Comments
Jeff - this is a useful perspective, and I agree with some of it, but I think it's still loading a bit too much guilt onto EA people and organizations for being duped and betrayed by a major donor.
EAs might have put a little bit too much epistemic trust in subject matter experts regarding SBF and FTX -- but how can we do otherwise, practically speaking?
In this case, I think there was a tacit, probably largely unconscious trust that if major VCs, investors, politicians, and journalists trusted SBF, then we can probably trust him too. This was not just a matter of large VC firms vetting SBF and giving him their seal of approval through massive investments (flawed and rushed though their vetting may have been.)
It's also a matter of ordinary crypto investors, influencers, and journalists largely (though not uniformly) thinking FTX was OK, and trusting him with billions of dollars of their money, in an industry that is actually quite skeptical a lot of the time. And major politicians, political parties, and PACs who accepted millions in donations trusting that SBD's reputation would not suffer such a colossal downturn that they would be implicated. And journalists from leading national publications doing their own forms of due diligence and investigative journalism on their interview subjects.
So, we have a collective failure of at least four industries outside EA -- venture capital, crypto experts, political fund-raisers, and mainstream journalists -- missing most of the alleged, post-hoc, red flags about SBF. The main difference between EA and those other four industries is that I see us doing a lot of healthy, open-minded, constructive, critical dialogue about what we could have done differently, and I don't see the other four industries doing much -- or any -- of that.
Let's consider an analogous situation in cause-area science rather than donor finance. Suppose EAs read some expert scientific literature about a potential cause area -- whether global catastrophic biological risks, nuclear containment, deworming efficacy, direct cash transfers, geoengineering, or any other domain. Suppose we convince each other, and donors, to spend billions on a particular cause area based on expert consensus about what will work to reduce suffering or risk. And then suppose that some of the key research that we used to recommend that cause area turns out to have been based on false data fabricated by a powerful sociopathic scientist and their lab -- but the data were published in major journals, peer-reviewed by leading scientists, cited by hundreds of other experts, informed public policy, etc.
How much culpability would EA have in that situation? Should we have done our own peer review of the key evidence in the cause area? Should we have asked the key science labs for their original data? Should we have hired subject matter experts to do some forensic analysis of the peer-reviewed papers? That seems impractical. At a certain point, we just have to trust the peer-review process -- whether in science, or in finance, politics, and journalism -- with the grim understanding that we will sometimes be fooled and betrayed.
The major disanalogy here would be if the key sociopathic scientist who faked the data was personally known to the leaders of a movement for many years, and was directly involved in the community. But even there, I don't think we should be too self-castigating. I have known several behavioral scientists more-or-less well, over the years, who turned out to be very bad actors who faked data, but who were widely trusted in their fields, who didn't raise any big red flags, and who left all of their colleagues scratching their heads afterwards, asking 'How on Earth did I miss the fact that this was a really shady researcher?' The answer usually turns out to be, the disgraced researcher allocated most of the time that other researchers would have put into collecting real data, into covering their tracks and duping their colleagues, and they were just very good at being deceptive and manipulative.
Science relies on trust, so it's relatively vulnerable to intentionally bad, deceptive actors. EA also relies on trust in subject matter experts, so we're also relatively vulnerable to bad actors. But unless we want to replicate every due diligence process, every vetting process, every political 'opposition research' process, every peer review process, every investigative journalism process, then we will remain vulnerable to the occasional error -- and sometimes those errors will be very big and very harmful.
That might just be the price of admission when trying to do evidence-based good using finances from donors.
Of course, there are lots of ways we could do better in the future, especially in doing somewhat deeper dives into key donors, the integrity of key organizations and leaders, and the epistemics around key cause areas. I'm just cautioning against over-correcting in the direction of distrust and paranoia.
Epistemic status of this comment: I'm slightly steel-manning a potential counter-argument against Jeff's original post, and I think I'm mostly right, but I could easily be persuaded otherwise.
In addition to having a lot more on the line, other reasons to expect better of ourselves:
Because of the second point, many professional investors do surprisingly little vetting. For example, SoftBank is pretty widely reputed to be "dumb money;" IIRC they shook hands on huge investments in Uber and WeWork on the basis of a single meeting, and their flagship Vision Fund lost 8% (~$8b) this past quarter alone. I don't know about OTPP but I imagine they could be similarly diligence-light given their relatively short history as a venture investor. Sequoia is less famously dumb than those two, but still may not have done much vetting if FTX was perceived to be a "hot" deal with lots of time pressure.
Very much agree. Some EAs knew SBF for almost a decade and plausibly interacted with him for hundreds of hours (including in non-professional settings which are usually more revealing of someone's character and personality).
The obvious default conclusion here is that there is nothing inherent in his personality that made him more likely to do this, compared to other EAs.
Other EAs haven't gambled billions of customer funds simply because they didn't have billions of customer funds. If they had been in SBF's situation they may have fallen to the temptation too.
Needless to say, I think what SBF did was unquestionably wrong and condemn it. I'm simply also pessimistic enough to think that I myself, and other regularly-adjusted-humans around me, would also fall to such temptations. Somehow, I really doubt that 100% of the people condemning SBF would have resisted the temptation if they were put into the same situation.
Strongly agree with these points and think the first is what makes the overwhelming difference on why EA should have done better. Multiple people allege (both publicly on the forum and people who have told me in confidence) to have told EA leadership that SBF was doing thinks that strongly break with EA values since the Alameda situation of 2018.
This doesn't imply we should know about any particular illegal activity SBF might have been undertaking, but I would expect SBF to not have been so promoted throughout the past couple of years. This is especially surprising given my perception of EA's high risk-aversion to doing marketing of the movement over the years.
Even if we put everything else to the side, I was shocked to find out that SBF had a $40m property in the Bahamas and felt very naive to have believed the much more popular stories that he merely drove and old car and slept on a beanbag in front of his desk. Surely many other EAs who had visited the Bahamas had been to his penthouse suite or had caught wind of it and could have corrected the mistaken image somehow or posed it as a risk to the movement.