Some comments on recent FTX-related events

I want to push back on this a tiny bit. Just because some projects got funding from FTX, that doesn't necessarily mean Open Phil should fund them. There's a few reasons for this:

There will be projects that 1) have significant funding gaps, 2) have been vetted by people you trust for both their value alignment and competence, 3) are not only shovel-ready, but already started.

1. When FTX Future Fund was functioning, there was lots more money available in the ecosystem, hence (I think) the bar for receiving a longtermist grant was lower. This money is now gone, and lots of orgs who got FTX funding might not meet OP's bar / the new bar we should have given less resources. So basically I don't think it's sufficient to say 1) they have significant funding gaps, 2) they exist and 3) they've been vetted by people you trust. IMO you need to prove that they're also sufficiently high-quality, which might not be true as FTX was vetting them with a different bar in mind. 

Stepping in to help these projects bridge the gap until they can find new funding sources looks like an unusually cost-effective opportunity. It may also require somewhat less vetting on your end, which may matter more if you're unusually constrained by grantmaker capacity for a while

2.  The problem I see here is that these projects might not ever find new funding sources, or it would take longer to find than is reasonable. For example, EA funding in general is quite down (e.g. tech stocks) and we're looking at an extended period (1-2 years) of recession / slow growth, so keeping alive projects that don't meet the OP longtermist bar for 1-3+ years probably isn't the best use of money, as it's unclear if all of these projects would definitely find funding in the future. As I say below, a 3 month exit grant to help people transition to other projects might be a better use of funds.

3. I think your second point is a tough one as I can definitely imagine mishandling this might be bad for encouraging future folks to start-up projects in EA. That said, I think EAs of all people should be happy to accept that some charities, if they're not amongst the most effective things to do, shouldn't exist. If we (the EA community or Open Phil) thinks that the bottom 20% of FTX-funded projects aren't worth funding, then we likely shouldn't fund them. ^[1] Just like there could be a negative impact on founders being put-off by the a lack of a safety net within EA, I'm also worried that it could be bad for community epistemics (and more importantly, the world) if we're willingly supporting projects that clearly aren't amongst the best things we could be doing with our money. I definitely agree though some sort of exit grants over 3 months by OP / other EA funders might be useful to help people transition if their projects got totally tanked, but funding sub-par projects for another year or more seems less than ideal.

I'm kind of unsure about my points above and happy to be pushed back on them - but I also don't think it's a simple as: if FTX funded it, those longtermist opportunities out must be great so let's fund them.

1. ^{^}

   This feels a bit harsh to say, and it's easy for me to do as I don't have FTX funding. Apologies if it comes across as insensitive, as I understand this is a hard time for a lot of people. I really do hope people at least have enough resources to figure out alternative plans without any serious hardship.

In 2018, I heard accusations that Sam had communicated in ways that left people confused or misled, though often with some ambiguity about whether Sam had been confused himself, had been inadvertently misleading while factually accurate, etc. I put some effort into understanding these concerns (but didn’t spend a ton of time on it; Open Phil didn’t have a relationship with Sam or Alameda).

I didn’t hear anything that sounded anywhere near as bad as what has since come out about his behavior at FTX. At the time I didn’t feel my concerns rose to the level where it would be appropriate or fair to publicly attack or condemn him. The whole situation did make me vaguely nervous, and I spoke with some people about it privately, but I never came to a conclusion that there was a clearly warranted (public) action.

Comment on the phrasing but not the substance of what you're saying: 

IMO, "malevolent" is a bad phrase for what I think you might mean. (To my ears, "malevolent" has the connotations of wanting to do something bad for  consciously-selfish  reasons or wishing bad things upon others. That's different from being very strategic about one's actions in interpersonal situations, being comfortable with lying, etc.)

Did Open Phil shift funds away from longtermist causes when FTX funds became available?

(It's interesting to note that, at present, my above comment is on -1 agreement karma after 50 votes. This suggests that the question of rebalancing the neartermist:longtermist funding ratio is genuinely controversial, as opposed to there being a community consensus either way.)

It looks like Open Phil's approach to this is to evaluate all programs (neartermist and longtermist) against cash transfers (they use an internal 'unit of impact', I think, to try to compare all programs). As I understand it, any program funded by Open Phil needs to beat this standardised bar - it isn't that they actually believe longtermist projects are much more impactful but still grant to neartermist causes for political reasons or similar. Or, to put it another way, the bar in neartermist funding isn't lower than it is in longtermist funding.

Accordingly, they wouldn't necessarily reallocate funds from one place to another in advance, but if the new longtermist applications seem to be more impactful in expectation that the neartermist ones, they might choose to fund more longtermist programs than neartermist ones going forward.

For what it's worth, things like the GiveWell charities actually perform extraordinarily well in this analysis, so my prior is that FTX-funded projects won't outperform them significantly in Open Phil's evaluation, and so won't lead to a reallocation of funding.

Not the OP, but my sense is that the worldview diversification edifice is really not set up to deal with this kind of situation.

It's probably worth noting that Holden has been pretty open about this incident. Indeed, in a talk at a Leaders Forum around 2017, he mentioned it precisely as an example of "end justify the means"-type reasoning.

I don't mean to endorse Holden's actions - they were obviously ill-judged - but this reads as pretty lightweight stuff. He posted a few anonymous comments boosting GiveWell? That is so far away from what it increasingly looks like SBF is responsible for - multi-billion dollar fraud, funneling customer funds to a separate trading entity against trumped-up collateral, and then running an insolvent business, presumably waiting for imminent Series C funding to cover the holes.

There was no one with official responsibility for the relationship between FTX and the EA community. I think the main reason the two were associated was via FTX’s/Sam having a high profile and talking a lot about EA - that’s not something anyone else was able to control. (Some folks did ask him to do less of this.)

It’s also worth noting that we generally try to be cautious about power dynamics as a funder, which means we are hesitant to be pushy about most matters. In particular, I think one of two major funders in this space attacking the other, nudging grantees to avoid association and funding from it, etc. would’ve been seen as strangely territorial behavior absent very strong evidence of misconduct.

That said: as mentioned in another comment, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I’d reasoned more like this: “This person is becoming very associated with effective altruism, so whether or not that’s due to anything I’ve done, it’s important to figure out whether that’s a bad thing and whether proactive distancing is needed.”

I had previously assumed that Open Philanthropy had responsibility for overseeing much of the SBF-EA connection and promotion.

Why did you assume this? Serious question. I was under the (perhaps incorrect) impression that Open Phil doesn't consider itself responsible for overseeing the EA community.  

To me some of the actors who seem like they should have had relevant responsibility here are CEA, 80K, and senior staff at the FTX Future Fund before they joined it. 

Also, I just want to flag that I really like the vote/agreement system used here. Seems like people thought the question was useful(I assume), and generally think that Open Philanthropy didn't have responsibility here. That seems good to know!

If they were coupled, I would probably have felt more attacked. 

Since writing this, I've realized that there probably is a lot more legal consideration regarding these announcements than I initially realized. 

"Responsibility" is easily a legal term, so seems potentially hazardous to write about online, in this sort of situation. One of the absolute last things I want to see now would be the other EA funders having to get involved in a prolonged legal conflict.

If anything like this is the case, it could be safe to delay this sort of discussion until much later.

I really wish some of the key questions about this situation could be publicly figured out sooner, but here other things might likely take higher precedence.

All that said, after the key immediate disasters are tied up, I would be very interested in some discussion of which orgs held responsibility for this situation, if any did. I think work here could really help make/secure trust in these organizations. (This might be very obvious)
 

I would also be interested in knowing who/which org was "owning" the relationship with FTX...

Not to assign blame, but to figure out what the right institutional responsibility/oversight should have been, and what needs to be put in place should a similar situation emerge in future. 

It seemed to me like the way the prize was presented and constructed was aimed at specifically changing Nick Beckstead's views without giving much consideration for being universally convincing. Given that he's stepped down from the Future Fund, why do you think the prize is critical?

They're doing it! Well, something similar, in early 2023. Thanks OpenPhil!

I've e-mailed CEA to ask them if they're engineering any coordination around this.

In addition to the above, what Open Philanthropy's exposure looks like would be informative to the wider community IMO. Eg: is it just a fairly standard investment portfolio or are they more exposed to Meta than an index would be.

I strongly disagree -- first, because this is dishonest and dishonorable. And second, because I don't think EA should try to have an immaculate brand.

Indeed, I suspect that part of what went wrong in the FTX case is that EA was optimizing too hard for having an immaculate brand, at the expense of optimizing for honesty, integrity, open discussion of what we actually believe, etc. I don't think this is the only thing that was going on, but it would help explain why people with concerns about SBF/FTX kept quiet about those concerns. Because they either were worried about sullying EA's name, or they were worried about social punishment from others who didn't want EA's name sullied.

IMO, trying super hard to never have your brand's name sullied, at the expense of ordinary moral goals like "be honest", tends to sully one's brand far more than if you'd just ignored the brand and prioritized other concerns. Especially insofar as the people you're trying to appeal to are very smart, informed, careful thinkers; you might be able to trick the Median Voter that EA is cool via a shallow PR campaign and attempts to strategically manipulate the narrative, but you'll have a far harder time tricking the sorts of extremely smart, educated, morally scrupulous people who EA is actually mostly trying to recruit and persuade.

And this is especially especially true insofar as you're trying to get a huge diffuse community to all play along with your fake narrative! It's not as though you can send out a memo to all EAs to dissemble in a specific way that furthers your narrative; the memo will just leak and cause more harm than good. EA needs to give up on this "have an immaculate brand" mirage and shift its mindset toward goals more like "exemplify real virtues", "focus on the object level", and "specialize in the niche of being The Group That Speaks Truth Even When It's Uncomfortable". You won't win over everyone that way, but you'll win more of the battles that matter, and that are actually winnable.

Rebranding in response to a scandal suggests an attempt to brush the issue under the rug without dealing with the underlying problems. Surely you want to be able to respond “this is how we changed to prevent that happening again,” not “we were hoping you wouldn’t remember that”?

The overgeneralisation isextremely easy to make. Just search "effective altruism" on twitter right now. :'( (n.b., not recommended if you care about your own emotional well-being.)

The assets of the Good Ventures Foundation (who Open Phil is recommending their grants to) are a matter of public record (albeit delayed). They had more than $3bn in June 2020.