I think seeing it as "just putting two people in touch" is narrow. It's about judgement on whether to get involved in highly controversial commercial deal which was expected to significantly influence discourse norms, and therefore polarisation, in years to come. As far as I can tell, EA overall and Will specifically do not have skills / knowhow in this domain.

Introducing Elon to Sam is not just like making a casual introduction; if everything SBF was doing was based on EA, then this feels like EA wading in on the future of Twitter via the influence of SBFs money.

Introducing Elon to Holden because he wanted to learn more about charity evaluation? Absolutely - that's EA's bread and butter and where we have skills and credibility. But on this commercial deal and subsequent running of Twitter? Not within anyone's toolbox from what I can tell.

I'd like to know the thinking behind this move by Will and anyone else involved. For my part, I think this was unwise, should have had more consultation around it.

I would consider disavowing the community if people start to get more involved in: 1) big potentially world-changing decisions which - to me - it looks like they don't have the wider knowledge or skillset to take on well, or 2) incredibly controversial projects like the Twitter acquisition, and doing so through covert back-channels with limited consultation.

Attempting to frame this as MacAskill simply putting them in touch is fairly astonishing. From the texts alone:

MacAskill laid out monetary amounts for the offers of Bankman-Fried's investment in Twitter.

He’s worth $24B, and his early employees (with shared values) bump that to $30B. I asked about how much he could in principle contribute and he said: “~$1-3b would be easy ~3-8b I could do ~$8-15b is maybe possible but would require financing.

Then, when Musk explicitly asked if he would vouch for Sam Bankman-Fried. MacAskill vouched for him enthusiastically, linking explicitly to SBF's dedication to longtermism.

You vouch for him?

Very much so! Very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well.

I do not understand how this can be characterised as just putting them in touch.

Fwiw I would still be interested in a response from Will, but I dont think he should feel obliged to give one.

Feels a bit weird to me that you are speaking about "EA" doing something here, as it seems pretty clear that this was Will acting in a personal capacity.

(This is in no way trying to defend his actions, but I think it's an important difference. )

Edit: This comment refered to an earlier version of David's comment that talked about EA wanting to buy twitter, etc.

I think it'd be easy to come up with highly impactfwl things to do with free reign over Twitter? Like, even before I've thought about it, there should be a high prior on usefwl patterns. Brainstorming:

1. Experiment with giving users control over recommender algorithms, and/or designing them to be in the long-term interests of the users themselves (because you're ok with foregoing some profit in order to not aggressively hijacking people's attention)
   1. Optimising the algorithms for showing users what they reflectively prefer (eg. what do I want to want to see on my Twitter feed?)^[1]
   2. Optimising algorithms for making people kinder (eg. downweighting views that come from bandwagony effects and toxoplasma), but still allowing users to opt-out or opt-in, and clearly guiding them on how to do so.
2. Trust networks
   1. Liquid democracy-like transitive trust systems (eg. here, here)
      1. I can see several potential benefits to this, but most of the considerations are unknown to me, which just means that there could still be massive value that I haven't seen yet.
      2. This could be used to overcome Vingean deference limits and allow for hiring more competent people more reliably than academic credentials (I realise I'm not explaining this, I'm just pointing to the existence of ideas enabled with Twitter)
      3. This could also be a way to "vote" for political candidates or decision-makers in general too, or be used as a trust metric to find out whether you want to vote for particular candidates in the first place.
3. Platform to arrange vote swapping and similar, allow for better compromises and reduce hostile zero-sum voting tendencies.
4. Platform for highly visible public assurance contracts (eg. here), could be potentially be great for cooperation between powerfwl actors or large groups of people.
   1. This also enables more visibility for views that held back by pluralistic ignorance. This could be both good and bad, depending on the view (eg. both "it's ok to be gay" and "it's not ok to be gay" can be held back by pluralistic ignorance).
5. Could also be used to coordinate actions in a crisis
   1. eg. the next pandemic is about to hit, and it's a thousand times more dangerous than covid, and no one realises because it's still early on the exponential curve. Now you utilise your power to influence people to take it seriously. You stop caring about whether this will be called "propaganda" because what matters isn't how nice you'll look to the newspapers, what matters is saving people's lives.
6. Something-something nudging idk.

Mostly, even if I thought Sam was in the wrong for considering a deal with Elon, I find it strange to cast a negative light on Will for putting them in touch. That seems awfwly transitive. I think judgments for transitive associations are dangerous, especially given incomplete information. Sam/Will probably thought much longer on this than I have, so I don't think I can justifiably fault their judgment even if I had no ideas on how to use twitter myself.

1. ^{^}

   This idea was originally from a post by Paul Christiano some years ago where he urged FB to adopt an algorithm like this, but I can't seem to find it rn.

+1 - when I saw those messages, I felt uncomfortable about it, because I couldn't imagine any good reason for EAs to want to buy Twitter, and because it hadn't been discussed publicly at all, that I saw. So if SBF had bought Twitter - with or without Will's advice/support/backing - with the money that he said he was planning to use for EA causes, that would have seemed inappropriately unilateral to me (even if the recent fraud stuff hadn't happened.) 

Why would Will want SBF to buy Twitter, and think it worth billions? Apart from thinking it was a great business investment, a strong contender for the reason is ‘propaganda for our values’.

I don't consider this a plausible motivation at all. Even assuming Will's judgment wasn't great here, he's clearly smart enough to know that it would make an incredibly bad impression to run a site this large, associated with free speech (or lack thereof), and turn it into something that's ideologically biased. You'd have to be incredibly naive to think that this has a shot at going well (and that's almost the bigger issue than it being "not very high-integrity like"). In any case, I think it's much more likely Will wanted to raise the world's sanity waterline by improving public discourse norms. (Emrik made a comment with some example ideas.) (Edit: Just saw you already replied to Emrik and changed your mind somewhat, very cool!)

Another great point, transparency - I want Wil to be transparent as to his involvement in that given his reach and influence on EA, he should be able to explain his thought process as to what was the objective of his endorsement.

Thank you, point taken, corrected it. I made a mental map that this is an ongoing process reaching from as far back as couple of weeks ago until now. But it can be seen other way.

However, there is a question on why this wasn't discussed in the forums earlier, as the first reporting came in. Not a good sign if such stories on Will are in the media and nobody in EA noticed (myself included).

Thank you, updated.

Wow, thanks for posting these!

To me, it doesn't seem that hard to understand how someone could act like that. Seems to be a common mistake, trusting someone (Sam) too much and thinking he's a great entrepreneur (therefore connect him) and vouch for him. I'm not saying that it's excusable, just that it's a common type of mistake for someone with bad people judgment.

howdoyousay? made a good comment, admittedly:

As far as I can tell, EA overall and Will specifically do not have skills / knowhow in this domain.

And neither did Sam. But, if you think Sam's a great entrepreneur, maybe it doesn't take all that much knowhow to think it's worth a shot? I mean Musk clearly hadn't thought about this idea too much either, and you only have to improve the counterfactual where Musk does things alone! 

I don't dislike the idea of reforming twitter. Imagine if Sam was who Will thought he was and actually had 8 billion liquid that were his to spend (and not pledged to other EA causes or to anyone else). Then why not let him try it? (No need to make it EA-branded and no need for Will's involvement – and therefore EA involvement – in the initial connection to become a topic in the media.) 

I'm not saying Will did nothing wrong. I think the mistake of vouching is inexcusable (despite being understandable) and if I was Will I'd strongly consider forever forfeitting my vote on anything people-judgment-related.  I'm just saying the twitter thing per se doesn't seem obviously insane to me. Public discourse is broken in a way that makes me very pessimistic about the future in general, so thinking "maybe it would be better if Elon Musk wasn't in charge of improving it alone, maybe it would be good if someone really thoughtful with an EA outlook played a role in this" seems totally reasonable.

Hi Miguel, I broadly agree with AbigailT's comment. Could you expand why you think this is a bad thing? From my perspective, it just seems like he put 2 people in touch, and that Elon's purchase of Twitter was not immoral. 

By the way, sorry you got downvoted so much. I suspect it's because your comment was (1) strong/accusatory, (2) didn't have justification, (3) and not obviously true.