I don't think the board's side considered it a referendum. Just because the inappropriate behaviour was about safety doesn't mean that a high integrity board member who is not safety focused shouldn't fire them!

Amazing, probably my favourite April Fool's post of the day

Positive feedback: Great post!

Negative feedback: By taking any public actions you make it easier for people to give you feedback, a major tactical error (case in point)

Because Sam was engaging in a bunch of highly inappropriate behaviour for a CEO like lying to the board which is sufficient to justify the board firing him without need for more complex explanations. And this matches private gossip I've heard, and the board's public statements

Further, Adam d'Angelo is not, to my knowledge, an EA/AI safety person, but also voted to remove Sam and was a necessary vote, which is strong evidence there were more legit reasons

Oh, that handle is way better, and not what I took from the post at all!

Thanks a lot for the clarifications. If you agree with my tactical claims and are optimising for growth over a longer time frame than I agree, we probably don't disagree much on actions and the actions you describes and cautions seem very reasonable to me. To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough

I'm specifically claiming silicon valley AI, where I think it's a fair bit higher?

no one cares about EA except EAs and some obviously bad faith critics trying to tar you with guilt-by-association

I agree with your broad points, but this seems false to me. I think that lots of people seem to have negative associations with EA, especially given SBF and in the AI and tech space where eg it's widely (and imo falsely) believed that the openai coup was for EA reasons

EDIT: Trying to distill my argument: the effect of growth on movement health is unclear, probably positive, but I do not think "optimise for growth" is what I would come up with if I was solely optimising for the strength of the EA community, it seems like there's notably more important directions

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Thanks a lot for the detailed and transparent post. I'm a bit surprised by the focus on growth.

While I do agree that feeling like you're in a buzzing growing movement can be good for morale. I also think there are costs to morale from growth like lots of low context new people around, feeling like the movement is drifting away from what older participants care about, etc. Having a bunch of competent and excited new people join who do a lot of awesome stuff seems great for morale, but is significantly harder imo, and requires much more specific plans.

It's extremely not obvious to me that this is the best way to recover community morale and branding. In particular, under the hypothesis that a lot of damage was caused by FTX, it seems like a good amount of your effort should be going into things like addressing whatever substantial concerns were caused in community members by this, better governance, better trust, better post mortemming and transparency on what went wrong, etc - far better to rebuild better foundations of the existing movement and maintain the existing human capital than try to patch it up with growth. I could even see some interpreting the focus on growth as a deliberate lack of acknowledgement of past failures and mistakes. By all means have growth as one of your goals, but it was surprising to me to have it so prominent

(Note - this is my model of what would be best for resolving community issues and thus having an impact, not a request for what I personally most care about, the changes I suggest would not make a massive difference to me personally)

This seems like a great post to exist!