This is mostly a counterpoint to Will Aldred/Duncan Sabien's post.
I'm not really an EA; haven't taken the pledge, don't work at an org, have been to no EA meetups in my life, (haven't been a speaker at EA Global).
However, I have been close to the EA community for a while, agreeing with many of its goals and donating to many of its key causes.
Reading Duncan's post made me want to defend the case for why I'm less approving of the EA community than before. I want to be a little specific about what I'm less approving of.
- EA™ - CEA / EVF (I'd never heard it called EVF before FTX)
- Will MacAskill personally
- Donation practices during the "funding overhang" era
There are some people/orgs I am more approving of:
- Peter Wildeford (and Rethink Priorities more generally)
- Rob Wiblin
- Dustin Moskovitz
I'm not going to say anything about Peter/Rob/Dustin in this post, although the amount I approve them more does not change the net effect, which is less approving of EA.
Lots of the reasons I am less approving of EA now than I was prior to FTX collapse are things I could have known. However I am aware of them because of the FTX collapse. Others might have already been aware of everything I'll mention, in which case I would agree with Duncan - with few exceptions, the communities reaction to the FTX collapse has been very good and I largely approve.
So, what have I learned since the FTX collapse which makes me approve less of EA?
- Will MacAskill:
- Initial reactions thread I read this as both minimizing the event and distancing himself from SBF, which is not credible in light of:
- Elon relationship - you don't go and bat for someone with the richest guy in the world unless you are confident in who you're batting for
- Their long history of a close relationships (shared board memberships, his earlier mentorship etc)
- Guzey's review (this episode is why I'm posting as a throwaway)
- Initial reactions thread I read this as both minimizing the event and distancing himself from SBF, which is not credible in light of:
- Equivocal statements during the early crisis:
- Will MacAskill
- Holder Karnofsky (note the edit and Alexander Berger's comments before blaming Holden)
- There were more statements I was annoyed with at the time, but I can't remember enough of the specifics to search them right now. If I remember them, I will add them here. (Part of my praise for Rob was his statement was in sharp contrast of what was coming out at the time)
- Wytham Abbey - I don't especially want to relitigate this but it makes me think less of EA - you can read many takes on EAF - probably the fairest place to start is the reasoning for why it was bought.
- People who received funding in dubious ways and didn't say anything (North Dimension donating on behalf of FTX Future fund)
- EA (generally) treating FTX as something which "happened" to them, rather than being something they were intimately involved in. (Initial funding for Alameda coming from the EA community, ...)
- I suspect (but can't prove) that the EA orgs are using the excuse of legal advice / legal threats to avoid saying things they don't want to say for other reasons. (And my suspicion is that this is because they have done something which could be bad)
- People in the community knew SBF's image was manufactured to some degree but didn't say anything (general take from forum - summarized in this New Yorker piece)
- EA's earlier relationship with a sketchy billionaire (and the degree to which this was covered up)
All of these things put together are enough for me to downgrade my opinion of EA. I've put this together from off the top of my head, so there are likely other things which have affected my view over the last month. To be clear - I am still very much in favor of EA principles, the EA community and will continue to donate to EA causes but will be a little more cautious around trusting the community's view of people and especially cautious around organizations linked to CEA / Will MacAskill.
Edit 1 2022-12-18: Fixed typo in link
DMMF - I share your first concern, that many young EAs seem to have quite a bit of ageism, distrust of legacy systems, contempt for tradition, arrogance about being able to reinvent complex systems from first principles, and wariness of welcoming mid-career and senior experts into the EA community.
This youthful arrogance is partly merited. Traditional charity circa 2000 (before GiveWell) was an unaccountable, unempirical grift that was better suited to virtue signaling, status seeking, and wealthy in-group power games, than to actually helping people or animals. EA challenging this legacy system was entirely right, proper, and helpful. Consequentialist moral philosophy, sentientism (eg about animal welfare), randomized trials, cost-benefit reasoning, scope-sensitivity, etc were crucial and revolutionary developments at the foundation of EA.
However, applied to other domains, subcultures, professions, legacy systems, and cultural traditions, that youthful arrogance can be quite misguided. Especially in the domain of financial accounting, corporate management, and business ethics. SBF seemed to think that he could ignore all the accumulated wisdom of the past few centuries about how to run a company, and protect users and investors. The result was, from the perspective of experienced business managers, risk managers, and accountants, and highly predictable catastrophe (for anyone who actually knew the inner workings of Alameda/FTX).
So, one takeaway from this whole FTX debacle is that maybe EAs should be a little more selective about when to challenge tradition and try to reinvent things from first principles, versus when to respect tradition, expertise, and domain knowledge.
This is a tricky and delicate balancing act, but I think science provides an example of how to get that balance roughly right. Young scientists in grad school quickly learn that almost every new idea that they think is earth-shaking and ground-breaking was already thought about by the late 1800s, or 1950s, or whenever. With great scholarship comes great humility. Only after they've mastered a fair amount of the literature in some domain are they equipped to make even modest contributions at the cutting edge of thinking. And only in the rarest cases can a true genius overturn a major established paradigm.
The early EA geniuses managed to overturn the existing charity paradigm, and that was great. But with that initial success, we must be wary of developing a generalized hubris about overturning every tradition we see, and challenging every expert we meet.