 gave excellent-sounding responses to his prompts.
I would strongly support doing this—I have strong roots in the artistic world, and there are many extremely talented artists online that I think could potentially be of value to EA.
How bad is it to fund someone untrustworthy? Obviously if they take the money and run, that would be a total loss, but I doubt that’s a particularly common occurrence (you can only do it once, and would completely shatter social reputation, so even unethical people don’t tend to do that). A more common failure mode would seem to be apathy, where once funded not much gets done, because the person doesn’t really care about the problem. However, if something gets done instead of nothing at all, then that would probably be (a fairly weak) net positive. The reason why that’s normally negative is due to that money then not being used in a more cost-effective manner, but if our primary problem is spending enough money in the first place, that may not be much of an issue at all.
+1 from me.
I was talking about the whole situation with my parents, and they mentioned that their local synagogue experienced a very similar catastrophe, with the community’s largest funder turning out to be a con-man. Everybody impacted had a lot of soul-searching to do, but ultimately in retrospect, there was really nothing they could or should have done differently—it was a black-swan event that hasn’t repeated in the quarter of a century or so since it happened, and there were no obvious red flags until it was too late. Yes, we can always find details to agonize over, but ultimately, I doubt it will be very productive to change our whole modus operandi to prevent this particular black swan event from repeating (with a few notable exceptions).