Hi everyone — I wanted to update you about the sorts of communication you’ll expect to hear from EA organisations and their leaders, and why this will probably be an intensely frustrating situation for all involved. For those that don’t know, I’m head of communications at CEA, and am working on Effective Ventures’ response to the current situation.
In particular, I expect that in the short term you’ll get a lot less communication about things than you’d want. This is for a few reasons:
- Legal risk. It’s likely that there will be extensive legal proceedings around FTX that will drag on for a very long time. This means that anything that is said by anyone who is even tangentially involved is at risk of being scrutinised and multiply interpreted by dozens of people, including people whose role (rightly) is to advocate for their clients or those they represent.
- Lack of information. Everything has happened very quickly, and everyone is still trying to gather facts and figure out what’s going on. We don’t even fully know what we don’t know. So we’re figuring out things as we go, and don’t want to share information that might later turn out to be inaccurate.
- This is compounded by the fact that everyone is incredibly busy and dealing with a ton of different things (legal, financial, operational, management) all at once.
This sucks. I really want to be saying everything on my mind right now, and I would love for other people at EA orgs to do the same. I also want to try to make sure people don’t say things they’ll regret in the years to come. But these are hard tradeoffs, and I’m not sure we’ll always get them right.
"Legal risk" is difficult to assess because it could refer any of ten different things. But for some referrents of "legal risk," the fact that many leaders and major organizations all have exposure to the same SBF/FTX-related legal risks would likely itself be indicative of a weakness in how EA is organized and run.
I'm just making stuff up, but I wonder if movements like EA should have a one or two organizations created to exist on what we might call lukewarm standby. Most of the time, the lukewarm-standby organization wouldn't do much; it has a part-time staff member, some volunteer board members elected by the community (a majority of whom are not affiliated with major organizations), and a minimal fundraising campaign targeted at ordinary EA community members to ensure independence. The closest I can think of to a lukewarm-standby organization in modern life is the Selective Service System in the US (a/k/a "the draft"), although it is designed to potentially activate for a specific purpose rather than for a range of purposes.
However, in a crisis or where major organizations have conflicts, the lukewarm-standby organization could take in some funds and swell in size to handle whatever was needed. At the end of the crisis, the organization could disband if that was seen as prudent, and the community would create another one. For instance, in the current situation, there is potentially a need for an organization to strategize and coordinate surrounding the potential for clawbacks. However, from the original post it sounds like a number of organizations one might ordinarily expect to spearhead this role themselves have SBF/FTX legal risk.