I’m Rachel Ensign, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. I’m looking to connect with folks in the EA community who crossed paths with Sam Bankman-Fried and thought this forum may be a good place to find them.
If you fit that bill, please feel free to reach out. My contact information is 917-769-0847 or rachel.ensign@wsj.com.
Rachel
A reminder to all that the Community Health team at CEA offers support and guidance for responding to media enquiries, and can be contacted by at media@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Rachel, they also might be a helpful place to start for your enquiry.
To the rest of the forum:
I strongly recommend people on the EA forum do not downvote outsiders, especially an actual WSJ journalist writing a story about EA, unless they actually post content that violate forum norms or rules.
I (very briefly) skimmed it and didn't see any major red flags.
With less intensity, we should discourage the framing of "auditing" very established journalists for red flags, or create "whitelists" for such. There are situations this is valid (but not for the WSJ!). This is hard to calibrate and communicate.
Zooming out, there's a lot of say here about the voting and forum. There's this "beauty contest" that exists mainly inside the heads of a few on this forum. This behavior is entirely transparent and probably will backfire.
with less intensity, we should discourage the framing of 'auditing' very established journalists for red flags
Why? If I was making a decision to be interviewed by Rachel or not, probably the top thing I'd be worried about is whether they've previously written not-very-journalistic hit pieces on tech-y people (which is not all critical pieces in general! some are pretty good and well researched). I agree that there's such thing as going too far, but I don't think my comment was doing that.
I think "there are situations this is valid (but not for the WSJ!)" is wrong? There have been tons of examples of kind of crap articles in usually highly credible newspapers. For example, this article in the NYT seemed to be pretty wrong and not that good.
No, I don't, I just noticed a number of people in that thread were using their real names. One of them even posted this meme on their twitter :
https://web.archive.org/web/20211114183540/https://twitter.com/LinchZhang/status/1459951267401273345
P.S. You should probably check out the drama regarding the purchase of a stately mansion called Wytham Abbey by the Effective Ventures Fund (formerly Centre for Effective Altruism).
To make a long story short: Two of EVF's board members (Will MacAskill and Nick Beckstead) were selected by SBF to be on the FTX Future Fund leadership team (FTX Future Fund being a "charitable" arm of FTX). Under their leadership, the FTX Future Fund donated millions to EVF-afflilated charities (including ~$14million for an EVF subsidiary also called the Centre for Effective Altruism) . While this was happening, EVF was finalizing the purchase of a stately mansion near Oxford England that was listed for £15 million.
However, the purchase was made without the community's knowledge, we only found out because of a New Yorker article about SBF. An EVF board member claims (without documentation) that FTX money was not used in the purchase of the mansion, but also made it apparent that the purchase probably would not have been made if the additional cashflow from FTX hadn't covered the cost.
I doubt any journalist reading this Forum will have missed the Wytham thread, but here it is anyway (including long comments from both the funder and main grantee).
I think there's a reasonable & worth-having discussion to be had about this, but the connection to FTX implied here seems very tenuous to me. Tony has made similar (& similarly-vague) allegations in several places on the Forum in the last couple of days, and I'm still not sure what he's actually alleging.
I doubt any journalist reading this Forum will have missed the Wytham thread, but here it is anyway (including long comments from both the funder and main grantee).
I think there's a reasonable & worth-having discussion to be had about this, but the connection to FTX implied here seems very tenuous to me. Tony has made similar (& similarly-vague) allegations in several places on the Forum in the last couple of days, and I'm still not sure what he's actually alleging.