If this comment is more about "how could this have been foreseen", then this comment thread may be relevant. I should note that hindsight bias means that it's much easier to look back and assess problems as obvious and predictable ex post, when powerful investment firms and individuals who also had skin in the game also missed this. 

TL;DR: 
1) There were entries that were relevant (this one also touches on it briefly)
2) They were specifically mentioned
3) There were comments relevant to this. (notably one of these was apparently deleted because it received a lot of downvotes when initially posted)
4) There has been at least two other posts on the forum prior to the contest that engaged with this specifically

My tentative take is that these issues were in fact identified by various members of the community, but there isn't a good way of turning identified issues into constructive actions - the status quo is we just have to trust that organisations have good systems in place for this, and that EA leaders are sufficiently careful and willing to make changes or consider them seriously, such that all the community needs to do is "raise the issue". And I think looking at the systems within the relevant EA orgs or leadership is what investigations or accountability questions going forward should focus on - all individuals are fallible, and we should be looking at how we can build systems in place such that the community doesn't have to just trust that people who have power and who are steering the EA movement will get it right, and that there are ways for the community to hold them accountable to their ideals or stated goals if it appears to, or risks not playing out in practice.

i.e. if there are good processes and systems in place and documentation of these processes and decisions, it's more acceptable (because other organisations that probably have a very good due diligence process also missed it). But if there weren't good processes, or if these decisions weren't a careful + intentional decision, then that's comparatively more concerning, especially in context of specific criticisms that have been raised,^[1]  or previous precedent. For example, I'd be especially curious about the events surrounding Ben Delo,^[2] and processes that were implemented in response. I'd be curious about whether there are people in EA orgs involved in steering who keep track of potential risks and early warning signs to the EA movement, in the same way the EA community advocates for in the case of pandemics, AI, or even general ways of finding opportunities for impact. For example, SBF, who is listed as a EtG success story on 80k hours, has publicly stated he's willing to go 5x over the Kelly bet, and described yield farming in a way that Matt Levine interpreted as a Ponzi. Again, I'm personally less interested in the object level decision (e.g. whether or not we agree with SBF's Kelly bet comments as serious, or whether Levine's interpretation as appropriate), but more about what the process was, how this was considered at the time with the information they had etc. I'd also be curious about the documentation of any SBF related concerns that were raised by the community, if any, and how these concerns were managed and considered (as opposed to critiquing the final outcome).

Outside of due diligence and ways to facilitate whistleblowers, decision-making processes around the steering of the EA movement is crucial as well. When decisions are made by orgs that bring clear benefits to one part of the EA community while bringing clear risks that are shared across wider parts of the EA community,^[3] it would probably be of value to look at how these decisions were made and what tradeoffs were considered at the time of the decision. Going forward, thinking about how to either diversify those risks, or make decision-making more inclusive of a wider range stakeholders^[4], keeping in mind the best interests of the EA movement as a whole.

(this is something I'm considering working on in a personal capacity along with the OP of this post, as well as some others - details to come, but feel free to DM me if you have any thoughts on this. It appears that CEA is also already considering this)

If this comment is about "are these red-teaming contests in fact valuable for the money and time put into it, if it misses problems like this"

I think my view here (speaking only for the red-teaming contest) is that even if this specific contest was framed in a way that it missed these classes of issues, the value of the very top submissions^[5] may still have made the efforts worthwhile. The potential value of a different framing was mentioned by another panelist. If it's the case that red-teaming contests are systematically missing this class of issues regardless of framing, then I agree that would be pretty useful to know, but I don't have a good sense of how we would try to investigate this.

  

1. ^{^}

   This tweet seems to have aged particularly well. Despite supportive comments from high-profile EAs on the original forum post, the author seemed disappointed that nothing came of it in that direction. Again, without getting into the object level discussion of the claims of the original paper, it's still worth asking questions around the processes. If there was were actions planned, what did these look like? If not, was that because of a disagreement over the suggested changes, or the extent that it was an issue at all? How were these decisions made, and what was considered?

2. ^{^}

   Apparently a previous EA-aligned billionaire ?donor who got rich by starting a crypto trading firm, who pleaded guilty to violating the bank secrecy act

3. ^{^}

   Even before this, I had heard from a primary source in a major mainstream global health organisation that there were staff who wanted to distance themselves from EA because of misunderstandings around longtermism.

4. ^{^}

   This doesn't have to be a lengthy deliberative consensus-building project, but it should at least include internal comms across different EA stakeholders to allow discussions of risks and potential mitigation strategies.

5. ^{^}

   e.g. A critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model, Methods for improving uncertainty analysis in EA cost-effectiveness models, and 
   Biological Anchors external review

In hindsight they look a bit performative.

There's a related problem with CEA. Their mission is to nurture the EA community, and their sizeable community health team's is to "preserve the EA community's ability to grow and produce value". But the CH team has focused on public relations, diversity,  "discussion norms", and crisis-response, while the community became unhealthy for a different reason - FTX. It seems like this team, or some other, needs to take on a wider mandate, that includes monitoring of such issues.

I would like to know, for example, whether any large EA orgs (and EA thinkers, I suppose too) have formally engaged with those criticism contest entries. Like, was it somebody's job to think about when anything should change as a result? Or something discussed by a governance board (or similar)?

This sounds like a sort of EA congressional investigation. An important part for that, which I don't know how to make happen, is to make sure the investigators are accountable to EA while not being controlled by the "executive branch" which is being investigated. One would think some kind of democratic processes would help.

A meta level structural problem may be that so much decision making seems to be focused on a relatively small group of people without much oversight. Even with the best people in the world that's going to lead to group think and blind spots. Other charities and non-profits have extensive oversight systems that may be worth imitating.

Much more sensible. 

Let me kick off on point 4: I don't think it is accidental that EA's philanthropic model of social change leads to the concentration of power in the hands of a few people with outsized riches, or control over those riches. Why has the movement never even thought of democratising itself? Recall that JS Mill, being the utilitarian he was, argued for democracy on instrumental grounds - mostly because it led to better epistemic and cultural outcomes.

As a brief addendum, I imagine in the non fraudulent world, Sam’s net worth is substantially smaller. So maybe the extremely fast growth of his wealth should itself be regarded with suspicion?

Jehan gives some additional suggestions I liked here. Including rules about:

• "fraternization and power relationships."
• Anti-corruption.

Might not have affected things in the FTX case, but perhaps worth considering whilst the window for significant reform is wide open.

I'm updating towards the view that there are two different tasks - first, a fact-finding exercise and second, decisions about how to respond.

It doesn't seem appropriate to me that Open Philanthropy directly conducts the fact-finding exercise - it seems important to have an independent person(s) who are able to receive confidential feedback. It does seem appropriate to me, though, for Open Phil to commission that investigation/inquiry though.

I don't know how EA should decide how to decide how to respond. I'm not sure that the financial dependence on OP is as much of an issue in this context, but agree it's probably worth addressing.

To clarify, my update isn't that I think there shouldn't be a "did anybody know" aspect to the investigation - but rather that a broader fact-finding review would be useful, and that my original suggestion was probably too narrow.

Yeah not sure EV is necessarily the right perspective, but I see where you're going and think it's an  interesting thought experiment. Considering how SBF's decision making and largely linear utility lead to high risk appetetite, this might have led him to underestimate harmful tail risk considering the global stage he was maintaining for EA.

It might be a big leap of faith, but assuming he justified some his actions with an ends justify the means attitude (with each marginal dollar gained having roughly equal utility to help others) , at what point tho did his social stature warrant the  downside consideration of reputational damage for him and EA? When it was him early on at Alameda, a coin-flip with enough upside might have made sense since he wasn't socially influential enough to be risking reputational damage, just his net worth.

But heading into FTX, led alone into  lawmaker's offices and every news outlet imaginable, he became a steward of EA in an unprecedented manner.. but it does not appear that maintaining his stature in a risk-reduced manner given his importance ever factored into his decision making.

I'd argue the major point of an investigation is to establish the evidence