From the Executive Team and Board of Directors of Rethink Priorities (Peter Wildeford, Marcus Davis, Abraham Rowe, Kieran Greig, David Moss, Ozzie Gooen, Cameron Meyer Shorb, and Vicky Bond).
We were saddened and shocked to learn about the extremely serious alleged misdeeds and misconduct of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. While we are still trying to understand what happened and the consequences of these events, we are dismayed that customer funds may have been used improperly, and that, currently, many customers are unable to retrieve funds held by FTX. We unequivocally and in the strongest possible terms condemn any potential fraud or misuse of customer funds and trust that occurred at FTX. The actions that Bankman-Fried and FTX have been accused of are out of line with the values that we believe in and try to represent as an organization.
At this time, Rethink Priorities remains in a stable financial and legal position. We do not plan on laying off staff or cutting salaries in response to these events or to the changed financial condition of the EA space. However, the strategies of our General Longtermism, Special Projects, and Surveys teams were partly based on the existence of FTX funding for Rethink Priorities and others in the EA community. For the time being, we've mainly paused further hiring for these programs and are revisiting our strategies for them going forward. We’ve decided that hiring for our Special Projects team, which was already in progress before we learned about the FTX situation, will proceed in order to evaluate and onboard new fiscal sponsees.
Unfortunately, this situation does impact our long-term financial outlook and our ability to keep growing. Rethink Priorities continues to have large funding needs and we look forward to sharing more about our plans with the community in the next few days. We will need to address the funding gap left by these changed conditions for the coming years.
In terms of legal exposure, Rethink Priorities’ legal counsel are looking into the possibility of clawbacks of funds previously donated to us by FTX-related sources. At this time, we are not aware of any other significant legal exposure for Rethink Priorities or its staff.
Prior to the news breaking this month, we already had procedures in place intended to mitigate potential financial risks from relying on FTX or other cryptocurrency donors. Internally, we've always had a practice of treating pledged or anticipated cryptocurrency donations as less reliable than other types of donations for fundraising forecasting purposes, simply due to volatility in that sector. As a part of regular crisis management exercises, we also engaged in an internal simulation in August around the possibility of FTX funds no longer being available. We did this exercise due to the relative size and importance of the funding to us, and the base failure rates of cryptocurrency projects, not due to having non-public information about FTX or Bankman-Fried.
In hindsight, we believe we could have done more to share these internal risk assessments with the rest of the EA community. Going forward, we are reevaluating our own approach to risk management and the assessment of donors, though we do not believe any changes we will make would have caught this specific issue.
As mentioned above, Rethink Priorities is receiving legal advice on clawbacks, and we are happy to share resources with other organizations that are concerned about their exposure. We cannot provide legal advice, but we are able to provide information on our own response—please reach out to Abraham Rowe (abraham@rethinkpriorities.org) for more information.
Quite off-topic but I think it's quite remarkable that RP does crisis management and simulation exercises like this! I'm glad that RP is stable financially and legally (at least in the short-term), and put a significant chunk of that down to your collective excellent leadership.
I appreciate some of the generator behind this post, but also have hesitations about sentences like this:
I think a really core part of Effective Altruism is the recognition that being a good person is hard and messy. Figuring out what moral principles to follow is complicated and requires extensive analysis and thinking. When I hear prominent EAs, people that I have often personally discussed the ethics of lying to nazi officials when hiding jews in your closet, or the tradeoffs of cooperating with corrupt government regimes in foreign countries, say that they now suddenly "unequivocally condemn all fraud", I feel gaslit and confused by what is happening.
These are not sentences that anyone I worked with in EA believed a month ago, and I don't think that you believe them now. Yes, almost all fraud is bad. But it's not perfectly clear cut, as is the case with almost all clear lines one might want to draw in the domain of ethics. The central cases of fraud at FTX that we know about seem very likely to have been quite bad, and we should... (read more)
Hi Oli. I talked to a friend and they pointed out that many people reading your comment may reasonably read you as saying a) there's a direct quote where RP leadership in the post above "unequivocally condemn all fraud" (including fraud relevant to hiding jews from nazi officials) and b) that you've "often personally discussed" ethics with RP leadership.
a) is clearly false, as the post above only refers to condemning "any potential fraud or misuse of customer funds and trust that occurred at FTX," and does not refer to any broad condemnation for fraud or fraud-like activities relevant to hiding jews from nazis or cooperating with corrupt government regimes. I'm guessing b) is false as well based on my personal understanding of how often you interact with RP leadership.
I can see how this is an honest misunderstanding, however, it'll be helpful to be very clear that in the statement above, RP leaders gave no literal indication one way or another about their position on e.g. lying to Nazis.
I, speaking for myself, really appreciate the calls for specificity and precision when we make moral judgments and assessments, in general and especially in this moment.
RP's statement is inherently a Public Media Statement, and the portions condemning certain events at FTX should be evaluated with that in mind. I think it is quite clear that RP was not intending to make a statement about hypothetical "minor" events at FTX that might be technically fraud, or that most readers would understand them as having done so.
To be clear, Public Media Statements should be as accurate as possible -- but the medium informs the message and limits the writer's ability to convey nuance, full depth of meaning, and high degrees of accuracy. The same is true of explaining things to a five-year old; trying to cram in high degrees of technical accuracy or nuance can often interfere with the goals of the communication and make it less accurate.
For instance, I suggest that one of the rules of Public Media Statements is that media outlets will quote a small portion of them, and that quote will be the main way the statement is experienced by readers. So each sentence that a journalist could reasonably quote needs to independently be a reasonably good representation of the organization's opinion. Or the journalist may craft a short summary of the statement -- so the w... (read more)
There's a time and place to discuss exceptions to ethics and when goals might justify the means, but this post clearly isn't it.
I agree that the more inquisitive posts are more interesting, but the goal of this post is clearly not meant to reflect deeply on what to learn from the situation. It's RP giving an update/statement that's legally robust and shares the most important details relevant to RP's functioning
I read the original comment not as an exhortation to always include lots of nuanced reflection in mostly-unrelated posts, but to have a norm that on the forum, the time and place to write sentences that you do not think are actually true as stated is "never (except maybe April Fools)".
The change I'd like to see in this post isn't a five-paragraph footnote on morality, just the replacement of a sentence that I don't think they actually believe with one they do. I think that environments where it is considered a faux pas to point out "actually, I don't think you can have a justified belief in the thing you said" are extremely corrosive to the epistemics of a community hosting those environments, and it's worth pushing back on them pretty strongly.
Also note that their statement included "...that occurred at FTX". So not any potential fraud anywhere.
Wait, if now isn't the time to be specific about what actions we actually condemn and what actual ethical lines to draw, when is it? Clearly one of the primary things that this post is trying to communicate is that Rethink condemns certain actions at FTX. It seems extremely important (and highly deceptive to do otherwise) to be accurate in what it condemns, and in what ways.
Like, let's look ahead a few months. Some lower-level FTX employee is accused of having committed some minor fraud with good ethical justification that actually looks reasonable according to RP leadership, so they make a statement coming out in defense of that person.
Do you not expect this to create strong feelings of betrayal in previous readers of this post, and a strong feeling of having been lied to? Many people right now are looking for reassurance about where the actual ethical lines are that EA is drawing. Trying to reassure those people seems like one of the primary goals of this post.
But this post appears to me be basically deceptive about where those lines are, or ... (read more)
(speaking for myself. Was not involved in drafting the post, though I read an earlier version of it) FWIW this is very much not how I read the post, which is more like "organizational updates in light of FTX crashing." RP's financial position, legal position, approach to risk, and future hiring plans all seem to be relevant here, at least for current and future collaborators, funders, and employees. They also take up more lines than the paragraph you focused on, and carry more information than discussions about EA ethical lines, which are quite plentiful in the forum and elsewhere.
That's possible! My guess is most readers are more interested in the condemnation part though, given the overwhelming support that posts like this have received, which have basically no content besides condemnation (and IMO with even bigger problems on being inaccurate about where to draw ethical lines).
It is plausible that RP primarily aimed to just give an organizational update, though I do think de-facto the condemnation part will just end up being more important and have a greater effect on the world and will be referred back to more frequently than the other stuff, so there might just be a genuine mismatch between the primary goals that RP has with this post, and where the majority of the effect of this post will come from.
I think my post is quite clear about what sort of fraud I am talking about. If you look at the reasons that I give in my post for why fraud is wrong, they clearly don't apply to any of examples of justifiable lying that you've provided here (lying to Nazis, doing the least fraudulent thing in a catch-22, lying by accident, etc.).
In particular, if we take the lying to Nazis example and see what the reasons I provide say:
... (read more)I think you're wrong about how most people would interpret the post. I predict that if readers were polled on whether or not the post agreed with “lying to Nazis is wrong” the results would be heavily in favor of “no, the post does not agree with that.” If you actually had a poll that showed the opposite I would definitely update.
I think the nazi example is too loaded for various reasons (and triggers people's "well, this is clearly some kind of thought experiment" sensors).
I think there are a number of other examples that I have listed in the comments to this post that I think would show this. E.g. something in the space of "jewish person lies about their religious affiliation in order to escape discrimination that's unfair to them for something like scholarship money, of which they then donate a portion (partially because they do want to offset the harm that came from being dishonest)", is I think a better experiment here.
I think people would interpret your post being pretty clearly and strongly against, in a way that doesn't seem very justified to me (my model of whether this is OK is pretty context-dependent, to be clear).
Yeah, sorry, I think you are right that as phrased this is incorrect. I think my phrasing implies I am talking about the average or median reader, who I don't expect to react in this way.
Across EA, I do expect reactions to be pretty split. I do expect many of the most engaged EAs to have taken statements like this pretty literally and to feel quite betrayed (while I also think that in-general the vast majority of people will have interpreted the statements as being more about mood-affiliation and to have not really been intended to convey information).
I do think that at least for me, and many people I know, my engagement with EA is pretty conditional on exactly the ability for people in EA to make ethical statements and actually mean them, in the sense of being interested in following through with the consequences of those statements, and to try to make many different ethical statements consistent, and losing that ability I do think would lose a lot of what makes EA valuable, at least for me and many people I know.
Fwiw I'd also say that most of "the most engaged EAs" would not feel betrayed or lied to (for the same reasons), though I would be more uncertain about that. Mostly I'm predicting that there's pretty strong selection bias in the people you're thinking of and you'd have to really precisely pin them down (e.g. maybe something like "rationalist-adjacent highly engaged EAs who have spent a long time thinking meta-honesty and glomarization") before it would become true that a majority of them would feel betrayed or lied to.
Thanks for this comment.
(Speaking for myself) I saw an earlier version of this post and thought that "strongest possible terms" didn't really make sense but didn't speak up. In retrospect this was a mistake.
I'm not sure when to surface "that doesn't feel exactly right" intuitions and speak up at all the correct times, since I feel like I have this intuition very often and if I comment all the time about them I'll come across as really nitpicky/uninteresting. And it's really hard to triage, like this comes up so often that I can't just do a (even a rushed and intuition-driven) cost-benefits analysis each time.[1]
Another salient example of a mistake in this genre was the FTX commercial. I thought it didn't make sense as an argument but like most commercials don't make sense on a literal level and I didn't really think too hard about why the FTX commercial was more deceptive than the usual "high-status unrelated activity! Buy our product!" line of messaging.
But again, it's unclear to me on how much to pay attention and when.
- ^
... (read more)EDIT: One heuristic I try to go through is something like "is this mistake central to the argument?" But as established in our other comme
(Speaking for myself) I'm pretty confused why you think this post is net negative (which I interpret "dispreference" to mean). I think the additional informational value the post has in the first paragraph is low, while the rest of the post clearly has a lot more content that's salient to collaborators/funders/future employees etc, as well as help people unaffiliated with RP orient on things that's less related to the failures of FTX itself (e.g. in terms of risk management).
I'm not disputing that the post might be net negative (consequentialist morality is hard), I'm just surprised that all of your evidence seems to come from one paragraph (and in my opinion, the least interesting one).
Seems kind of crazy to me, for what it's worth. Really seems like if someone's life was at stake, that you should do something else than just "not tolerate it".
Like, we do live in a world where our grandparents (or parents) were sometimes faced with the real decision on whether to lie to gestapo officers about the jews in their basement. Please, if you are an accountant and you have to do some slight tweaking of numbers to save the jews in your basement, please do that. This is not a pure hypothetical, misappropriating funds under immoral and illegal regimes is an actual decision that people alive right now, and people in the future will face.
Maybe it is the right call for you to swear some undying oath to the accounting principles, but I don't think most people should do that.
My impression is that in the business world, "fraud" is pointing at a cluster of actions that's more specific than most simple definitions. I'd assume that there are incredibly few cases where businesses are actually in situations where they feel they need to commit fraud to save a life or similar, especially in Western countries.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were even legal loopholes for these extreme hypothetical-like situations. Like, the person could say they were under effective duress.
My guess is that basically any of us would agree to hypotheticals or thought experiments that were wild enough. Like, "What if you knew with absolute certainty that America would be completely nuked unless your business commits a tiny amount of fraud? Would you do it then?"
I'm confused about this comment tbh. I can't tell if we just have very different life experiences or if there is some cognitive fallacy thing going on where it's easier to generate examples for my position than examples against my position.
For example, (in my family's lore) my grandfather was asked to cover up a (as I understand it) minor instance of corruption by his superior. He refused to do so, and was majorly screwed over during Cultural Revolution times as a result. Now this example isn't a clean one since "doing the right thing, even when it's hard" here pointed against fraud, and he in fact did not choose to do so. But I think I would not have faulted him if he chose protecting his family over loyalty to the party for some pretty minor thing. Particularly since his actual choice could easily have counterfactually resulted in my own non-existence.
As another example, at least some forms of American whistleblower animal activism involve skirting the edges of ag-gag laws, which may involve falsifying documents to be allowed access to factory farms to be able to film atrocities. Now maybe their moves here are unethical (I personally would hesitate to lie to an employer to that e... (read more)
Yep, I think we are indeed living in pretty interesting times!
I think both my parents and grandparents in Germany faced similar decisions, and definitely within the last 50 years (half of Germany was under USSR occupancy around 30 years ago!).
Something being "a democracy" is I think only a weak filter on the actual need for this. The U.S. had various anti-gay and anti-communism periods in which I think lying to the government or committing fraud seemed very likely the way to go (e.g. I personally am sympathetic, though very tentatively still overall opposed to the people who committed minor fraud to e.g. dodge the draft for the vietnam war, and definitely in favor of military personnel who lied about their sexual orientation for most of the last 50 years).
I also think racism was a serious enough problem within the last 50 years that I would not judge someone if they had lied about their race in various government documents in order to gain access to fair treatment, and of course anti-semitism has been rampant enough that lying about your religious affiliation to the government or universities, even within the U.S. was an action I would not judge people too badly for.&nb... (read more)
Okay, that's where I misunderstood you - lying to the government is not what I think of when condemning fraud. I think lying to government can be very serious and is often done too flippantly, but it's not what I thought you were defending. In my mind, fraud is primarily about stealing money, and I just couldn't figure out how you were defending that.
I’m very proud to be part of an organization that was so prudent with money and managing risk.
Thank you for being forthcoming and transparent. I am grateful to see people in positions of leadership doing this.
We have now also published a post about our impact, our strategy and our funding needs for 2023.
[I work as RP's director of development.]
Also, we are looking for board members to improve financial and legal oversight of our organization and increase accountability for our leadership: https://careers.rethinkpriorities.org/en/jobs/78036 (apply by Jan 13, 2023)
Reassuring to read that RP treated the pledged or anticipated crypto donations with caution, and about the crisis management exercises / stress tests. Perhaps others organisations can learn. Thanks.
This is the very beginning of forward leading in crisis, and individually, I appreciate the transparent communication in clarification of RP's current situation and strategies for the short term plan. Especially glad to be reassured that the current team is not affected by layoffs/cutdown in salaries. Though, I'm curios to know if this mean there will be potential on-going hiring freeze for certain positions? If so, which roles are to be expected on pause at RP's, or generally, in other longtermism-focused orgs in the Bay Area?
So cool! Is there any writeup of your thoughts here or how you approach these exercises?