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.
I think it's worth mentioning that just yesterday, WSJ posted an article whose first paragraph depicted EA as banditry.
Dozens of people interviewed by journalists from reputable news outlets over the last several years have claimed that their statements were taken out of context, occasionally in total contradiction to several promises and agreements that they made with the journalist before the interview.
There's no need to overcomplicate things; articles with funky villains get more clicks. It's as simple as that.
The first paragraph is this:
"If the rise of Sam Bankman-Fried was a modern tale about cryptocurrency tokens and “effective altruism,” his fall seems to be as old as original sin. “This is really old-fashioned embezzlement,” John Ray, the caretaker CEO of the failed crypto exchange FTX, told the House on Tuesday. “This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose, not sophisticated at all.”"
I don't think that amounts to depicting EA as banditry. The subject is Sam Bankman-Fried, not the effective altruism movement.
I think it makes more sense to look at articles that Rachel has written about SBF/EA. Here's one:
I (very briefly) skimmed it and didn't see any major red flags.
I think this is a better article to link to https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moral-vanity-of-sam-bankman-fried-delusion-charity-morals-big-think-ftx-cryptocurrency-twitter-philanthropy-11669846009 (unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/cLPvN )
“Sam Bankman-Fried said he wanted to prevent nuclear war and stop future pandemics.” It gives new meaning to thinking big. It’s also delusional, which has become a political characteristic of his generation. [...]
It’s no surprise Mr. Bankman-Fried would think his cryptocurrency profits could prevent nuclear war. [...] He is describing what has come to be known in our time as virtue signaling, which is the current version of moral vanity—the presumption that doing good deserves the public’s support and esteem. But why has this urge to assert public virtue in outsize ways become a mass movement? People who did good used to be humble. Now they won’t get out of our faces.
One inevitably cynical answer is politics. The political left embraced the technique known as “controlling the narrative,” which is a euphemism for propaganda. The new element in our time is that these “narratives” always include sweeping, if vague, claims of moral certitude and superiority. [...]
The purpose of this moral grandiosity isn’t to engage one’s opponents but to marginalize them, to place them beyond the pale of what the new gatekeepers of virtue define as acceptable discourse. [...]
Overlooked in the Bankman-Fried saga is the implicit admission inside the idea of effective altruism that capitalism—for-profit enterprise—is the indispensable means to good ends.
I think it makes more sense to look at articles that Rachel has written about SBF/EA. Here's one:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-frieds-plans-to-save-the-world-went-down-in-flames-11669257574.
I (very briefly) skimmed it and didn't see any major red flags.