Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"?
Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed — but maybe I'm out of the loop?
My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general postmortem for EA or any group of EAs. Is that correct, and have things changed since then?
[Update Apr. 5: I'd now guess that EV's investigation was slightly broader than that, though it's hard to say exactly how broad.]
I saw that Will MacAskill is planning to appear on some podcasts soon to speak about SBF, which seems like great news to me. If I recall correctly, Will previously said that he was going to talk about what happened with SBF once EV's narrow investigation was done, but it's now been almost a year since that investigation finished (!).
I think it would have been better to speak up way, way sooner, but I'm hopeful that Will will be able to clear up some big chunks of what the heck happened, and that a bunch of other EAs will speak up with their postmortems too, now that SBF's trial and sentencing are complete?
I unfortunately don't know the full list of who should be sharing personal or org-level postmortems on this topic, so I'm forced to single out people like Will whose involvement over the years is public knowledge. Hopefully I'll know who I should be gadflying to share the remaining puzzle pieces once Will and others start sharing some of the first puzzle pieces.
To state the obvious: I'm wary of EAs performatively self-flagellating and accepting more responsibility for the FTX thing than is warranted (given, e.g., that huge numbers of people with a very direct financial incentive in spotting FTX's fraud didn't spot it, so it's obviously not weird if random EAs failed to spot it). I want a concrete understanding of what actually happened, not vague scapegoating or self-flagellation.
But the idea of a basic investigation and postmortem seems like an obvious step to me regardless, and my sense is that there are things we could have done a lot better re SBF (e.g., better spread the word about what happened in the Alameda blow-up, so more people would've been aware of some red flags), even if those things probably wouldn't have prevented the FTX debacle all on their own. So I'd like to hear what's up with all that.
See also CEA's recent piece in the Washington Post. The WaPost piece mostly just seems like EA PR, and I'll be very sad if we stay at that level of vagueness.
The piece also (unless I'm misunderstanding something) implies some false things about whether CEA, EV, etc. have ever done an investigation into what happened with an eye toward reviewing (and possibly improving) EA institutions, practices, etc.
This doesn't match what I've heard from talking to involved parties, and Oliver Habryka mentions that he's "been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform". says, based on documents he's been shared on and conversations he had, that he thinks most people at CEA did not consider the investigation to be helpful for doing internal reforms.
So the narrow "are we in legal trouble?" investigation EV did last year doesn't seem like it was ever meant to fill the "figure out what happened and whether we should do anything about it, for the sake of ethics and for the sake of furthering our EA work" role. But maybe I'm missing something here.
Update Apr. 2: CEA staff, Oliver Habryka, and a former EV board member (who resigned in protest) all confirm that no such investigation has taken place, nor is any in the works. Which leaves me baffled about what's going on here.
Update Apr. 4: An EA who was involved in EA's early response to the FTX disaster has give me their take on why there hasn't yet been an investigation. They think EA leaders (at least, the ones they talked to a lot at the time) had "little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs", and had more to do with things like "general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties". See my comment for a lot more details, and a short response from Habryka.
Also, some corrections: I said that "there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year", which I think risks overstating how narrow the investigation probably was. I also said that Julia Wise had "been calling for the existence of such an investigation", when from her perspective she "listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly". Again, see the comment for details.
The first consideration here is that EA needs to focus, primarily, on impact. That is the whole point of the movement, to maximise the positive impact we can have.
So any investigation should focus on how the SBF fiasco impacted EA's ability to do good, and how we might address that. And also, if we'd want to change (something about EA) in order to minimise future events that could adversely impact our ability to do good. i.e. Actionable recommendations.
IMHO, looking from outside, SBF has done a lot of PR damage to EA, and we have not done a good job of responding to that. Maybe this would be a good area to focus an investigation.
One tangible example of each:
On a more general note, we need to make it very clear that Effective Altruism is not some kind of closed society where you get accepted or rejected. The EA community is no more to blame for SBF's crimes than the New York Yankees are to blame if one of their fans commits a homicide while on vacation in Japan.
Ultimately, if we do consider investigating this, we need to be clear that the investigation isn't going to do further harm to the EA movement (and therefore, to all the causes that depend on the EU movement). Is there any reason to believe that doing an internal investigation will help? I mean, will anyone outside the movement feel reassured or will the trust an investigation that shows we did nothing wrong? And if some EA's did do something wrong, or even cannot prove conclusively that they didn't, isn't there a risk that publishing that will massively damage the movement, disproportionately relative to any bad things done.
I don't want to appear cynical. But right now, SBF has given the EA movement a massive PR problem. Whatever we do needs to factor that into consideration.
If there were some smoking gun type evidence suggesting that several EA's probably did bad things, then obviously we'd need to investigate that to provide reassurance (which is also important for PR). But I haven't heard anyone accuse anyone of that. So what do we gain?
Thank you for this comment.
I really appreciate when someone puts an explanation for why they down-voted something I wrote :D
Indeed, I knew that what I wrote would be unpopular when I wrote it. And maybe it just looks like I'm an old cynic polluting the idealism of youth. But I don't agree that it's naive. If anything, the naivete lies on the other side.
How can an EA not realise that damaging the EA movement is damaging to the world?
So you need to balance the potential damage to the world thought damage to EA vs the potential of avoi... (read more)