We were shocked and immensely saddened to learn of the recent events at FTX. Our hearts go out to the thousands of FTX customers whose finances may have been jeopardized or destroyed.
We are now unable to perform our work or process grants, and we have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund. As a result, we resigned earlier today.
We don’t yet have a full picture of what went wrong, and we are following the news online as it unfolds. But to the extent that the leadership of FTX may have engaged in deception or dishonesty, we condemn that behavior in the strongest possible terms. We believe that being a good actor in the world means striving to act with honesty and integrity.
We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor. We are so sorry that it has come to this. We are no longer employed by the Future Fund, but, in our personal capacities, we are exploring ways to help with this awful situation. We joined the Future Fund to support incredible people and projects, and this outcome is heartbreaking to us.
We appreciate the grantees' work to help build a better future, and we have been honored to support it. We're sorry that we won't be able to continue to do so going forward, and we deeply regret the difficult, painful, and stressful position that many of you are now in.
To reach us, grantees may email [email protected]. We know grantees must have many questions, and in our personal capacities we will try to answer them as best as we can given the circumstances.
Nick Beckstead
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Avital Balwit
Ketan Ramakrishnan
Will MacAskill
What do EA and the FTX Future Team think of a claim by Kerry Vaughan that Sam Bankman-Fried did severely unethical behavior before and EA and FTX covered it up and laundered his reputation, effectively getting away with it.
I'm posting because of true, this suggests big changes to EA norms are necessary to deal with bad actors like him, and that Sam Bankman-Fried should be outright banned from the forum and EA events.
Link to tweets here:
https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1590807597011333120
I want to clarify the claims I'm making in the Twitter thread.
I am not claiming that EA leadership or members of the FTX Future fund knew Sam was engaging in fraudulent behavior while they were working at FTX Future Fund.
Instead, I am saying that friends of mine in the EA community worked at Alameda Research during the first 6 months of its existence. At the end of that period, many of them suddenly left all at once. In talking about this with people involved, my impression is:
1) The majority of staff at Alameda were unhappy with Sam's leadership of the company. Their concerns about Sam included concerns about him taking extreme and unnecessary risks and losing large amounts of money, poor safeguards around moving money around, poor capital controls, including a lack of distinction between money owned by investors and money owned by Alameda itself, and Sam generally being extremely difficult to work with.
2) The legal ownership structure of Alameda did not reflect the ownership structure that had been agreed to by the parties involved. In particular, Sam registered Alameda under his sole ownership and not as jointly owned by him and his cofounders. This was not thought to be a problem because everyone trusted each other as EAs.
3) Eventually, the conflict got serious enough that a large cohort of people decided to quit all at once. Sam refused to honor the agreed ownership structure of Alameda and used his legal ownership to screw people out of their rightful ownership stake in Alameda Research.
4) Several high-ranking and well-respected members of the EA community with more familiarity with the situation believed that Sam had behaved unethically in his handling of the situation. I heard this from multiple sources personally.
5) I believe the basic information above circulated widely among EA leadership and was known to some members of FTX Future Fund.
A person who did work at Alameda during this period described Sam's behavior as follows:
Additionally, Jeffrey Ladish has a Twitter thread that further suggests that concerns about Sam's business practices were somewhat widespread.
Information about pre-2018 Alameda is difficult to obtain because the majority of those directly involved signed NDAs before their departure in exchange for severance payments. I am aware of only one employee who did not. The other people who can spreak freely on the topic are early investors in Alameda and members of the EA community who heard about Alameda from those directly involved before they signed their NDAs.
I want to add that I am reasonably afraid that my discussing this will make me some powerful enemies in the EA community. I didn't raise this issue sooner because of this concern. If anyone else wants to step up and reveal their information or otherwise help agitate strongly to ensure all the information about this situation comes to light, that would be most appreciated.
I think this is really important.
I was one of the people who left at the time described. I don't think this summary is accurate, particularly (3).
(1) seems the most true, but anyone who's heard Sam on a podcast could tell you he has an enormous appetite for risk. IIRC he's publicly stated they bet the entire company on FTX despite thinking it had a <20% chance of paying off. And yeah, when Sam plays league of legends while talking to famous investors he seems like a quirky billionaire; when he does it to you he seems like a dick. There are a lot of bad things I can say about Sam, but there's no elaborate conspiracy.
Lastly, my severance agreement didn't have a non-disparagement clause, and I'm pretty sure no one's did. I assume that you are not hearing from staff because they are worried about the looming shitstorm over FTX now, not some agreement from four years ago.
When said shitstorm dies down I might post more and under my real name, but for now the phrase "wireless mouse" should confirm me as someone who worked there at the time to anyone else who was also there.
I'm the person that Kerry was quoting here, and am at least one of the reasons he believed the others had signed agreements with non-disparagement clauses. I didn't sign a severance agreement for a few reasons: I wanted to retain the ability to sue, I believed there was a non-disparagement clause, and I didn't want to sign away rights to the ownership stake that I had been verbally told I would receive. Given that I didn't actually sign it, I could believe that the non-disparagement clauses were removed and I didn't know about it, and people have just been quiet for other reasons (of which there are certainly plenty).
I think point 3 is overstated but not fundamentally inaccurate. My understanding was that a group of senior leadership offered Sam to buy him out, he declined, and he bought them out instead. My further understanding is that his negotiating position was far stronger than it should have been due to him having sole legal ownership (which I was told he obtained in a way I think it is more than fair to describe as backstabbing). I wasn't personally involved in those negotiations, in part because I clashed with Sam probably worse than anyone else at the company, which likely would have derailed them.
That brings me to my next point, which is that I definitely had one of the most negative opinions of Sam and his actions at the time, and it's reasonable for people to downweight my take on all of this accordingly. That said, I do feel that my perspective has been clearly vindicated by current events.
I want to push back very strongly against the idea that this was primarily about Sam's appetite for risk. Yes, he has an absurd appetite for risk, but what's more important is what kinds of risks he has an appetite for. He consistently displayed a flagrant disregard for legal structures and safeguards, a belief that rules do not apply to him, and an inclination to see the ends as justifying the means. At this stage it's clear that what happened at FTX was fraud, plain and simple, and his decision to engage in that fraud was entirely in character.
(As a minor note, I can confirm that the "wireless mouse" phrase does validate ftxthrowaway as someone who was there at the time, though of course now that it has been used this way publicly once it will no longer be valid in the future.)
I'm curious if you (or any other "SBF skeptic") has any opinion regarding whether his character flaws should've been apparent to more people outside the organizations he worked at, e.g. on the basis of his public interviews. Or alternatively, were there any red flags in retrospect when you first met him?
I'm asking because so far this thread has discussed the problem in terms of private info not propagating. But I want to understand if the problem could've been stopped at the level of public info. If so that suggests that a solution of just getting better at propagating private info may be unsatisfactory -- lots of EAs had public info about SBF, but few made a stink.
I'm also interested to hear "SBF skeptic" takes on the extent his character flaws were a result of his involvement in EA. Or maybe something about being raised consequentialist as a kid? Like, if we believe that SBF would've been a good person if it weren't for exposure to consequentialist ideas, that suggests we should do major introspection.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from all of this is that while humans are quite good judges of character in general, we do a lot worse in the presence of sufficient charisma, and in those cases we can't trust our guts, even when they're usually right. When I first met SBF, I liked him quite a bit, and I didn't notice any red flags. Even during the first month or two of working with him, I kind of had blinders on and made excuses for things that in retrospect I shouldn't have.
It's hard for me to say about what people should have been able to detect from his public presence, because I haven't watched any of his public interviews. I put a fair amount of effort into making sure that news about him (or FTX) didn't show up in any of my feeds, because when it did I found it pretty triggering.
Personally, I don't think his character flaws are at all a function of EA. To me, his character seems a lot more like what I hear from friends who work in politics about what some people are like in that domain. Given his family is very involved in politics, that connection seems plausible to me. This is very uncharitable, but: from my discussions with him he always seemed a lot more interested in power than in doing good, and I always worried that he just saw doing good as an opportunity to gain power. There's obviously no way for me to have any kind of confidence in that assessment, though, and I don't think people should put hardly any weight on it.
Thanks for the reply!
In terms of public interviews, I think the most interesting/relevant parts are him expressing willingness to bite consequentialist/utilitarian bullets in a way that's a bit on the edge of the mainstream Overton window, but I believe would've been within the EA Overton window prior to recent events (unsure about now). BTW I got these examples from Marginal Revolution comments/Twitter.
This one seems most relevant -- the first question Patrick asks Sam is whether the ends justify the means.
In this interview, search for "So why then should we ever spend a whole lot of money on life extension since we can just replace people pretty cheaply?" and "Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?"
In any case, given that you think people should put hardly any weight on your assessment, it seems to me that as a community we should be doing a fair amount of introspection. Here are some things I've been thinking about:
We should update away from "EA exceptionalism" and towards self-doubt. (EDIT: I like this thread about "EA exceptionalism", though I don't agree with all the claims.) It sounds like you think more self-doubt would've been really helpful for Sam. IMO, self-doubt should increase in proportion to one's power. (Trying to "more than cancel out" the normal human tendency towards decreased self-doubt as power increases.) This one is tricky, because it seems bad to tell people who already experience Chidi Anagonye-style crippling self-doubt that they should self-doubt even more. But it certainly seems good for our average level of self-doubt to increase, even if self-doubt need not increase in every individual EA. Related: Having the self-awareness to know where you are on the self-doubt spectrum seems like an important and unsolved problem.
I'm also wondering if I should think of "morality" as being two different things: A descriptive account of what I value, and (separately) a prescriptive code of behavior. And then, beyond just endorsing the abstract concept of ethical injunctions, maybe it would be good to take a stab at codifying exactly what they should be. The idea seems a bit under-operationalized, although it's likely there are relevant blog posts that aren't coming to my mind. Like, I notice that the EA who's most associated with the phrase "ethical injunctions" is also the biggest advocate of drastic unilateral action, and I'm not sure how to reconcile that (not trying to throw shade -- genuinely unsure). EDIT: This is a great tweet; related.
Institutional safeguards are also looking better, but I was already very in favor of those and puzzled by lack of EA interest, so I can't say it was a huge update for me personally.
EA self-doubt has always seemed weirdly compartmentalized to me. Even the humblest of people in the movement is often happy to dismiss considered viewpoints by highly intelligent people on the grounds that it doesn't satisfy EA principles. This includes me - I think we are sometimes right to do so, but probably do so far too much nonetheless.
Seems plausible, I think it would be good to have a dedicated "translator" who tries to understand & steelman views that are less mainstream in EA.
Wasn't sure about the relevance of that link?
(from phone) That was an example of an ea being highly upvoted for dismissing multiple extremely smart and well meaning people's life's work as 'really flimsy and incredibly speculative' because he wasn't satisfied that they could justify their work within a framework that the ea movement had decided is one of the only ones worth contemplating. As if that framework itself isn't incredibly speculative (and therefore if you reject any of its many suppositions, really flimsy)
Thanks!
I'm not sure I share your view of that post. Some quotes from it:
...
...
...
I don't think any of these observations hinge on the EA framework strongly? Like, do we have reason to believe Andrew Carnegie spent a significant amount trying to figure out if libraries were a great donation target by his own lights, as opposed to according to the EA framework?
The thing that annoyed me about that post was that at the time it was written, it seemed to me that the EA movement was also fairly guilty of this! (It was written before the criticism/red teaming contest.)
I'm not familiar enough with the case of Andrew Carnegie to comment and I agree on the point of political tribalism. The other two are what bother me.
On the professor, the problem is there explicitly: you omitted a key line 'I tried asking for his opinion on existential threats', which is a strongly EA-identifying approach, and one which many people feel is too simplistic. Eg see Gideon Futurman's EAGx Rotterdam talk when it's up - he argues the way EAs think about x-risk is far too simplified, focusing on single-event narratives, ignoring countless possible trajectories that could end in extinction or similar any one of which is vanishingly unlikely, but which collectively we should take much more seriously. Whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems to me to be one a smart person could reasonably hold, and shows that by asking someone 'his opinion on existential threats, and which specific scenarios these space settlements would help with', you're pigeonholing them into EA-aligned specific-single-event way of thinking.
As for Elon Musk, I think the same problem is there implicitly: he's written a paper called 'Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species', spoken extensively on the subject and spent his life thinking that it's important, and while you could reasonably disagree with his arguments, I don't see any grounds for dismissing them as 'really flimsy and incredibly speculative' without engagement, unless your reason for doing so is 'there exists a pool of important research which contradicts them and which I think is correct'. There are certainly plenty of other smart people who think as he does, some of them EAs (though maybe that doesn't contribute to my original complaint). Since there's a very clear mathematical argument that it's harder to kill all of a more widespread and numerous civilisation, to say that the case is 'really flimsy', you basically need to assume the EA-aligned narrative that AI is highly likely to kill us all.
Thanks!
Well that's the thing -- it seems likely he didn't see his actions as contradicting those principles. Suggesting that they're actually a dangerous set of principles to endorse, even if they sound reasonable. That's what's really got me thinking.
I wonder if part of the problem is a consistent failure of imagination on the part of humans to see how our designs might fail. Kind of like how an amateur chess player devotes a lot more thought to how they could win than how their opponent could win. So if the principles Sam endorsed are at all recoverable, maybe they could be recovered via a process like "before violating common-sense ethics for the sake of utility, go down a massive checklist searching for reasons why this could be a mistake, including external observers in the decision if possible".
My guess is standard motivated reasoning explains why he thought he wasn't in violation of his stated principles.
Question, but why do you think the principles were dangerous, exactly? I am confused about the danger you state.
I think your first paragraph provides a potential answer to your second :-)
There's an implicit "Sam fell prey to motivated reasoning, but I wouldn't do that" in your comment, which itself seems like motivated reasoning :-)
(At least, it seems like motivated reasoning in the absence of a strong story for Sam being different from the rest of us. That's why I'm so interested in what people like nbouscal have to say.)
So you think there's too much danger of cutting yourself and everyone else via motivated reasoning, ala Dan Luu's "Normalization of Deviance" and the principles have little room for errors in implementing them, is that right?
Here's a link to it:
https://danluu.com/wat/
And a quote:
I'm not sure what you mean by "the principles have little room for errors in implementing them".
That quote seems scarily plausible.
EDIT: Relevant Twitter thread
Specifically, I was saying that wrong results would come up if you failed in one of the steps of reasoning, and there's no self-correction mechanism for bad reasoning like Sam Bankman-Fried was doing.
Can I ask the obvious question of whether you made money by shorting ftt? You were both one of the most anti-FTX and most still involved in crypto trading, so I suspect if you didn't then no one did.
Ps: apologies for burning the "wireless mouse" Commons. If others want to make throwaways, feel free to dm me what that is referring to and I will publicly comment my verification.
Also no non-disparagement clause in my agreement. FWIW I was one of the people who negotiated the severance stuff after the 2018 blowup, and I feel fairly confident that that holds for everyone. (But my memory is crappy, so that's mostly because I trust the FB post about what was negotiated more than you do.)
DM'd you.
Confirming this account made an Alameda research reference in my DMs.
… I assume you realise that that narrows you down to one of two people (given it's safe to assume Nishad is not currently spending his time on the EA Forum)
I do think I was probably just remembering incorrectly about this to be honest, I looked back through things from then and it looks like there was a lot of back-and-forth about the inclusion of an NDA (among other clauses), so it seems very plausible that it was just removed entirely during that negotiation (aside from the one in the IP agreement).
yep, not too worried about this. thanks for flagging :)
Here is some questions/content that might be interesting to discuss if you're interested?
I've been on leave from work due to severe burnout for the last couple months (and still am), and was intentionally avoiding seeing anything about SBF/FTX outside of work until recent events made that basically impossible. So no, I didn't personally trade on any of this at all.
Fair. Sorry to hear that, I hope you can go back to ignoring the situation soon!
Can you answer two questions related to the source of SBF's early business wealth?
Were the Kimchi arb returns real?
As you know, the "Kimchi premium" was this difference in BTC price between Korea (Japan?) and the rest of the world.
The narrative is that SBF arbed this price difference to make many millions and create his early wealth.
The Sequoia puff piece makes this cute story:
After SBF's fall, Twitter speculation says this is dubious.
This is because the cause of the Kimchi premium was strict legal capital controls, and the liquidity was orders of magnitude too small to produce the wealth in SBF later used. At best, SBF was actively breaking laws by this trade. The amount of money he could make may have been too small to justify the narratives around his early success.
Do you have any comments on the above?
Jaan Tallinn investment
Tallinn later ended up funding SBF with $50M.
What would you say to the speculation that it was this funding, and not the Kimchi arb , that really launched SBF's career?
If this is mostly true, the takeaway is that there's little cleverness or competency being expressed here here?
It seems like power, money and access led to SBF's success. This theme would fit with SBF's later behavior, with bluffing and overaweing spend.
That tradition seems hollow and bad, maybe contagious to the things that SBF created or touched.
This could be useful in some way? It seems like the vector EA or EA PR could take, could counter this.
I don't mind sharing a bit about this. SBF desperately wanted to do the Korea arb, and we spent quite a bit of time coming up with any number of outlandish tactics that might enable us to do so, but we were never able to actually figure it out. The capital controls worked. The best we could do was predict which direction the premium would go and trade into KRW and then back out of it accordingly.
Japan was different. We were able to get a Japanese entity set up, and we did successfully trade on the Japan arb. As far as I know we didn't break any laws in doing so, but I wasn't directly involved in the operational side of it. My recollection is that we made something like 10-30 million dollars (~90%CI) off of that arb in total, but I'm not at all confident on the exact amount.
Is that what created his early wealth, though? Not really. Before we all left, pretty much all of that profit had been lost to a series of bad trades and mismanagement of assets. Examples included some number of millions lost to a large directional bet on ETH (that Sam made directly counter to the predictions of our best event trader), a few million more on a large OTC trade in some illiquid shitcoin that crashed long before we could get out of it, another couple million in a series of XRP transfers that nobody noticed had never arrived, and that had fallen in value by something like 90% when they finally showed up much later, and various other random small things like a junior trader accidentally transferring half a million dollars of USDT to a BTC address (or something like that) due to a complete lack of safeguards on transfers, etc. Not to mention absurd levels of expenditures, e.g. an AWS bill that at one point reached about a quarter million dollars per month.
My knowledge of the story ends when we left, and my recollection is that at that point the Japan arb had long been closed and most of our profits from it had been squandered. I don't know how he achieved his later success, but if I were to guess, I'd say it probably has a lot more to do with setting up FTX, launching highly predatory instruments like leveraged ETF tokens on it, and doing similarly shady stuff to the things that brought it all crashing down, but during a bull market that made all of those risks pay off. That's entirely guesswork though, I have no inside knowledge about anything that happened after April 2018.
Note: All of this is purely from memory, I have not cross-checked it with anyone else who was there, and it could be substantially wrong in the details. It has been a long time, and I spent most of that time trying to forget all about it. I'm sharing this because I believe the broad strokes of it to be accurate, but please do not update too strongly from it, nor quote it without mentioning this disclaimer.
What about the GBTC arb trade? Did Alameda get into that during your time there?
Good question, but tbh I just don’t remember the answer.
Thank you for sharing, I can understand why you might be feeling burnt out!! I've been in a workplace environment that reminds me of this, and especially if you care about the people and projects there...it's painful.
Here is some questions/content that might be interesting to discuss?
(You might not want to given if your fatigue though.)
Thanks for sharing this nbouscal. How many people did you tell about this at the time?
Personally, I remember telling at least a handful of people at the time that Sam belonged in a jail cell, but I expect that people thought I was being hyperbolic (which was entirely fair, I was traumatised and was probably communicating in a way that signalled unreliability).
I was told that conversations were had with people in leadership roles in EA. I wasn’t part of those conversations and don’t know the full details of what was discussed or with whom.
It would be awesome for the names of senior people who knew to be made public, plus the exact nature of what they were told and their response or lack thereof.
I think this could be a nice-to-have, but really, I think it's too much to ask,
"For every senior EA, we want a long list of exactly each thing they knew about SBF"
This would probably be a massive pain, and much of the key information will be confidential (for example, informants who want to remain anonymous).
My guess is that there were a bunch of flags that were more apparent than nbouscal's stories.
I do think we should have really useful summaries of the key results. If there were a few people who were complicit or highly negligent, then that should be reported, and appropriate actions taken.
I strongly believe it is hyperrelevant to know who knew what, when so that these people are held to account. I don't think this is too much to ask, nor does it have to be arduous in the way you described of getting every name with max fidelity. I see so many claims that "key EA members knew what was going on" and never any sort of name associate with it.
I agree this is really important and would really, really want it to be figured out, and key actions taken. I think I'm less focused on all of the information of such a discovery being public, as opposed to much of it being summarized a bit.
A summary of sorts is being compiled here:
What would you suggest might be appropriate actions for complicity or negligence?
I don't feel like I'm in a good place to give a good answer. First, I haven't really thought about it nor am I an expert in these sorts of matters.
Second, I'm like several layers deep in funding structures that start with these people. It's sort of like asking me to publicly write what I love/hate, objectively, about my boss.
I think I could say that I'd expect appropriate actions to look a lot like they do with top companies (mainly ones without lots of known management integrity problems). At these companies, I believe that when some officials are investigated for potential issues, often they're given no punishment, and sometimes they're fired. It really depends on the details of the findings.
I think it is very important to understand what was known about SBF's behaviour during the initial Alameda breakup, and for this to be publicly discussed and to understand if any of this disaster was predictable beforehand. I have recently spoken to someone involved who told me that SBF was not just cavalier, but unethical and violated commonsense ethical norms. We really need to understand whether this was known beforehand, and if so learn some very hard lessons.
It is important to distinguish different types of risk-taking here. (1) There is the kind of risk taking that promises high payoffs but with a high chance of the bet falling to zero, without violating commonsense ethical norms, (2) Risk taking in the sense of being willing to risk it all secretly violating ethical norms to get more money. One flaw in SBF's thinking seemed to be that risk-neutral altruists should take big risks because the returns can only fall to zero. In fact, the returns can go negative - eg all the people he has stiffed, and all of the damage he has done to EA.
Are you in a position to be more specific about what SBF did that this is referring to?
no
In 2021 I tried asking about SBF among what I suppose you could call "EA leadership", trying to distinguish whether to put SBF into the column of "keeps compacts but compact very carefully" versus "un-Lawful oathbreaker", based on having heard that early Alameda was a hard breakup. I did not get a neatly itemized list resembling this one on either points 1 or 2, just heard back basically "yeah early Alameda was a hard breakup and the ones who left think they got screwed" (but not that there'd been a compact that got broken) (and definitely not that they'd had poor capital controls), and I tentatively put SBF into column 1. If "EA leadership" had common knowledge of what you list under items 1 or 2, they didn't tell me about it when I asked. I suppose in principle that I could've expended some of my limited time and stamina to go and inquire directly among the breakup victims looking for one who hadn't signed an NDA, but that's just a folly of perfect hindsight.
My own guess is that you are mischaracterizing what EA leadership knew.
Huh, I am surprised that no one responded to you on this. I wonder whether I was part of that conversation, and if so, I would be interested in digging into what went wrong.
I definitely would have put Sam into the "un-lawful oathbreaker" category and have warned many people I have been working with that Sam has a reputation for dishonesty and that we should limit our engagement with him (and more broadly I have been complaining about an erosion of honesty norms among EA leadership to many of the current leadership, in which I often brought up Sam as one of the sources of my concern directly).
I definitely had many conversations with people in "EA leadership" (which is not an amazingly well-defined category) where people told me that I should not trust him. To be clear, nobody I talked to expected wide-scale fraud, and I don't think this included literally everyone, but almost everyone I talked to told me that I should assume that Sam lies substantially more than population-level baseline (while also being substantially more strategic about his lying than almost everyone else).
I do want to add to this that in addition to Sam having a reputation for dishonesty, he also had a reputation for being vindictive, and almost everyone who told me about their concerns about Sam did so while seeming quite visibly afraid of retribution from Sam if they were to be identified as the source of the reputation, and I was never given details without also being asked for confidentiality.
Can you give some context on why Lightcone accepted a FTX Future Fund grant (a) given your view of his trustworthiness?
So far I have been running on the policy that I will accept money from people who seem immoral to me, and indeed I preferred getting money from Sam instead of Open Philanthropy or other EA funders because I thought this would leave the other funders with more marginal resources that could be used to better ends (Edit: I also separately thought that FTX Foundation money would come with more freedom for Lightcone to pursue its aims independently, which I do think was a major consideration I don't want to elide).
To be clear, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for the other end of this tradeoff, but I currently still believe that it's OK for EAs to take money from people whose values or virtues they think are bad (and that indeed this is often better than taking money from the people who share your values and virtues, as long as its openly and willingly given). I think the actual tradeoffs are messy, and indeed I ended up encouraging us to go with a different funder for a loan arrangement for a property purchase we ended up making, since that kind of long-term relationship seemed much worse to me, and I was more worried about that entangling us more with FTX.
To be again clear, I was not suspecting large-scale fraud. My sense was that Sam was working in a shady industry while being pretty dishonest in the way the crypto industry often is, but was primarily making money by causing tons of people to speculate in crypto while also being really good at trading against them and eating their lunch, which I think is like, not a great thing to do, but was ultimately within the law and was following reasonable deontological constraints in my opinion.
I am seriously considering giving back a bunch of the money we received. I also for pretty similar reasons think that giving that money back does definitely not entail giving that money back to FTX right now, who maybe are just staging a hack on their own servers (or are being hacked) and should not be trusted with more resources. I expect this will instead require some kind of more sophisticated mechanism of actually helping the people who lost funds (conditional on the bankruptcy proceedings not doing clawbacks, which I think is reasonable given that I think clawbacks are unlikely).
I think it personally might have been better to have a policy of refusing funds from institutions that I think are bad and have power in my social ecosystem, so that I feel more comfortable speaking out against them. I personally prefer the policy of taking their money while also having a policy of just speaking out against them anyways (Dylan Matthews did this in one of his Future Perfect articles in a way I find quite admirable), but I do recognize this is setting myself up for a lot of trust in my own future integrity, and it might be better to tie myself to a mast here.
I think the key damage caused by people in my reference class receiving funds from FTX was that they felt less comfortable criticizing FTX, and I think indeed in-retrospect I was more hesitant than I wish I would have been to speak out against Sam and FTX for this reason, and am currently spending a lot of my time trying to understand how to update and learn from this. It's pretty plausible to me that I fucked up pretty badly here, though I currently think my fuckup was not being more public about my concerns, and not the part where I accepted Sam's money. I also think confidentiality concerns were a major problem here, and it's pretty plausible another component of my fuckup was to agree to too much confidentiality in a way that limited what I could say here.
In situations like this, it might be a good habit to state reservations publicly at the same time you receive the grant? Then your accepting the grant isn't a signal that you endorse the grantmaker, and you can be less worried about your relationship with the grantmaker damaging your future ability to be candid. Either they stop giving you money, or they continue giving you money even though you badmouthed them (which makes it more clear that you have impunity to do so again in the future).
Interesting idea.
But it seems unrealistic to expect a recipient of a grant, upon receiving it, to publicly announce ethical and legal reservations about the grant-giver... and then for the grant-giver to be OK with that, and to follow through on providing the grant funding.
'Biting the hand that feeds you' doesn't typically result in good outcomes.
Sure, though I think altruistic grantmakers should want their grantees to criticize them (because an altruistic grantmaker should care more about getting useful and actionable criticism than about looking good in the moment), and I think a lot of EA grantmakers walk the walk in that respect. E.g., MIRI has written tons of stuff publicly criticizing Open Phil, even though Open Phil is by far our largest all-time funder; and I don't think this has reduced our probability of getting future Open Phil funding.
One advantage of the norm I proposed is that it can help make this a more normal and expected practice, and (for that reason) less risky than it currently is.
And since everything's happening in public, grantmakers can accumulate track records. If you keep defunding people when they criticize you (even when the criticisms seem good and the grant recipients seem worthy, as far as others can tell), others can notice this fact and dock the grantmaker reputational points. (Which should matter to grantmakers who are optimizing this hard for their reputation in the first place.)
Fair points. I guess if any community can create a norm where it's OK for grant receivers to criticize grantmakers, it's the EA community.
I was really just pointing out that creating and maintaining such an open, radically honest, self-reflective, criticism-welcoming culture is very much an uphill struggle, given human nature.
That's very surprising!!
Do you know if anybody attempted to propagate this information to any of the EAs who were promoting SBF publicly? (If so, do you know if they succeeded in conveying that information to them?)
And just to check, did any of the people who warn you privately promote SBF/FTX publicly?
I ask because it seems weird for a lot of EAs to be passing around warnings about SBF being untrustworthy while a lot of (other?) EAs are promoting him publicly; I very much hope these sets were disjoint, but also it's weird for them to be so disjoint, I would have expected better information flow.
Yep, I was and continue to be confused about this. I did tell a bunch of people that I think promoting SBF publicly was bad, and e.g. sent a number of messages when some news article that people were promoting (or maybe 80k interview?) was saying that "Sam sleeps on a bean bag" and "Sam drives a Corolla" when I was quite confident that they knew that Sam was living in one of the most expensive and lavish properties in the Bahamas and was definitely not living a very frugal livestyle. This was just at the same time as the Carrick stuff was happening, and I would have likely reached out to more people if I hadn't spent a lot of my social energy on pushing back on Carrick stuff at the time (e.g. ASB's piece on Carrick's character).
Overall, I did not message many people, and I personally did not speak out very publicly about my broader concerns. I also think a lot of that promotion was happening in a part of the EA ecosystem I interface much less with (80k, UK EAs, Will, etc.), and I've had historically somewhat tense relationships to that part of the ecosystem, so I did not have many opportunities to express my concerns.
It would be useful to say whether any of the people you told would be considered 'EA leadership'; and if so, who.
How can both of these be true:
If both of those are true, how many logical possibilities are there?
I find them all super implausible so I don't know what to think!
My understanding is that the answer is basically 2.
I'd love to share more details but I haven't gotten consent from the person who told me about those conversations yet, and even if I were willing to share without consent I'm not confident enough of my recollection of the details I was told about those conversations when they happened to pass that recollection along. I hope to be able to say more soon.
EDIT: I've gotten a response and that person would prefer me not to go into more specifics currently, so I'm going to respect that. I do understand the frustration with all of the vagueness. I'm very hopeful that the EA leaders who were told about all of this will voluntarily come forward about that fact in the coming days. If they don't, I can promise that they will be publicly named eventually.
My guess is different parts of leadership. I don't think many of the people I talked to promoted SBF a lot. E.g. see my earlier paragraph on a lot of this promotion being done by the more UK focused branches that I talk much less to.
That could very well be and there are a lot of moving parts. That is why I think it is important for people who supposedly warned leadership to say who was told and what they were told. If we are going to unravel this this all feels like necessary information.
The people who are staying quiet about who they told have carefully considered reasons for doing so, and I'd encourage people to try to respect that, even if it's hard to understand from outside.
My hope is that the information will be made public from the other side. EA leaders who were told details about the events at early Alameda know exactly who they are, and they can volunteer that information at any time. It will be made public eventually one way or another.
I respect that people who aren't saying what they know have carefully considered reasons for doing so.
I am not confident it will come from the other side as it hasn't to date and there is no incentive to do so.
May I ask why you believe it will be made public eventually? I truly hope that is the case.
The incentives for them to do so include 1) modelling healthy transparency norms, 2) avoiding looking bad when it comes out anyway, 3) just generally doing the right thing.
I personally commit to making my knowledge about it public within a year. (I could probably commit to a shorter time frame than that, that's just what I'm sure I'm happy to commit to having given it only a moment's thought.)
What do you find super implausible about 2?
If insiders were making serious accusations about his character to EA leadership and they went on to promote him that would be weird to me. Especially if many people did it which is what has been claimed. Of course I have no idea who “leadership” is because no one is being specific.
To be fair sometimes people make accusations that are incorrect? Your decision procedure does need to allow for the possibility of not taking a given accusation seriously. I don't know who knew what and how reasonable a conclusion this was for any given person given their state of knowledge, in this case, but also people do get this wrong sometimes, this doesn't seem implausible to me.
My decision procedure does allow for that and I have lots of uncertainties, but it feels that given many insiders claim to have warned people in positions of power about this and Sam got actively promoted anyway. If multiple people with intimate knowledge of someone came to you and told you that they thought person X was of bad character you wouldn't have to believe them hook line and sinker to be judicious about promoting that person.
Maybe this is the most plausible of the 3 and I shouldn't have called it super implausible, but it doesn't seem very plausible for me, especially from people in a movement that takes risks more seriously than any other that I know.
I found this comment annoying enough to read that I felt compelled to give a simplified version:
This removes some nuance, but maybe adds some clarity.
Edit: Reworded, see original here.
I did not say that it'd be good if somebody was a ruthless negotiator.
If you're going to paraphrase somebody, please be more careful to paraphrase things they actually said, by dereferencing, and not add implications you thought they meant.
I didn't say I was paraphrasing you, I said I was giving a simplified version. I also pointed out the sentence was not in the original.
Adding in an unflattering sentiment that was not said or clearly implied in the original is not "simplifying".
Ok, fine, reworded. You can still find the original here.
I consider this credible.
It suggests that my categorization of "EA leadership" was probably too broad and that fewer people knew the details of the situation than I believed.
That means there is a question of how many people knew. I am confident that Nick Beckstead and Will MacAskill knew about the broken agreement and other problems at Alameda. I am confident they are not the only ones that knew.
Why are you confident of that? In general, I think there's just less time and competence and careful checking to go around, in this world, than people would want to believe. This isn't Hieronym's To The Stars or the partially Hieronym-inspired world of dath ilan.
Huge thanks for spelling out the specific allegations about SBF's behavior in early Alameda; for the past couple days I'd been seeing a lot of "there was known sketchy stuff at Alameda in 2017-18" and it was kind of frustrating how hard it was to get any information about what is actually alleged to have happened, so I really appreciate this clear point-by-point summary.
Same here, this is really helping me understand the (at least perceived) narrative flow of events
I decided to speak about it because if true, it would imply bad things about how EA hasn't remembered the last time things went wrong.
In many senses, this is EA's first adversarial interaction, where we can't rely on internal norms of always cooperating anymore.
After the involved EAs consult with their lawyers, they may find a receptive audience to tell their stories at the Department of Justice or another federal agency. I would be shocked if the NDAs were effective as against cooperating with a federal investigation. If the quoted description is true, it seems relevant to the defense SBF seems to be trying to set up.
I knew about Sam's bad character early on, and honestly I'm confused about what people would have expected me to do.
I should have told people that Sam has a bad character and can't be trusted, that FTX is risky? Well, I did those things, and as far as I can tell, that has made the current situation less bad than it would have been otherwise (yes, it could have been worse!). In hindsight I should have done more of this though.
Should I have told the authorities that Sam might be committing fraud? All I had were vague suspicions about his character and hints that he might be dishonest, but no convincing evidence or specific worries about fraud. (Add jurisdictional problems, concerns about the competence of regulators, etc)
Should I not have "covered up" the early scandal? Well, EAs didn't, and I think Kerry's claim is wrong.
Should I have publicly spread concerns about SBF's character? That borders on slander. Also, I was concerned that SBF would permanently hate me after that (you might say I'm a coward, but hey, try it yourself).
Should I have had SBF banned from EA? Personally, I'm all for a tough stance, but the community is usually against complete bans of bad actors, so it just wasn't feasible. (EG, if I were in charge, Jacy and Kerry would be banned, but many wouldn't like that.)
SBF was powerful and influential. EA didn't really have power over him.
What could have been done better? I am sincerely curious to get suggestions.
My current, extremely tentative, sense of the situation is not that individuals who were aware of some level of dishonesty and shadiness were not open enough about it. I think individuals acted in pretty reasonable ways, and I heard a good amount of rumors.
I think the error likely happened at two other junctions:
I think if we had some kind of e.g. EA newspaper where people try to actively investigate various things that seem concerning, then I think this would have helped a bunch. This kind of thing could even be circulated privately, though a public version seems also good.
I separately also think that we should just much more deeply embed the virtues of honesty and truth-seeking into the core idea of EA. I think it shouldn't be possible to be seen as "an effective EA" without also being actually good at truth-seeking and helping other people orient to the world.
I think when a billionaire shows up with billions of dollars, or an entrepreneur builds a great company, I think it should just be a strict requirement that they are also honest and good at truth-seekingness in order to gain status and reputation within the community, in the same way that no matter how much money you make, people are not going to think you are a "good scientist" without actually having discovered new verifiable regularities in the natural world (you might be a "great supporter of science", but I think that doesn't usually mean you would get invited to all the scientific conferences, or get the Nobel Prize, or something, and I think people would have a healthy understanding of the relationship of you to the rest of the scientific ecosystem).
Agree with much of what you say here. (Though I don't think we currently have strong enough evidence to single out specific EA leaders as being especially responsible for the recent tragic events; at least I don't think I personally have that kind of information.)
As a substitute, or complement, to an investigative EA newspaper, what do you think about an "EA rumours" prediction market?[1] Some attractive features of such a market:
I think this market would need judicious moderation to function well and avoid being abused. But overall it seems to me like it might be an idea worth exploring further, and of the sort that could make future events in the same reference class as the FTX debacle less likely to happen.
By 'market', I do not necessarily mean a real-money prediction market like Polymarket or PredictIt; it could also be a play-money market like Manifold Markets or a forecasting platform like Metaculus.
Yeah, I feel excited about something in this space. Generally I feel like prediction markets have a lot of good things going for them in situations like this, though I do worry that they will somehow just end up gamed when the stakes are high. Like, my guess is Sam could have likely moved the probability of a market here a lot, either with money, or by encouraging other people to move it.
Should EA people just be way more aggressive about spreading the word (within the community, either publicly or privately) about suspicions that particular people in the community have bad character?
(not saying that this is an original suggestion, you basically mention this in your thoughts on what you could have done differently)
Confirming that this account DM'd me with information indicating that they worked at Alameda.
I'm unclear how to update on this, but note that Kerry Vaughan was at CEA for 4 years, and a managing director there for one year before, as I understand it, being let go under mysterious circumstances. He's now the program manager at a known cult that the EA movement has actively distanced itself from. So while his comments are interesting, I wouldn't treat him as a particularly credible source, and he may have his own axe to grind.
All this conversation about Leverage and Kerry's motives and character misses the point that he's talking about events that have little to nothing to do with him. He's saying that there was a blowup at Alameda early on reflecting badly on SBF that lots of EA leaders knew about and turned a blind eye to. This can be investigated and confirmed or denied without delving into conversations about Leverage or Kerry that are besides the point at hand.
To the extent that Kerry's allegation involves his own judgment of Sam's actions as bad or shady, I think it matters that there's reason not to trust Kerry's judgment or possibly motives in sharing the information. However we should definitely try to find out what actually happened and determine whether it was truly predictive of worse behavior down the line.
Agreed! IMO it's good for people to be aware that Kerry has an axe to grind; but the thing to do with that information is to look into the matter further.
I commented above that I think Kerry's comment is incorrect, so I feel obligated to state that I have no reason to think this is the result of bias. I am inclined to think he's doing the best he can in an information-scarce environment.
I retract this comment. Kerry has continued repeating the same claim on Twitter without noting that there's disagreement about its truth. This does not seem like unbiased behavior.
The claim on Twitter is different.
Can you clarify what you think is unfair? Happy to issue a correction.
https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1591508739236188160?t=qL-dGKXar3b7EQ4EHs597Q&s=19
Edit: if anyone else wants to take a stab at explaining why the Twitter thread is unfair given this thread feel free. Would want to issue a correction sooner rather than later.
-1 on this comment. In particular, being at CEA for 4 years seems like something which makes criticism more plausible. And it's not surprising that EA has distanced itself from groups critical of us (while I have some concerns about Leverage, I think there are a bunch of ways that they've been treated unfairly).
Hard disagree on Leverage. They've absorbed a tonne of philanthropic funding over the years to produce nothing but pseudoscience and multiple allegations of emotional abuse.
I'm not saying Kerry wouldn't know about this stuff - I think he likely does. I'm saying a) that he was one of the 'top leaders' he refers to, so had ample chance to do something about this himself, b) he has a track record of questionable integrity, and c) he has potential motive to undermine the people he's criticising.
I think this comment is a pretty clear example of one way in which Leverage has been treated unfairly, which is that people lump "not very productive" and "abusive" into a single criticism. The latter is much more serious, but the former is much easier to quickly verify, and so the former ends up lending credibility to the latter even though I personally think we probably have too few groups taking philanthropic funding to do crazy research that may end up looking like pseudoscience.
To be very clear, I'm not claiming that Leverage was not an abusive environment, and I take the allegations you mention very seriously. I've just also seen people piling onto Leverage in not-very-careful ways that I'm not very happy about.
I'm not a fan of Leverage, but I agree with Richard here. I think Kerry is better modeled as "normal philosophy-friendly EA" with the modifications "less conflict-averse than the average EA" and "mad at EA (for plenty of good reasons and also plenty of bad reasons, IMO) and therefore pretty axe-grindy". If you model him with a schema closer to "crazy cultist" than to "bitter ex-EA", I expect you to make worse predictions.
I’m guessing I have a lower opinion of Leverage than you based on your tone, but +1 on Kerry being at CEA for 4 years making it more important to pay serious attention to what he has to say even if it ultimately doesn’t check out. We need to be very careful to minimize tribalism hurting our epistemics.
For what it's worth, these different considerations can be true at the same time:
So I would personally be inclined to pay close attention to his criticisms of CEA. At the same time, I would need more "positive" contexts from others to be able to trust what he says.
I agree that these can technically all be true at the same time, but I think the tone/vibe of comments is very important in addition to what they literally say, and the vibe of Arepo's comment was too tribalistic.
I'd also guess re: (3) that I have less trust in CEA's epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage's , though I'm uncertain here (edited to add: tbc my best guess is it's better, but I'm not sure what my prior should be if there's a "he said / she said" situation, on who's telling the truth. My guess is closer to 50/50 than 95/5 in log odds at least).
I agree that the tone was too tribalistic, but the content is correct.
(Seems a bit like a side-topic, but you can read more about Leverage on this EA Forum post and, even more importantly, in the comments. I hope that's useful for you! The comments definitely changed my views - negatively - about the utility of Leverage's outputs and some cultural issues.)
I've read it. I'd guess we have similar views on Leverage, but different views on CEA. I think it's very easy for well-intentioned, generally reasonable people's epistemics to be corrupted via tribalism, motivated reasoning, etc.
But as I said above I'm unsure.
Edited to add: Either way, might be a distraction to debate this sort of thing further. I'd guess that we both agree in practice that the allegations should be taken seriously and investigated carefully, ideally by independent parties.
Mea culpa for not being clear enough. I don't think handwavey statements from someone whose credibility I doubt have much evidential value, but I strongly think CEA's epistemics and involvement should be investigated - possibly including Vaughan's.
I find it bleakly humourous to be interpreted as tribalistically defending CEA when I've written gradually more public criticisms of them and their lack of focus -and honestly, while I don't understand thinking they're as bad as Leverage, I think they've historically probably been a counterfactual negative for the movement, and don't have a good sense of whether things have improved.
Thanks for clarifying. To be clear, I didn't say I thought they were as bad as Leverage. I said "I have less trust in CEA's epistemics to necessarily be that much better than Leverage's , though I'm uncertain here"
I thought CEA started the movement?
As I understood it, CEA was originally just a legal entity to save 80k and GWWC from having to both individually get charitable status, though GWWC had been around in some form since maybe 2007ish, and 80k for a year or two (and Givewell, which had started about the same time as CEA and arguably has as good a claim to having started it had no formal association with any of these orgs). The emerging movement might have taken its name from the new org, or maybe just started using the phrase in response to the poll result.
At some stage IIRC, CEA started taking on more responsibilities and distanced itself, and eventually split from its child orgs. From that point on, I feel like they have generally not been well run - the staff seem to have been hired for enthusiasm and allegiance to the cause, and sometimes apparent nepotism (they seem to have hired internally for quite a few positions) rather than competence. As far as I can tell, staff have neither a carrot to motivate them or a stick: I know of only two examples of CEA employees being pushed out, one of who was CEO, and those were, as I understand it, for behaviour that was unambiguously termination-worthy (CEA may not want to disclose details of specific individuals being let go, and if that has happened those individuals might understandably not want to talk about it either, but the org doesn't eg have a clear policy for expecting high standards). Meanwhile they run multiple programs, the nature of which is constantly changing and lacks meaningful outcome metrics, meaning both that it's hard to gauge how well they do what they do, and hard for alternative organisations to offer them high fidelity competition.
(excuse all the self-citations - I don't know anyone else who's been publicly writing anything highly critical of CEA since the funds criticism, though I've had a number of conversations with people who're also cynical about the org. I've been fairly reluctant go on record with these views myself, and suspect I'm harming myself in expectation by doing so, since I'm interested in doing future EA-funded work)
To be clear a) I don't think all CEA staff have been bad - some I think highly of, the vast majority I have no specific opinion of, just that the overall org has generally functioned ineffectively, b) most of the specific actions I have in mind date back at least a couple of years, before Max Dalton became ED, and c) I had a recent conversation with him and gave him these concerns, which he seemed somewhat open to. So it may be that they're in a much better state under him. But I'm also wary of under-new-management-itis, under which a nonprofit org can't be criticised for a couple or years after a change - which potentially puts the org beyond reproach if it cycles EDs often enough.
But good on you for being brave enough to publicly criticise your funding sources ("I have received EA funding in multiple capacities, and feel quite constrained in my ability to criticise CEA publicly") or people you like ("I like everyone I've interacted with from CEA").
I really like this comment, and I agree with it.
++++
Why would being dismissed from CEA and being part of Leverage mean he has an axe to grind regarding SBF?
Regarding 'top EA leaders' knowing about it (see further in the thread).
If you'd like to investigate whether Leverage was a cult, there are now several additional sources of information available.
One source is Cathleen's post which is detailed, extensive, and written directly by a former employee. A board member conducted their own investigation into what Leverage could have done better between 2012 and 2019 by conducting interviews with former members of Leverage staff.
You can also view Leverage's website to learn more about what we've been working on post-2019. The fact that I work at Leverage is best explained by my having a very different view of the organization's history and current work than you do.
In any case, I don't see why disagreements about the value of Leverage's current or past work have anything to do with the specific claims I've made about what happened at Alameda in 2018.
I’d also recommend reading Zoe Curzi’s essay about her own (traumatic) experience at Leverage, the publishing of which was publicly supported by Leverage founder Geoff Anders.
At least judging by Geoff Anders' friends list on Facebook, some very prominent EAs haven't really.
Not everybody maintains their FB friends list carefully or at all, really. I've seen way nuttier people on friends lists.
I heard the same claim, from a different source: that SBF did something unethical at Alameda Research prior to founding FTX, that some EAs had left Alameda saying that SBF was unethical and no one should work with him, and that there were privately circulated warnings to this effect. (The person I heard this from hasn't spoken publicly about it yet as far as I know. They are someone with no previous or current involvement with FTX or Alameda Research, who I think is reporting honestly and is well positioned to have heard such things.)
(EDIT: others along the rumor-path via which I heard this have now spoken on this thread, in greater detail than I have; so this comment is a duplicate report and should not be coutned.)
+ 1 for way more investigations and background checks for major donations, megaprojects, and association with EA.
I think this suggests that the EA orgs which had close ties to FTX and SBF should have investigations performed by outside parties. If this is true it makes the situation even worse than it appears at the moment since it could have been prevented by having higher ethical standards.
Edit: I now see one part of this has already been stated, but I still think the part about some EAs still being ok with Geoff Anders is important.
Just want to point out that this is incredibly ironic, as Vaughan is part of Leverage Research, a known cult, which has still not been entirely disavowed by some prominent EAs, and whose head Geoff Anders still appears to be on good terms with some of them.