This is a linkpost for https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/28/sam-bankman-fried-effective-truism-fraud/
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EA's CEO says Sam Bankmann-Fried was never an effective altruist
I don't think the piece says that.
The title of the piece is: "Sam Bankman-Fried, the effective altruist who wasn’t." I don't think <the self-styled effective altruist who actually wasn't one> is an implausible interpretation of that ambiguous title. Other plausible-to-me interpretations include: <the former effective altruist who wasn't one at the end">, <the effective altruist who wasn't a true EA>, etc.
Of course, "EA's CEO" wasn't accurate (which the linkposter changed), and I would not assume that the CEO wrote the headline. But I do think a lack of clarity in the headline is at play here.
I think it's a pretty important distinction that "EA" is a question which has no CEO, while the Centre for Effective Altruism does. I recommend changing the title here.
I think it's a nice op-ed; I also appreciate the communication strategy here—anticipating that SBF's sentencing will reignite discourse around SBF's ties to EA, and trying to elevate the discourse around that (in particular by highlighting the reforms EA has undertaken over the past 1.5 years).
I haven't downvoted, but this is attracting several downvotes, and I thought I'd try to articulate some negative feelings I have here:
- First, as Stefan has noted, the summary seems inaccurate: Zach's article nowhere claims that Sam was never an effective altruist
- I think it's bad form to put sensationalist takeaways in a summary when they don't appear in the article, and feel not great about the link as a result
- I do think that seeing it linked in this way primed me to be more negative about the article (and the notes below reflect that)
- I have mixed feelings about that (maybe it would have been better to see it without anchoring, but also there's something good about looking at things we love with critical eyes)
- Second cluster, some negativity towards the article
- Could be summarized as "Except ... it's kind of right, though?" of the summary linked here. While the article never says Sam was never an EA in so many words, that's kind of the vibe that's carried through it
- It doesn't acknowledge the (IMO real) possibility that Sam's errors were in part inspired by misguided readings of effective altruism
- The judge slammed Sam in part for "evasive, hairsplitting" testimony and "never a word of remorse"
- It seems like maybe Zach's article errs just a little in these directions (although far less egregiously, and certainly not lying or covering up any crime)
- I have some feeling like it may be appropriate to go out of the way now (and especially on this topic) to try not to make any of Sam's mistakes
- The judge slammed Sam in part for "evasive, hairsplitting" testimony and "never a word of remorse"
- I have mixed feelings about the impact I expect this to have on readers
- I think it says a lot of true things and I think that if taken at face value will make many people's impressions more accurate
- However, I also think some proportion of insightful readers may pick up on some PR-vibes and have this reinforce an impression that effective altruism may still be vulnerable to some of the errors that Sam made
- Probably it's good overall, compared to no such article? But I wonder if there might have been some version of the article that I'd have felt more straightforwardly good about
I guess that many of the downvotes are likely based on one or the other of these clusters (or both, although the two complaints are in some tension with one another).
(edited for clarity and to restructure the bullet point nesting)
Phew! It's much harder to write an effective (no pun intended) headline than I thought! :-). Have changed it to include an actual quote, which I hope is sufficiently representative of the article's content.
You can use https://archive.is/ to read paywalled articles, depending on your ethical views on the matter
See also what I wrote in my LinkedIn post on this topic:
I strong downvoted this because it is predominately about the commenter's dispute with the Sortition Foundation, apart from a short summary of the op-ed. In my view, posting that material directly on the Forum would have been significantly off-topic, and I don't think doing so with a link that does not disclose the predominant topic of the linked material is meaningfully better.
I'm surprised by the vehemence of your response to my LinkedIn post on Zach Robinson's SBF article. I don't think that my additional personal experience example of betrayal by the Sortition Foundation was off-topic at all - quite the contrary. Do you not think that it was helpful to point out the similarity of SBF's behaviour with that of the Sortition Foundation?
Additionally, can you not find room within your response to appreciate the fact that an EA organisation, 80,000 Hours, through its influence on me, has had a positive effect on humanity's collective intelligence? Because without the decision, influenced by 80,000 hours, to leave a tenured post, I would not have had the time or brain power to devote to solving the problem of how to select participants for an instrument of collective intelligence fairly and legitimately.
Without my contribution of the missing puzzle piece, geospatial sortition, such a historic first, the world's first global citizens' assembly, could never have taken place. Where is your appreciation for that? EA's influence on an individual EA resulted in demonstrably positive good for the world, but the EA concerned was betrayed and harmed by a predatory organisation, just as the EA movement was betrayed and harmed by a predatory individual.
I do not think discussion of alleged misconduct by another organization is on-topic in a thread about unrelated misconduct merely because the person reporting the allegations was "influenced by" an EA podcast. That would turn every post relating to misconduct allegations into a megathread about any and all misconduct allegations from a very wide range of organizations, and would derail conversation about the initial topic.
I suspect you would not take kindly to a thread about alleged Sortition Foundation misconduct being derailed into a free-ranging discussion of (at best) very loosely analogous misconduct at unrelated organizations -- and you would be right to be annoyed in that case. I think Zach is owed the same courtesy here.
You are picking up some irritation on my end, some of which is due my view that your link was somewhat misleading. In my view, there is a norm here that someone posting a link should fairly characterize the contents of that link. I think your categorization of the link as "on this topic" was somewhat misleading and clickbaity.
The nature of the content didn't help. In my mind, it comes far too close to casually equating a dispute over authorship credit and IP to the largest financial fraud since Madoff. In my view, calling for a range of people to be put "in jail" and calling an organization a "thie[f]" like SBF constitute hyperbole that runs afoul of the Forum's norms for civility, at least without some very strong evidence.
Assuming the Sortition Foundation is EA-adjacent enough to make its alleged misconduct an appropriate topic of discussion here -- a question on which I express no opinion -- there was an appropriate way to bring it up on the Forum. A link on an unrelated thread that did not fairly disclose its content was not it.
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See also what I wrote in my LinkedIn post on this topic:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deborah-wa-foulkes_opinion-sam-bankman-fried-the-effective-activity-7179153232173092867-lHiQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
I do not think discussion of alleged misconduct by another organization is on-topic in a thread about unrelated misconduct merely because the person reporting the allegations was "influenced by" an EA podcast. That would turn every post relating to misconduct allegations into a megathread about any and all misconduct allegations from a very wide range of organizations, and would derail conversation about the initial topic.
I suspect you would not take kindly to a thread about alleged Sortition Foundation misconduct being derailed into a free-ranging d... (read more)