Summary
Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community’s relationship with FTX.” She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan’s experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant.
Explaining her decision to resign from EV’s board, Kagan wrote:
“I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed. (In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations after the fraud was revealed).
In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan’s concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record:
- Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF’s tenure on CEA’s board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors before he even founded Alameda.
- There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX’s collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation.
- EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures’ board changes as “institutional reform” when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking.
I don’t claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I’ve included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It’s quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX’s massive fraud). It’s also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I’m not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved.
But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from.
An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way. In Rob Bensinger’s words, “An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent.”
Kagan’s allegations, together with the issues I describe in the body of this post, suggest there is enough risk that some EA leaders made mistakes with respect to FTX “and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations” to warrant an independent post-mortem.
The warnings about SBF shared to the EA leaders Slack Channel provide an excellent example of the problems with the status quo:
- Nobody has publicly disputed the existence of the Slack warnings
- People might reasonably have delayed commenting until the the investigations conducted by Mintz and the UK Charity Commission were complete, but those were wrapped up in September and December of 2023 respectively
- Now 20 months after FTX went bankrupt no EA leader has publicly acknowledged the warnings other than to deny that they personally saw them.
- No EA leader has publicly acknowledged that with the benefit of hindsight, mistakes were made in how the warnings were handled
- The EA community (or at least the portion that isn’t part of the Slack channel) is completely clueless about who saw the warnings, what (if anything) was done about them, and what should be done to prevent similar mistakes going forward.
I struggle to see how anyone can have confidence that this same group of leaders has learned, and will help the broader community learn, the appropriate lessons from the FTX debacle.
Ben Todd was correct when he wrote:
“This has been the worst setback the community has ever faced… Now looking to effective altruism’s second decade, there’s time to address its problems, and build something much better. Indeed, now is probably going to be one of the best ever opportunities we’re going to have to do that.”
The amount of time that has transpired and the lack of progress that has occurred since this was written in March of 2023 represents both a lost opportunity and a clear illustration of why an independent investigation is sorely needed.
****************************************
Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters.
Even now, there hasn’t been a clear public communication from any EA leader, individual, or organization that simply spells out the facts around SBF’s relationship with the EA community and key EA organizations. There’s no dispute that meaningful relationships existed. But I find the lack of a proactive description or acknowledgement of those relationships troubling, and attempts to downplay or avoid discussing those relationships even more so.
Circa ~2017, SBF was one of 80k and CEA’s largest donors.
Before Alameda was even founded, SBF was a major donor to both 80k and CEA, a fact that clearly could have impacted how those organizational leaders may have viewed SBF at the time and subsequently. Yet the closest I’ve seen to this being proactively disclosed was Will mentioning in passing on Spencer’s podcast that while SBF was at Jane Street “he was also donating to organizations that promoted effective altruism. So I think that included 80,000 hours and Center for Effective Altruism.”[3] Given Will’s deep involvement with both organizations, and the scale of SBF’s giving to them, I would expect Will to be quite confident that SBF was a donor during the period in question.
In fact, at the time SBF was one of 80k’s four largest donors and had donated 10% (or more) of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence.[4] He was also one of CEA’s largest donors (during a period when Will was CEO of CEA), per Michael Lewis’ reporting.[5]
I don’t think 80k or CEA did anything wrong in taking SBF’s gifts at the time; it would have been bizarre if they hadn’t. But I find it worrisome that while a variety of 80k leaders have published reflections or otherwise opined on the FTX saga, 80k’s as an organization has a discussion of FTX on its “mistakes” page, none of these have mentioned SBF’s history as a major donor. And I have not seen any acknowledgement of his role as a major donor to CEA while at Jane Street, aside from Will’s brief and hedged mention on Spencer’s podcast quoted above.[6]
SBF served on CEA’s board.
The only place I’ve seen this fact acknowledged by an EA leader or organization has been a (literal) footnote as part of Will’s April 2024 public reflections. The footnote omits important context such as the duration of SBF’s tenure (Kerry Vaughan has tweeted that it extended from 2016 to 2019) or how SBF came to join the board (Vaughan suggests Will had a personal role).
SBF worked for CEA.
Immediately prior to founding Alameda, SBF was briefly (~2 months) employed as CEA’s Director of Development. I’ve never seen this fact acknowledged in any EA communications or reflections that have followed FTX’s collapse.
Multiple EA leaders and organizations were aware about allegations stemming from the Alameda dispute.
As one Forum commenter noted:
“Some of 80k's own staff were part of the early Alameda cohort who left and thought SBF was a bad actor. In an honest accounting of mistakes made, it seems strange not to acknowledge that 80k (and others) missed an important red flag in 2018, and didn't put any emphasis on it when talking to/promoting SBF.”
This comment was on Ben Todd’s post-FTX reflections post, which didn’t mention the 2018 warnings at all even when they were clearly relevant to the points he was making.[7] There is also no mention of warnings from the Alameda dispute in the discussion of FTX-related mistakes on CEA and 80k’s website (bizarrely, the FTX section of CEA’s mistakes page suggests that no FTX-related mistakes were made by CEA staff or CEA as an organization).[8]
Open questions:
- What were SBF, Caroline, Gary, and Nishad's formal and informal ties to the EA community?
- Which organizations and individuals were they major donors to? When did these donations take place, and how significant were they relative to the size of the organizations? Which organizations did they work at, or advise, and when?
- Are there other formal or informal ways that EA community coordinated with them or promoted them, individually or as a group?
- What other personal or financial ties between EA and FTX exist that might be relevant?
- Did any EA leaders vouch for SBF and/or Alameda to Alameda’s early funders (e.g. Jaan Tallinn and Luke Ding?)
It appears that when SBF left Jane Street to join CEA as Director of Development, he was already planning to start Alameda.[9] Was anyone in CEA leadership aware of those plans? Is there any evidence that the CEA role was “a ruse to avoid JS learning about true intentions?”
There are worrisome discrepancies between comments from EA leaders and credible media reports.
Just because a media outlet, even a credible one, reports something doesn’t make it a fact. However, there is a disturbing pattern of credible media reports that conflict with accounts offered by EA leaders, or that raise important questions that have gone unaddressed by EA leaders.
Will’s professed ignorance about inappropriate romantic relationships SBF had while at Alameda directly conflicts with Time’s reporting on the subject.
On the Clearer Thinking podcast, Will told Spencer that he was aware of only a single relationship SBF had with a professional colleague, and to Will’s knowledge it wasn’t a problematic one: “Midway through 2022,I heard about, like, one person at early Alameda that he dated… not even really an employee. But yeah, but someone at the same organization. I didn't hear like “and it was bad” or anything.”[10]
This directly contradicts Time’s reporting. Time specifically reported that in 2018 Will (among others) heard allegations about SBF’s problematic relationships on multiple occasions: “Sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy [and] had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates...”
Will’s characterization of what complaints he heard about SBF related to the Alameda dispute, and when he heard them, conflicts with Time’s reporting
On multiple occasions Will characterized the specific complaints he had heard about SBF from former Alameda employees as being about his business competence (e.g. Sam was a bad manager and too willing to take risk), but never mentioned hearing complaints about SBF’s ethics. Time, however, reports that significant ethical concerns were raised, and to Will specifically:
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.
Will has not (to my knowledge) claimed that he never heard concerns about SBF’s ethics, so I think he has probably been making true statements about what he did hear. That said, I consider those statements misleading (and certainly not forthcoming) if Will did in fact hear ethical complaints as Time alleges. And if Will’s first public reflections in 18 months after FTX collapsed included carefully crafted statements that were technically true but in practice misleading, I would consider that to be quite worrisome and potentially indicative of deeper problems.
In addition to the discrepancy about the substance of the complaints he heard, Will’s account of when he heard them also conflicts with Time. Will has claimed “I wasn’t involved in the dispute; I heard about it only afterwards” while Time reported that Will was warned about SBF by others at Alameda “in the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation [where co-founders tried to force SBF out].”
Nobody in EA leadership has publicly acknowledged the New Yorker’s report that many leaders received warnings that SBF was being investigated for criminal behavior four months before FTX’s collapse (other than to deny personally having seen said warnings)
The New Yorker reports that in July 2022 a private Slack group for EA leaders received a warning that someone in government was investigating SBF for a crime. The person who shared that also added “my point in sharing this is to raise awareness that a) in some circles SBF’s reputation is very bad b) in some circles SBF’s reputation is closely tied to EA, and c) there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse… it seems like a major PR vulnerability.” The New Yorker goes on to add “according to someone on the Slack, there was “surprisingly little engagement. Mostly ‘thanks for the flag.’ When I asked if it was possible that the leaders hadn’t seen the warning, the Slack participant told me, “I honestly can’t imagine it went unnoticed.”
A group of EA leaders received an extraordinarily prescient warning just four months prior to FTX’s collapse. Yet the EA community is completely in the dark about what, if anything, was done about it (for example, was CEA’s Communications team alerted about the potential “major PR vulnerability”?). The only mention of the Slack warning I’ve seen is Will’s response to an inquiry from the author of the New Yorker article: “With respect to specific Slack messages, I don’t recall seeing the warnings you described.”
EA leadership has not acknowledged an internal CEA investigation and/or board assessment conducted relating to Alameda, which both Time and Semafor have reported
Time reports that “Sometime [in 2019], the Centre for Effective Altruism did an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda, according to one person who was contacted during the investigation... it was conducted in part by MacAskill.” Time implies that SBF’s departure from CEA’s board in 2019 was related to this investigation; MacAskill’s account of SBF’s departure is quite vague (“In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.”)[11]
Semafor reported that in 2018, CEA “trustees considered allegations that Bankman-Fried had engaged in unethical business practices at his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, but ultimately took no action, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.”
I’ve seen no acknowledgement of either investigation’s existence or findings from MacAskill (or any other EA leaders), even though there have been natural opportunities to mention these investigations if they actually took place.[12] (It also seems plausible that Time and Semafor are referencing the same incident, and that one of these sources is wrong about the date). If one or more investigations did take place and if records of it remain, that paper trail could shed light on unresolved discrepancies (e.g. whether or not Will was aware of concerns about SBF’s inappropriate romantic relationships).
Open questions:
- What warning signs existed about FTX?
- Which if any EA leaders knew about them, when did they learn about them, and what did they do about them?
- How many EA leaders had serious concerns about SBF's morals/ethics and the implications for EA before the fraud, based on what, and what did they do about it?
- Who saw the July 2022 Slack group warning about SBF? Who was in the group, and who acknowledged (even in passing) having seen the warning? Did anyone do anything?
- Was there a CEA assessment into SBF? If so, when did it take place, and what did it look like?
- Was CEA’s Communications team ever made aware of the Alameda dispute, the Slack group warning (which included the specific warning “there’s some chance SBF’s reputation gets much, much worse”), or other concerns about SBF? If so, what (if anything) did they do in response to those warnings?
- To what extent were members of the EA community aware that FTX and Alameda were more entangled than they were publicly portrayed to be?
- How well known in the EA community were lavish aspects of SBF’s lifestyle? Were people who portrayed SBF as frugal to others aware of evidence he wasn’t frugal?
- What due diligence was done around FTX?
- What due diligence did Nick Beckstead (and/or others) conduct around the creation of the Future Fund?
- What due diligence did EV conduct before accepting donations from SBF/Future Fund? Did it follow the guidelines that were allegedly established in the wake of an earlier embarrassing instance of accepting donations from a crypto billionaire running an offshore exchange who subsequently ran into legal problems?
- Are EA leaders being forthcoming in their communications about EA and FTX after the collapse?
- Did SBF have inappropriate relationships that Will, Nick, or others knew about or heard allegations of?
- Were there ethical concerns about SBF after Alameda that Will, Nick, Holden or others knew about (and if so -- specifically what)?
- Does Tara Mac Aulay agree with how Will characterized (on the Clearer Thinking podcast) a heated conversation they had after the Alameda split? Time quotes Naia Bouscal as saying “Will basically threatened Tara”, but on Clearer Thinking Will said he spoke with Tara and “they don't think I was like intending to intimidate them or anything like that.” Tara’s perspective on this issue would obviously be valuable.
Did Will encourage, or help, SBF to get his initial internship at Jane Street as described in the Sequoia puff piece?[13]
EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading
As mentioned above, Rebecca Kagan has explicitly said she left the EV board due to concerns about how EV and EA leaders handled FTX both before and after the company collapsed. Yet in the Washington Post, Zach Robinson (head of CEA) framed board changes as part of “institutional reform” (“We have… reformed the governance of our organization, replacing leadership on the board and the staff.”) And on his podcast appearance with Spencer Greenberg, Will does not mention Kagan when talking about substantial turnover among EA leadership roles (including, but not limited to EV’s board) and instead suggests that to the extent FTX contributed to leadership turnover it was due to indirect causes like burnout.[14]
Oliver Habryka has also called into question Robinson’s claim that staff leadership changes were related to governance reform:
“I don't know of any staff that was let go as a result of FTX reflections (and I have asked about this repeatedly). Many people quit, but nobody was fired for any FTX things among leadership, and nobody who quit would have been fired. There is some small chance I am missing some supposed staff changes here, but claiming that CEA "replaced leadership on the staff" as a result of FTX seems straightforwardly false.”
The Mintz investigation is another instance where leadership has arguably overstated the degree of reform. Will told Spencer that “Effective Ventures commissioned a law firm to do an investigation into, you know, relationships between the charity and FTX.” It has been suggested that the law firm had a much narrower mandate, and was really only trying to establish that EV had no prior awareness of FTX’s criminal fraud. To the extent the law firm indeed had a very narrow mandate and Will suggests a much broader investigation, Will’s comments could be construed as misleading.
Open questions
- EV’s board has entirely turned over since FTX’s collapse. Did any other board members or senior staff share (in whole or in part) the concerns raised by Rebecca Kagan?
- What was the scope/mandate of the independent legal investigation that EV solicited? How much (if at all) did the scope extend beyond establishing whether anyone at EV was aware of SBF’s criminal fraud? Did the investigation uncover any mistakes made by EV and/or others in the EA community, and what improvements are suggested by those mistakes?
- Did the independent legal investigation lead to any concrete changes?
- What specific changes have EV, CEA, 80K, or other important organizations made to improve governance in the wake of FTX?
- Has anyone in an EA leadership position been fired or reprimanded for mistakes made relating to FTX?
- ^
When I make claims of the form “EA leaders/organizations did X” I mean it in the sense of “at least one EA leader/organization did X” not “all EA leaders/organizations did X”. I also want to be explicit that I think different EA leaders/organizations should be held to different standards, e.g. I think it is much more reasonable for Open Phil to hear concerns about SBF (another funder) and not act than it would be for CEA (where SBF was for a time a board member and employee) or 80k (which promoted SBF aggressively) to act the same way.
I also want to acknowledge that some EA leaders have shared valuable reflections and/or information with the broader community. In my opinion, posts by Nate Soares and Ben West stand out in this regard.
- ^
I’ve heard feedback from someone more knowledgeable about these issues than myself that the problems I’m describing aren’t the most serious ones.
- ^
(00:12:40)
- ^
80k’s website shows that SBF donated between £100,000 – 400,000 and did so “pre-2017”. This period was prior to Open Philanthropy starting to fund 80k, so SBF’s giving accounted for a significant amount of 80k’s budget. By May 2017, 80k’s website lists SBF as one of four donors who had given “over £100,000”. For context, the website at that time notes that as of December 2016 the organization “had received around £1,000,000 in donations” since its inception, meaning SBF had accounted for over 10% of the total revenue 80k had raised in its first six years of existence (and potentially much more).
- ^
From Going Infinite: “Three years into his career at Jane Street… he’d given away most of the money he’d made on the trading floor to three charities… Two of those charities, 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Oxford philosophers had started themselves.” Also: “Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors.” Note that between July 2016 and October 2017, Will was actually CEO at CEA with Tara serving as COO, so Sam was one of Will’s biggest donors as much or more than he was one of Tara’s biggest donors.
- ^
The lack of acknowledgement of SBF’s role as a donor is problematic because it helps obscure which lessons should be learned from this whole affair.
For example, 80K’s co-founder and long-time CEO Ben Todd wrote a ~6,000 word post on how he’s updated post-FTX, including a discussion of how biases might have clouded his judgment, and omitted any mention of how SBF was already a major donor by the time the Alameda allegations were first made. The vast majority of people would be biased in favor of someone who provided them significant financial support, that’s simply human nature. So omitting this relationship seems like either poor judgment (if the rationale was that disclosing the relationship wasn’t important) or evasive communication (if the rationale was trying to limit awareness of that relationship).
Similarly, Will MacAskill lists some of the lessons he’s drawn from FTX as “I think I’ve been too trusting of people” and “the key thing, in my view, is to pay attention to people’s local incentives when trying to predict their behaviour.” But he does not draw a connection between his own local incentives (favor the person donating large sums to your organization and promising to donate even more) and his own willingness to trust SBF.
- ^
One personal update Todd listed, but did not elaborate on, was: “If you have concerns about someone, don’t expect that the presence of people you’re not concerned around them will prevent dangerous action, especially if that person seems unusually strong willed.” It seems likely this was written with the Alameda dispute in mind, making this a natural and obvious place to mention it.
- ^
Some EA leaders were relatively quick to mention that they had heard about the Alameda dispute, including Holden Karnofsky and Nate Soares. Will MacAskill also acknowledged hearing about these concerns, though not until April 2024.
Karnofsky’s relatively timely recognition that there were red flags that with hindsight should have gotten more attention is the sort of common sense acknowledgment I would have hoped and expected from more EA leaders and organizations:
“I do think there were signs of things to be concerned about with respect to SBF and FTX. He ran this Alameda company, and there were a number of people who had worked there who’d left very upset with how things had gone down. And I did hear from some of them what had gone wrong and from their perspective what they were unhappy about.
There were things that made me say … I certainly see some reasons that one could be concerned, that one could imagine low-integrity behavior, less than honest and scrupulous behavior. At the same time, I just don’t think I knew anything that rose to the level of expecting what happened to happen or really being in a position to go around denouncing him.
Now it feels a little bit different in hindsight. And some of that does feel regrettable in hindsight.”
- ^
Zvi’s review of Going Infinite, which contains some of his personal experience with SBF and Jane Street, provides strong evidence of this:
Then a bit later, SBF decided to leave Jane Street, because he discovered the Japan and South Korea Bitcoin arbitrage trade, and he wanted the trade all to himself.
This is one place I will introduce myself into the story a tiny bit. When Sam decided to quit, the two of us went for a walk in the park. He said he was leaving to run or at least help run CEA, the Center for Effective Altruism.
Which was not a crazy fit. Sam was clearly deeply into EA and the thesis that he could be a major upgrade there seemed plausible, as did the possibility that from his perspective this could be high leverage. I was confused by his decision, Jane Street seemed like a better fit for him, but we strategized a bit about how good could be done and I wished him the best of luck.
As we all know now, he was, as with everyone else, lying right to my face.
[From Going Infinite:] During his final weeks at Jane Street, Sam traveled to Boston just to tell Gary about his plan to make a billion dollars trading crypto for effective altruistic causes. (1,423)
He admit it. He was not leaving to join CEA. He was leaving to pursue the Japan trade. And he had decided that I was not someone he wanted to bring in on that.
- ^
(00:47:26)
- ^
Will’s only public commentary on, or acknowledgement of, Sam’s time on the board is a footnote that reads in its entirety:
“Sam was on the board of CEA US at the time (early 2018). Around that time, after the dispute, I asked the investor that I was in touch with whether Sam should be removed from the board, and the investor said there was no need. A CEA employee (who wasn't connected to Alameda) brought up the idea that Sam should transition off the board, because he didn't help improve diversity of the board, didn't provide unique skills or experience, and that CEA now employed former Alameda employees who were unhappy with him. Over the course of the year that followed, Sam was also becoming busier and less available. In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.”
- ^
This comment (particularly the first footnote, which I’ve quoted in my previous footnote) would be a natural place to discuss a CEA investigation if one took place, as would the ~13:00-15:50 section of the Clearer Thinking podcast.
- ^
While I don’t consider the Sequoia piece particularly credible, its description of Will’s role in SBF’s internship at Jane Street warrants further investigation: “His course established, MacAskill gave SBF one last navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer.”
If the Sequoia profile is correct about this, Will’s description of this matter on the Sam Harris and Clearer Thinking podcasts appears misleading. On both podcasts, he omits any mention of his own role and instead frames SBF getting the internship as a demonstration of his “autonomy”.
Sam Harris (8:20): “He found the ideas [behind earning to give] compelling. We discussed it back and forth at the time. I next met him something like 6 months later at a vegan conference. We hadn’t been much in touch in that period. He told me he’d gotten an internship at Jane Street which is this quantitative trading fund. And that was very impressive I thought. He seemed just this very autonomous very morally motivated person.”
Clearer Thinking (11:50): “When I then met him six months again, six months later [after initially discussing earning to give], he had told me that ohh, he's actually got a internship at this trading firm Jane Street and that just seemed, you know, impressively autonomous to me.”
- ^
Will on leadership changes: “There's actually been a remarkable just refresh in EA leadership, at least in the sense of like the organizational leadership. Let's see, I mean the CEO's of Center for Effective Altruism, 80,000 hours, Open Philanthropy, Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks (not its CEO, but like, lead): all of those are different. The Board of Effective Ventures is either wholly different or will be, or are people who are like planning to move on. And so you know, I do think this isn't like directly caused by the FTX collapse and sometimes it's indirect where the collapse just caused people to like really burn out because there was just so much to do and it was like, you know, the work was just pretty grueling for quite a while. Or in other cases it's more just like, OK, let's each have kind of like more of a focus.” (01:34:45)
I've been contemplating writing a post about my side of the issue. I wasn't particularly close, but did get a chance to talk to some of the people involved.
Here's my rough take, at this point:
1. I don't think any EA group outside of FTX would take responsibility for having done a lot ($60k+ worth) of due-diligence and investigation of FTX. My impression is that OP considered this as not their job, and CEA was not at all in a position to do this (to biased, was getting funded by FTX). In general, I think that our community doesn't have strong measures in place to investigate funders. For example, I doubt that EA orgs have allocated $60k+ to investigate Dustin Moskovitz (and I imagine he might complain if others did!).
My overall impression was that this was just a large gap that the EA bureaucracy failed at. I similarly think that the "EA bureaucracy" is much weaker / less powerful than I think many imagine it being, and expect that there are several gaps like this. Note that OP/CEA/80k/etc are fairly limited organizations with specific agendas and areas of ownership.
2. I think there were some orange/red flags around, but that it would have taken some real investigation to figure out how dangerous FTX was. I have uncertainty in how difficult it would have been to notice that fraud or similar were happening (I previously assumed this would be near impossible, but am less sure now, after discussions with one EA in finance). I think that the evidence / flags around then were probably not enough to easily justify dramatically different actions at the time, without investigation - other than the potential action of doing a lengthy investigation - but again, that doing one would have been really tough, given the actors involved.
Note that actually pulling off a significant investigation, and then taking corresponding actions, against an actor as powerful as SBF, would be very tough and require a great deal of financial independence.
3. My impression is that being a board member at CEA was incredibly stressful/intense, in the following months after the FTX collapse. My quick guess is that most of the fallout from the board would have been things like, "I just don't want to have to deal with this anymore" rather than particular disagreements with the organizations. I didn't get the impression that Rebecca's viewpoints/criticisms were very common for other board members/execs, though I'd be curious to get their takes.
4. I think that OP / CEA board members haven't particularly focused on / cared about being open and transparent with the EA community. Some of the immediate reason here was that I assume lawyers recommended against speaking up then - but even without that, it's kind of telling how little discussion there has been in the last year or so.
I suggest reading Dustin Moskovitz's comments for some specific examples. Basically, I think that many people in authority (though to be honest, basically anyone who's not a major EA poster/commenter) find "posting to the EA forum and responding to comments" to be pretty taxing/intense, and don't do it much.
Remember that OP staff members are mainly accountable to their managers, not the EA community or others. CEA is mostly funded by OP, so is basically similarly accountable to high-level OP people. (accountable means, "being employed/paid by" here)
5. In terms of power, I think there's a pretty huge power gap between the funders and the rest of the EA community. I don't think that OP really regards themselves as responsible for or accountable to the EA community. My impression is that they fund EA efforts opportunistically, in situations where it seems to help both parties, but don't want to be seen as having any long-term obligations or such. We don't really have strong non-OP funding sources to fund things like "serious investigations into what happened." Personally, I find this situation highly frustrating, and think it gets under-appreciated.
6. My rough impression is that from the standpoint of OP / CEA leaders, there's not a great mystery around the FTX situation, and they also don't see it happening again. So I think there's not that much interest here into a deep investigation.
So, in summary, my take is less, "there was some conspiracy where a few organizations did malicious things," and more, "the EA bureaucracy has some significant weaknesses that were highlighted here."
Note: Some of my thinking on this comes from my time at the reform group. We spent some time coming up with a list of potential reform projects, including having better investigative abilities. My impression is that there generally hasn't been much concern/interest in this space.
I’ll respond to your other points in a separate comment later, but for the sake of clarity I want to give a dedicated response to your summary:
I very much agree that "the EA bureaucracy has some significant weaknesses that were highlighted here" is the right framing and takeaway.
My concern (which I believe is shared by other proponents of an independent investigation) is that these weaknesses have not, and are not on track to be, properly diagnosed and fixed.
I think plenty of EA leaders made mistakes with respect to FTX, but I don’t think there was any malicious conspiracy (except of course for the FTX/Alameda people who were directly involved in the fraud). For the most part, I think people behaved in line with their incentives (which is generally how we should expect people to act).
The problem is that we don’t have an understanding of how and why those incentives led to mistakes, and we haven’t changed the community’s incentive structures in a way that will prevent those same sorts of mistakes going forward. And I’m concerned that meaningful parts of EA leadership might be inhibiting that learning process in various ways. I'd feel better about the whole situation if there had been some public communications around specific things that have been to improve the efficacy of the EA bureaucracy, including a clear delineation of what things different parts of that bureaucracy are and are not responsible for.
I'm curious what your model is of the "community" - how would it significantly change on this issue?
My model is that the "community" doesn't really have much power directly, at this point. OP has power, and to the extent that they fund certain groups (at this point, when funding is so centralized), CEA and a few other groups have power.
I could see these specific organizations doing reforms, if/when they want to. I could also see some future where the "EA community" bands together to fund their own, independent, work. I'm not sure what other options there are.
Right now, my impression is that OP and these other top EA groups feel like they just have a lot going on, and aren't well positioned to do other significant reforms/changes.
I more or less agree with this. Though I think some of CEA’s power derives not only from having OP funding, but also the type of work CEA does (e.g. deciding who attends and talks at EAG). And other orgs and individuals have power related to reputation, quality of work, and ability to connect people with resources (money, jobs, etc).
Regarding how different parts of the community might be able to implement changes, it might be helpful to think about “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” reforms.
Top-down reforms would be initiated by the orgs/people that already have power. The problem, as you note, is that “OP and these other top EA groups feel like they just have a lot going on, and aren't well positioned to do other significant reforms/changes.” (There may also be an issue whereby people with power don’t like to give it up.) But some changes are already in the works, most notably the EV breakup. This creates lots of opportunities to fix past problems, e.g. around board composition since there will be a lot more boards in the post-breakup world. Examples I’d like to see include:
Bottom up reforms would be initiated by lay-EAs, the folks who make up the vast majority of the community. The obstacles to bottom up reforms are finding ways to fund them and coordinate them; almost by definition these people aren’t organized.
Examples I’d like to see include:
In December, Zach Robinson wrote: “EV also started working on structural improvements shortly after FTX’s collapse and continued to do so alongside the investigation. Over the past year, we have implemented structural governance and oversight improvements, including restructuring the way the two EV charities work together, updating and improving key corporate policies and procedures at both charities, increasing the rigor of donor due diligence, and staffing up the in-house legal departments. Nevertheless, good governance and oversight is not a goal that can ever be definitively ‘completed’, and we’ll continue to iterate and improve. We plan to open source those improvements where feasible so the whole EA ecosystem can learn from EV’s challenges and benefit from the work we’ve done.”
Open sourcing these improvements would be terrific, though to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t actually happened yet, which is disappointing. Though this stuff has been shared and I've just missed it.
Can you say more about why the distinction between "Open Philanthropy" and "Open Philanthropy GCRCB team" matters? What subset of the community does this GCRCB team align with vs not? I've never heard this before
In 2023, 80% of CEA’s budget came from OP’s GCRCB team. This creates an obvious incentive for CEA to prioritize the stuff the GCRCB team prioritizes.
As its name suggests, the GCRCB team has an overt focus on Global Catastrophic Risks. Here’s how OP’s website describes this team:
CEA has also received a much smaller amount of funding from OP’s “Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)” team. From what I can tell, the GHW team basically focuses on meta charities doing global poverty type and animal welfare work (often via fundraising for effective charities in those fields). The OP website notes:
There is an enormous difference between these teams in terms of their historical and ongoing impact on EA funding and incentives. The GCRCB team has granted over $400 million since 2016, including over $70 million to CEA and over $25 million to 80k. Compare that to the GHW which launched “in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
So basically there’s been a ton of funding for a long time for EA community building that prioritizes AI/Bio/other GCR work, and a vastly smaller amount of funding that only became available recently for EA community building that uses a global poverty/animal welfare lens. And, as your question suggests, this dynamic is not at all well understood.
I think the correct interpretation of this is that OP GHW doesn’t think general community building for its cause areas is cost effective, which seems quite plausible to me. [Edit: note I'm saying community-building in general, not just the EA community specifically - so under this view, the skewing of the EA community is less relevant. My baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn't an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.].
The risk, I think, is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where:
Using this as a general term for AI x-risk, longtermism, etc/
They also have a much smaller budget (as indicated by total spend per year).
You can see a direct comparison of total funding in this post I wrote: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnTQaLpBfy2znG5vm/the-flow-of-funding-in-ea-movement-building#Overall_picture
I agree it’s likely they have a smaller budget, but equating budget with total spend per year (rather than saying that one is an indication of the other) is slightly begging the question - any gap between the two may reflect relevant CEAs.
Fair point, I couldn't find a link to point to the budget, but:
"We launched this program in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million."
From their website - https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/ea-global-health-and-wellbeing/
I don't think they had dramatically more money in 2023, and (without checking the numbers again to save time) I am pretty sure they mostly maxed out their budget both years.
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.
A name change would be a good start.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn't use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn't speak for the medical community as a whole.
> funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA
I wouldn't be surprised if a similar thing occured - those orgs/programs decide that it isn't that cost-effective to do GHW community-building. I could see it going another way, but my baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn't an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.
I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.
It seems that everyone in EA / EA-adjacent circles who is not OP or EVF needs to be wary to some extent. If no one is on the lookout for these sorts of situations and no one is going to be indemnifying many EA individuals and entities, then other people/entities need to clearly understand that and take appropriate action to protect their own interests in the future.
All this sounds like a step back from a higher-trust environment in certain respects. For instance, it's certainly appropriate for OP to "fund EA efforts opportunistically, in situations where it seems to help both parties, [without wanting] to be seen as having any long-term obligations or such." That seems more like a transactional relationship. People in transactional relationships do not generally defer to their counterpart(ies) concerning the common good, count on them to be looking out for their own needs, and so on.
It's possible that an "opportunistic[]" approach that is not "responsible for . . . . the EA community" is the right strategy for OP to pursue. But there are costs to efficiency, personal/smaller-institutional risk tolerance, morale, and so forth to a more transactional / opportunistic approach to the EA community.
Agreed!
I also imagine that these groups would largely agree. Like, if one were to ask OP/EVF, "do you think the EA community should be well-off to develop infrastructure so it doesn't have to rely that much on you two", I could imagine them being quite positive about this.
(That said, I imagine they might be less enthusiastic about certain actual implementations of this, especially ones that might get in the way of their other plans.)
I’m very sympathetic to the idea that OP is not responsible for anything in this case. But CEA/EV should have done at least the due diligence that fit their official policies developed in the aftermath of Ben Delo affair. I think it’s reasonable for the community to ask whether or not that actually happened. Also, multiple media outlets have reported that CEA did do an investigation after the Alameda dispute. So it would be nice to know if that actually happened and what it found.
I don’t think the comparison about investigating Dustin is particularly apt, as he didn’t have all the complaints/red flags that SBF did. CEA received credible warnings from multiple sources about a CEA board member, and I’d like to think that warrants some sort of action. Which raises another question: if CEA received credible serious concerns about a current board member, what sort of response would CEA’s current policies dictate?
Re: gaps, yes, there are lots of gaps, and the FTX affair exposed some of them. Designing organizational and governance structures that will fix those gaps should be a priority, but I haven’t seen credible evidence that this is happening. So my default assumption is that these gaps will continue to cause problems.
I very much agree that we shouldn’t be holding EA leaders/orgs/community to a standard of “we should have known FTX was a huge fraud”. I mentioned this in my post, but want to reiterate it here. I feel like this is point where discussions about EA/FTX often get derailed. I don’t believe the people calling for an independent investigation are doing so because they think EA knew/should have known that FTX was a fraud; most of us have said that explicitly.
That said, given what was known at the time, I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that it would have been smart to do some things differently on the margin, e.g. 80k putting SBF on less on a pedestal. A post-mortem could help identify those things and provide insights on how to do better going forward.
This seems like a very important issue. I think one big problem is that other board members/execs are disincentivized to voice concerns they might have, and this is one of the things an independent investigation could help with. Learning that several, or none of, the other board members had concerns similar to Rebecca’s would be very informative, and an investigation could share that sort of finding publicly without compromising any individual’s privacy.
Pretty much agree with everything you wrote here. Though I want to emphasize that I think this is a pretty awful outcome, and could be improved with better governance choices such as more community representation, and less OP representation, on CEA’s board.
If OP doesn’t want to be accountable to the EA community, I think that’s suboptimal though their prerogative. But if CEA is going to take responsibility for community functions (e.g. community health, running effectivealtruism.org, etc.) there should be accountability mechanisms in place.
I also want to flag that an independent investigation would be a way for people in authority to get their ideas (at least on this topic) out in a less taxing and/or less publicly identifiable way than forum posting/commenting.
Very well put!
I think Zvi put it well: “a lot of top EA leaders ‘think we know what happened.’ Well, if they know, then they should tell us, because I do not know. I mean, I can guess, but they are not going to like my guess. There is the claim that none of this is about protecting EA’s reputation, you can decide whether that claim is credible.”
What was EV’s official policy post-Ben Delo?
As of February 2021:
I honestly doubt that this process would have, or should have, flagged anything about SBF. But I can imagine it helping in other cases, and I think it’s important for CEA to actually be following its stated procedures.
I hope that the “overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors” that was put together post-Delo in 2021 was well designed. But it’s also worth noting Zach has also discussed “increasing the rigor of donor due diligence” in 2023. Maybe the 2023 improvements took the process from good to great. Maybe they suggest that the 2021 policies weren’t very good. It’d be great for the new and improved policy, and how it differs from the previous policy, to be shared (as Zach has suggested it will be) so other orgs can leverage it and to help the entire community understand what specific improvements have been made post-FTX.
And -- if we are talking about 2024 -- there's another reason it doesn't seem like a great comparison to me. Researching catastrophic risks (to one's movement or otherwise) is generally only compelling to the extent that you can mitigate the likelihood and/or effect of those risks. Given the predominance of a single funder, investigating certain risks posed by that funder may not lead to actionable information to reduce risk no matter what the facts are.[1] At some level of vulnerability, the risk becomes akin to the risk of a massive life-extinguishing asteroid crashing into Earth in the next week; I'm just as dead if I know about it a week in advance rather than seconds in advance.
Of course, certain ethical duties would still exist.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about. The more likely Dustin is to turn out to be perpetrating a fraud (which I think is very unlikely!) the more the marginal person should be earning to give. And the more projects should be taking approaches that conserve runway at the cost of making slower progress toward their goals.
Agree -- I don't think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here.
To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years' clawback of prior OP grants, and it's not clear that getting months to years' worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!)
Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn't likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.
Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible.
This will be unpopular here, but these calls for public flagellation of "EA leaders" amounts to nothing more than scapegoating and trying to direct general disappointment to someone, even though it's not the right people.
Yes it's obviously interesting to speculate about who knew what, but no amount of "institutional reform" can change these things.
Also, this post has quite a conspiratorial tone which strikes me as unhelpful and not particularly truth seeking.
I think the principal challenge for an independent investigation is getting folks with useful information to disclose it, given these people will usually (to some kind and degree) also have 'exposure' to the FTX scandal themselves.
If I was such a person I would expect working with the investigation would be unpleasant, perhaps embarrassing, plausibly acrimonious, and potentially disastrous for my reputation. What's in it for me?
I agree this would be a big challenge. A few thoughts…
It could be better for the world, and you might care about that.
It could be that you expect enough other people will talk to them that it's good for them to hear your side of the story too.
It could be that you expect it would be bad for your reputation to refuse to talk to them (or to give details which are non-concordant with the picture they're building from talking to other people).
The second and third possible motivations seem to have a Prisoner's Dilemma element to them. They would motivate people to talk if and only if similarly situated individuals were talking. The inability to timely determine whether others have defected from the best-for-prisoners-collectively state is pretty important to the Dilemma.
Even worse, if other prisoners strongly oppose cooperation, they may find a way to collectively punish those who do defect. The original Dilemma only gives the jailers the ability to assign punishment based on defection/non-defection. None of that is meant to suggest that EA insiders would necessarily punish cooperators -- I have no way of knowing that. But I expect most people would consider the possibility of who might be displeased with their cooperation.
Some Prisoners Dilemma dynamics are at play here, but there are some important differences (at least from the standard PD setup).
I think it works fairly well for innocence if one does not trust the investigators/cops. You might believe, for instance, that they are under pressure to find a scapegoat and would (consciously or otherwise) use statements toward an incorrect or overblown conclusion.
True, but to the extent those people have the goods, motivation to disclose, and no fear of retaliation, it is not clear what would be stopping them from going to the media or even self-publishing. They might need to coordinate amongst themselves, but anyone with a sizable chunk of the goods likely knows who else has them.
Right -- for these types of private investigations to be successful, there often has to be some sort of prod that convinces people to cooperate when they would not choose to do so if given a unpressured choice. For example, your employer might threaten to fire you, or the sports league might sanction your team or university for non-cooperation. A few EtGers might be able to front the money for a good investigation, but only the powers-that-be can supply the necessary prod.
I think in the eyes of many (including substantial fraction of the public) participating in such an investigation will be seen as importantly heroic. I think it's wrong to assume that people cannot reward and understand the difficulty of such a choice, and cannot assign respect appropriately.
I think this would significantly depend on what the investigation ultimately showed. It would probably be hard for the average EA reader (much less a member of the general public) to reliably estimate how much personal stress, risk, cost, etc. a cooperator bore, and thus how much respect we should assign for their choice. I think many people would use the outcome as a rough proxy. If the investigation revealed only fairly-well-known structural problems plus bad judgment by a few individuals, then people may not appreciate how much of a burden it was to work with a thorough, broad-scope investigation that went down many paths that ultimately ended up being unfruitful.
If it's better for the extended EA community and our efforts to do good, it's plausibly better for the world, which I assume such a person would care about. That’s what would be in it for them.
Maybe they don't think the balance of benefits and risks/downsides and costs (including opportunity costs) is favourable, though.
This is clearly an outstanding issue for a non-negligible proportion of the community. It doesn't matter if some people consider the issue closed, or the investigation superfluous; this investigation would bring that closure to the rest of EA. Everyone here should be interested in the unity that would come from this.
Indeed. And if EA leaders do believe that the issue is closed or that an investigation would be superfluous (which seems to be a common, if not the default, leadership position), they should make the case for that position explicitly and publicly. As things stand, the clearest articulation I’ve seen as to why there hasn’t been an independent investigation comes from Rob Bensinger’s account of what an unidentified “EA who was involved in EA’s response to the FTX implosion” told him based on information that dated from ~April 2023 and “might be out of date”.
I think how much closure the investigation brings will depend significantly on what it includes and what it concludes, and I think different people will have different standards about what will satisfy them. While I am in favour of more investigation, I would guess that realistically feasible investigations will not be able to close all relevant questions or really settle everything relevant in the collective mind of the community.
I don’t see why Effective Altruism is responsible for not detecting fraud at a company before the market writ large did. If those warnings had been so clear and obvious, I would have suggested you invest in FTX’s competitors and bring their malfeasance to light. Otherwise, it is carping after the fact.
Just to clarify, I agree that EA should not have been expected to detect or predict FTX’s fraud, and explicitly stated that[1]. The point of my post is that other mistakes were likely made, we should be trying to learn from those mistakes, and there are worrisome indications that EA leadership is not interested in that learning process and may actually be inhibiting it.
“I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX’s massive fraud.”
I don't think 'responsible' is the right word, but the consequences to the effective altruism project of not catching on earlier were enormous, far larger than to other economic actors exposed to FTX. And I do think we ought to have realized how unusual our situation was with respect to FTX.
I'm confused about how to relate to speaking about these issues. I feel like I can speak to several but not all of the questions you raise (as well as some things you don't directly ask about). I'm not sure there's anything too surprising there, but I'd I feel generically good about the EA community having more information.
But -- this is a topic which invites drama, in a way that I fear is sometimes disproportionate. And while I'm okay (to a fault) sharing information which invites drama for me personally, I'd feel bad about potentially stirring it up for other people.
That makes me hesitant. And I'm not sure how much my speaking would really help (of course I can't speak with anything like the authority of an external investigation). So my default is not to speak, at least yet (maybe in another year or two?).
Open to hearing arguments or opinions that that's the wrong meta-level orientation. (An additional complication is that some-but-not-all of the information I have came via my role on the board of EV, which makes me think it's not properly my information to choose whether to share. But this can be regarded as a choice about the information which does feel like it's mine to choose what to do with.)
This seems like the wrong meta-level orientation to me. A meta-level orientation that seems better to me is something like "Truth and transparency have strong global benefits, but often don't happen enough because they're locally aversive. So assume that sharing information is useful even when you're not concretely sure how it'll help, and assume by default that power structures (including boards, social networks, etc) are creating negative externalities insofar as they erect barriers to you sharing information".
The specific tradeoff between causing drama and sharing useful information will of course be situation-dependent, but in this situation the magnitude of the issues involved feels like it should significantly outweigh concerns about "stirring up drama", at least if you make attempts to avoid phrasing the information in particularly-provocative or careless ways.
Thanks, this felt clarifying (and an important general point).
I think I'm now at "Well I'd maybe rather share my information with an investigator who would take responsibility for working out what's worth sharing publicly and what's extraneous detail; but absent that, speaking seems preferable to not-speaking. So I'll wait a little to see whether the momentum in this thread turns into anything, but if it's looking like not I'll probably just share something."
One way you could engage would be to share your thoughts on when, generally speaking, you think an independent investigation would be warranted. You wouldn’t have to go into any specific details about this particular incident, you could discuss this in terms of high level principles and considerations that you think should guide the decision.
Happy to share some thoughts (and not thereby signalling that I plan not to say more about the object-level):
In this case:
I basically agree with this take. I think an investigation conducted from within the EA community (by someone(s) with a bit of distance from FTX) makes a lot more sense than Mintz v2. Ideally, the questions this investigation would seek to answer would be laid out and published ahead of time. Would also be good to pre-publish the principles that would determine what information would be redacted or kept confidential from public communication around findings.
If we had one or more ombudspeople or explicit community representation on the CEA board (which I really wish we did), this would be a great role for them. As things stand, my low-conviction take is that this would be a reasonable thing for the new non-OP connected EV board members to take on, or perhaps the community health team. I have some reservations about having CEA involved in this, but also give a lot of weight to Rebecca saying "CEA is a logical place to house" an investigation.
Personally, I’d consider Rethink Priorities to be kind of the default choice to do an investigation; I’ve seen others toss their name around too. It’d be nice to have some process for generating other candidates (e.g. community health coming up with a few) and then some method of finding which of the options had the most community buy-in (e.g. ranked choice voting among everyone who has filled out the EA survey sometime in the last three years; I don’t think this would be an ideal methodology but it’s at least loosely in the ballpark of ways of finding an investigator that the community would find credible).
Not sure I buy this, on principle -- surely the investigation should have remit to add questions as it goes if they're warranted by information it's turned up? Maybe if the questions for this purpose are more broad principles than specific factual ones it would make sense to me.
This checks out to me.
Have you directly asked these people if they're interested (in the headhunting task)? It's sort of a lot to just put something like this on someone's plate (and it doesn't feel to me like a-thing-they've-implicitly-signed-up-for-by-taking-their-role).
In general my instinct would be more like "work out who feels motivated to have an investigation happen, and then get one (or more) of them to take responsibility for the headhunting".
Yeah, absolutely. What I had in mind when I wrote this was this excerpt from an outstanding comment from Jason on the Mintz investigation; I’d hope these ideas could help inform the structure of a future investigation:
I have not. While nobody in EA leadership has weighed in on this explicitly, the general vibe I get is “we don’t need an investigation, and in any case it’d be hard to conduct and we’d need to fund it somehow.” So I’m focusing on arguing the need for an investigation, because without that the other points are moot. And my assumption is that if we build sufficient consensus on the need for an investigation, we could sort out the other issues. If leaders think an investigation is warranted but the logistical problems are insurmountable, they should make that case and then we can get to work on seeing if we can actually solve those logistical problems.
Hmm, I think perhaps I have different takes on the basic mechanisms that make sense here?
Here's a scattershot of background takes:
... and then given those, my position is that if you want it to happen, the right step is less like "try to create a consensus that it should happen" and more like "try to find/make an alliance of people who want it, and then make sure there's someone taking responsibility for the specific unblocking steps". (I guess this view is not very much about the investigation, and more like my generic take on how to make things happen.)
Honestly my view of how important it is that the whole project happen will also be somewhat mediated by whether it can find a decently strong lead and can attract some moderate amount of funding. Since these would be indicative of "people really want answers", and I think the whole project is more valuable if that demand exists.
Agreed. This comment won’t be about FTX. Just translating this further, we need stronger norms for being careful about the individuals who have acted in a way that should be construed as cautionary for the community.
I generally wish for community builders and generally, EA leadership to at least be more cautious of promoting or continuously placing people who have caused harm/have made or done lots of orange/red flags in front-facing roles.
Executive summary: The post argues that EA leadership has not been sufficiently transparent about their relationships with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and FTX, and calls for an independent investigation into how EA leaders handled the situation before and after FTX's collapse.
Key points:
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