Why you’re not hearing as much from EA orgs as you’d like

It's been a few more days, and I do want to express frustration with the risk-aversion and guardedness I have experienced from CEA and other EA organizations in this time. I think this is a crucial time to be open, and to stop playing dumb PR games that are, in my current tentative assessment of the situation, one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place. 

This feels like you characterising the current situation to suit your agenda.

If you characterise it as "PR games," then you get to say that current behaviour is (many have claimed) "one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place."

However, if you characterise it as "risk-aversion and guardedness," then you should probably say that current behaviour is a healthy update away from the risky, move-fast-and-break-things behaviour that is  (many have claimed) one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place?

Could this not just be a case of "CEA and other EA organizations" deciding that when they find themselves wrapped up in hugely consequential situations, they should wait "weeks or months" rather than days to make big, non-urgent decisions like how to write about the situation? Are they damned if they're risk-averse and damned if they're not?

And yes I don't think it's urgent. I don't quite understand why so many people are demanding answers now. I can understand grantees facing urgent financial/career decisions wanting info relating to that now, but not people who just want to know details of what happened, what people think about that, how they're planning to change things etc.

I kind of get the impression that you just want everyone to say what they think all of the time, putting negligible weight on whether people are in situations where adversaries are very likely to severely punish mistakes and to publish quotes out of context in places where corrections can't be made (at least not fast enough)...with the exception of interviews with journalists, although I don't quite see why that scenario gets special treatment.

I wouldn't be surprised by the occasional rationalist placing such a huge value on immediately saying publicly whatever you think you know about anything almost regardless of the situation. But I've been very surprised by the amount of support you're getting and I'm still struggling to understand why.

I'm very sympathetic and would like to figure out how to say more.

(This account is negative toward your aims but positive of you personally. It seems good to state things like this when using anonymous accounts).

I think this is a crucial time to be open, and to stop playing dumb PR games that are, in my current tentative assessment of the situation, one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place.

I don't want to cooperate with a lot of the PR-focused storytelling...We will not figure out a new direction for EA behind closed doors.

Explore with us what wrong things happened. Figure out how we should change and what lessons we should learn.

We can address this by object-level discussion. You said this.

I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all unconfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.

I think it is very unlikely that you knew of the level of outright theft of customer funds or observed actual criminality.

My guess is that you probably observed:

• Accounts of the chaotic organization and operational structure 
• Accounts by Tara and others who left SBF on terrible terms in the past
• Accounts of dubious or predatory projects in cryptocurrency (SRM, MAPS), liquidation protected trading accounts, self dealing between Alameda and FTX

Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?

Thanks for posting this! Strong upvote. I made a similar point a couple of days ago in anticipation of continued silence.

I think this is pretty well said and I too am worried that what I'm seeing is a certain amount of turning inward and hastily figuring out "some kind of consolidated narrative" behind closed doors.

A major consideration is that no one wants to enter a space (the EA forum) where the LW/MIRI community easily dominates voting and sentiment. The EA forum is widely believed to be now transformed into an arena to suit your agenda.

Exactly. Let's take some time to reflect and update slowly as needed. First I didn't want to engage at all and saw this as a distraction. Now I'm much more up to date and see it as an opportunity to learn useful lessons about EA and myself as a person so deeply connected with this movement.

Bit of a wake up call to focus on priorities and not get distracted by the drama, while taking seriously what is happening and keeping accountability within the movement. It's pretty clear something will need to change. Unclear what exactly it will be. My guess that it will be largely around things that are pretty obvious to people who are involved in the community for some time. Such as not being open enough to outside perspective. Not being careful with spending. Not that much resources flowing outside of the movement to bring talented people in. Not that much effort to bring outside sources of funding in (because of easy money we have access to).

This kind of creates a bubble where everyone can think how good they are without engaging sufficiently with others. Anyway maybe that's not the lesson learned, but just my experience that I now can justify by FTX thingy happening. Still it feels like it gives EAs a permission to question the movement honestly point out core issues they are seeing without feeling like an outcast.

Things are bad now is the official storyline so we can complain without worries, and that will hopefully lead to fixing things. I guess that's what identity crisis is about. And this is very interesting time to be an EA. Because we will know how it was before that FTX thing happened, haha.

I believe the shift will be towards being more professional, humble and responsible. This change might help us to be more friendly and reasonable towards people who were not attracted by the EA movement even though they resonate with core ideas (senior professionals, business people, females, environment or social activists, engaged scientists, etc.)

For me this definitely says I should open myself to outside perspective even more than I was doing before. By this I mean mainly perspectives of people who are in very different bubbles from mine. If they are not trusting EA, my reaction should be that of curiosity. It's much more reasonable reaction to be sceptical than to be sold right away, unless you are in very specific circumstances looking for meaning driven intellectual community.

Anyway I think EAs are wonderful people and that should probably stay the way it is. We are already very diverse as far as unified communities go. But still a long way to go. My observation of the trend is that EA is becoming more diverse every year. Which is a very good sign and I'd say everyone wants this. While keeping standards of honesty and intellectual engagement high.

Now we have a bit of honesty crisis, but if we own our parts we might end up stronger than ever before. One person (or few) made silly mistake. We all do from time to time, but luckily most of us doesn't have that much power to make tragic mistake. That's why honesty and transparency or integrity are important. We need some control mechanisms. Many people in this community are incredibly honest. It's not only question of saying what we believe to be true, but being honest enough internally with ourselves that we are aware what are our true believes and motivations. Because easier person to fool with virtue signaling is yourself.

Anyway my tangent is getting pretty long. We will sleep few more times. Emotions will slowly fade. Only time will tell how good idea this EA project actually is and how good citizens EA aligned people are. Our goal is to contribute to our society. To make it better. So save and improve lives. To make sure future exists. These are beautiful ambitious. But we all know results is what matters. Now we collectively failed. Our hero became point of shame. Ideals were miscalibrated. We need to start again. Think better, be more honest, embrace more perspectives.

EAs as good people of the world is better framing than EA maximisers. Or better ideal at least for me. We need to come back to earth and reflect on the suffering all around. That's what can keep us grounded. There is humility to acknowledging that world is too complicated for me to control it. Most people are aware of this. EAs a bit less. I think this is a bug of the movement. Not totally sure. I'm definitely not against big ambitions. I think most EAs are not really ambitious. At least less they could be. Largely status competition. But that is part of almost everything people do. Anyway acknowledging that other communities are also important and useful and being in general more appreciative of the outside world might help us to be more aware of our shortcomings and realise that we are not really better than anybody else. Even though we received big funding or have a well respected job. It doesn't mean much. How we behave towards each other and what we actually get done is what matters.

We should be a community that focuses on getting things done while being kind and considerate of everyone else. That sounds like a nice ambition. I'll end it here.

I like this comment.

Legal risk. I am assuming that you are not suggesting that any of these figureheads have done anything illegal. In which case the risk here is a reputational one: they don't want their words dragged into legal proceedings. But that seems like a nebulous possibility, and legal cases like this can take years in any case. Surely you are not saying that they won't address the subject of FTX or SBF over that entire span lest a lawyer quote them? Or am I misreading you somehow?

I think you're underestimating how messy being dragged into a court case is - even if you're totally innocent, there can be significant time, emotional, and energy costs, courts aren't perfect at distinguishing truth from falsehood, bankruptcy cases are messy and money can be clawed back, etc etc. I think that taking this seriously is extremely reasonable, regardless of whether you've done something illegal!

Related to this, I applaud Habryka for speaking out [see bottom para.], and wish more people would do the same.

This doesn't seem like a very empathetic response to me, and doesn't really respond to the two main issues Shakeel notes (that everyone is navigating legal issues and continuing to gather information). There will be plenty of time for open soul-searching, individually and as a community, once the situation has somewhat stabilized.

arguably it was, ironically, too much worrying about prestige and PR that got us into this mess in the first place

I'd be curious to hear more about this. Do you mean that EAs wanting to get good press caused or contributed to SBF committing fraud? Or that it caused/contributed to EA being tightly associated with FTX? Or something else?

Hi — thanks for the question.

In April, Effective Ventures purchased Wytham Abbey and some land around it (but <1% of the 2,500 acre estate you're suggesting). Wytham is in the process of being established as a convening centre to run workshops and meetings that bring together people to think seriously about how to address important problems in the world. The vision is modelled on traditional specialist conference centres, e.g. Oberwolfach, The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center or the Brocher Foundation.

The purchase was made from a large grant made specifically for this. There was no money from FTX or affiliated individuals or organizations.

On Wytham Abbey, my understanding is that CEA's plan has been for it to be a space for events. This makes sense to me, as hosting events is a big part of what CEA does and if you're doing enough of that sort of thing it makes sense to buy (for both cost and operational efficiency/consistency) instead of renting?

I too would like to know the answers to your questions about Wytham Abbey, but I’m not sure how they’re relevant to the top level post.

I... Do think I don't want public statements. I would like public conversations, and indeed a process of slow internal drafting and honing feels more likely to harm in this case, than to help.

I think the big statements and official takes should take many weeks. The situation is confusing, and I don't think we know what lessons to take away from this, and I desperately don't want us to rush out what lessons we are supposed to learn from this.

But what I want in the meantime is presence. Sharing info so that people are better placed to form their own takes. Thinking together with people and pointing out flaws in each other's arguments. I prefer comments over top-level posts and list of observations over calls for action and lessons learned. Speaking as individuals instead of speaking as organizations.

I think CEA has been relatively clear over the past few years that it is not the leader of the EA community. My impression is that they see themselves as downstream of the community's intellectual leaders and the will of the community, broadly construed.

Do you have something specific in mind where you were too hasty, or do you in hindsight generally think you should've contributed less to trying to figure things out while things were happening? Because my first gut reaction is that the time you and other invested here was likely worth it. Two things that come to mind: 

1. Some things cannot wait 2 weeks, things are sometimes developing very quickly and one can prevent damages by understanding things better quicklier, even if many things will turn out to be dead-ends and wrong calls.
   1. Especially when it seems likely to be such a defining moment in the history of EA.
2. Related to 1, EA is under a lot of scrutiny right now and cooperating with broader truth-finding processes and clearly saying that we do not condone immoral behavior for the sake of the greater good seems to me very important. And doing this better rather than worse seems important.
   1. I saw that people are (I think correctly) worry about legal risk, and that contributes to people close to SBF not wanting to speak up much yet. But I'd guess people who don't face considerable risks are currently being very helpful by trying to contribute to truth-seeking and emphasizing the values of the EA community to outsiders.