Thank you for pulling this together Chana, I really appreciate it! I found your list very informative, and expect the internal and external reviewers will as well.
FWIW, this makes me view Owen’s statement/apology, which makes no mention of his role and associated influence at CEA, considerably more negatively. The following statements seem particularly incomplete/misleading :
I was employed as a researcher at that time. My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time… I in fact had significant amounts of power. This was not very salient to me but very salient to her… I was aware that hard power (like employer relationships or grantmaking) mattered, but I was pretty blind to the implications of the soft power that came from being older and more central in the community.
Yeah, while I thought Naia provided a bunch of specifics the thing about Will threatening Tara is definitely an area where I'd find more specifics very informative.
Thanks for providing status updates on this Chana!
I saw a comment on another thread that raised questions for me about another specific aspect of Owen’s historical role at CEA. Jonas Vollmer wrote “Nick (together with Owen) did a pretty good job turning CEA from a highly dysfunctional into a functional organization during CEA's leadership change in 2018/2019.”
I’m not sure if Jonas’ impression is accurate, and if so whether he’s referring to Owen’s role on the selection committee that picked Max as Executive Director or if there was involvement beyond that. So I hope the information you’re collecting will be able to address that.
Yeah I would certainly think/hope investigators would've talked to the most knowledgeable people and already uncovered everything in the Time article.
Some miscellaneous takeaways from this article…
New (to me) information included:
Thoughts after reading the article and comments:
Seems like we're in for a very slow investigation. Per Will, looks like "a minimum of 2 months" before the investigation is completed.
I’m also curious about the thinking on this. By having Michael act as a grantor, SFF isn’t just overlooking his history of sexual misconduct. It is also potentially enabling further misconduct, since it is giving him power and he has a track record of abusing power.
Thanks Anthony, I appreciate the support!
Despite any downvotes (which I anticipated), I think this is an important issue and I hope the community health team responds. And FWIW I'm open to the idea that their response could make me feel less concerned about CFAR than I currently do.
Some specific examples of EA leaders putting SBF on a pedestal that I found with a bit of brief digging:
All those examples come from the period after concerns about SBF had been raised to EA leaders. Prior to that, there are plenty more examples especially for 80k (e.g. SBF was on the 80k homepage from late 2014 to late 2017.)
As far as I can tell, EA leaders started promoting SBF in 2014 or so, seeing him as a great example of altruistic career choice in general, and of ETG (a counterintuitive model of altruistic career choice that originated in EA) specifically. Then leaders kept promoting SBF despite the warnings they got from Alameda co-founders, and continued to do so until FTX blew up.