I messaged you. Good for you for looking to make a difference and develop your knowledge/skills.

One way of thinking about the role is how varying degrees of competence correspond with outcomes. 

You could imagine a lot of roles have more of a satisficer quality- if a sufficient degree of competence is met, the vast majority of the value possible from that role is met. Higher degrees of excellence would have only marginal value increases; insufficient competence could reduce value dramatically. In such a situation, risk-aversion makes a ton of sense: the potential benefit of getting grand slam placements is very small in relation to the harm caused by an incompetent hire.

On the other hand, you might have roles where the value scales very well with incredible placements. In these situations, finding ways to test possible fit may be very worth it even if there is a risk of wasting resources on bad hires.

Yeah, a lot of interventions/causes/worldviews that have power in EA will have more than adequate resources to do what they are trying to do. This is why, to some extent, "getting a job at an EA org" may not be a particularly high EV move because it is not clear that the counterfactual employee would be worse than you (although, this reasoning is somewhat weakened by the fact that you could ostensibly free an aligned person to do other work, and so on).

Lending your abilities and resources to promising causes/etc. that do not have power behind them is probably a way that someone of mediocre abilities could have high impact, perhaps much more impact than much more talented people serving well-resourced masters. Of course, the trick here would be identifying what are these "promising", neglected areas, especially when the lack of attention by the powers that be may be interpreted as a lack of merit.

I had thought a public list that emphasized potential Impact of different interventions and the likely costs associated with discovering the actual impact would be great.

Reading through your articles, I can't help but share your concern especially because of how potentially fragile people's important and impactful altruistic decisions might be.

If my family is making 100k and they are choosing to designate 10% of that annually to effective charities, that represents vacations that are not had, savings that are not made, a few less luxuries, etc. I may be looking for a permission structure to eliminate or reduce my giving. This is probably even more true if I am only considering donation of a significant portion of my income. 

Critics of effective giving can help people feel morally justified in abstaining from effective giving, which might be all that they need to maintain the status quo of not giving, or tilt a bit more of their budget to themselves and their families. 

SBF likely had mixed motives, in that there was likely at least some degree to which he acted in order to further his own well-being or with partiality toward the well-being of certain entities (such as his parents). The reasoning that you mentioned above (privileging your own interests instrumentally rather than terminally such that you as an agent can perform better) is a fraught manner of thinking with extremely high risk for motivated reasoning. However, I think that it is one that serious altruists need to engage with in good faith. To not do so would imply giving until one's welfare was at the global poverty line, which would probably impair one too much as an agent. Of course, I'm not saying he was engaged in good faith regarding this instrumental privileging argument, but I cannot preclude the possibility.

Regardless, I have been persuaded by everything that I have seen that a significant part of SBF's motivations were to help advance a world of higher well-being. Of course, from a deontological perspective he did wrong by his dishonest and fraudulent actions. From a consequentialist perspective, the downside risks had such incalculable costs that it was terrible as well.

But the sincere desire of his to make the world a better place makes me sympathetic of him in a way that I probably would not be with similarly sentenced other convicts. Given a deterministic or random world, I understand that all convicts are victims too. But I cannot help but feel more for one who was led to their crime by a sincere desire to better the world, than say, to kill their spouse in a fit of rage, or advance themselves financially without any such altruistic motivation.

To clarify, you would sacrifice consistency to achieve a more just result in an individual case, right?

But if there could be consistently applied, just, results, this would be the ideal result...

I don't understand the disagree votes if I am understanding correctly.

Please note that my previous post took the following positions:

1. That SBF did terrible acts that harmed people.

2. That it was necessary that he be punished. To the extent that it wasn't implied by the previous comment, I clarify that what he did was illegal (EDIT: which would involve a finding of culpable mental states that would imply that his wrongdoing was no innocent or negligent mistake).

3. The post doesn't even take a position as to whether the 25 years is an appropriate sentence.

All of the preceding is consistent with the proposition that he also acted with the intention of doing what he could to better the world. Like others have commented, his punishment is necessary for general deterrence purposes. However, his genuine altruistic motivations make the fact that he must be punished tragic.

SBF did terrible acts from many different moral viewpoints, including that of consequentialism. In addition to those he directly harmed, he harmed the EA movement.

However, from review of what I have read, it seems as if he acted from a sincere desire to better the world and did so to the best of his (quite poor) judgment. Thus, to me, his punishment is a tragedy, though a necessary one. From a matter of ultimate culpability, I don't know if I would judge him more harshly than the vast majority of people in the developed world: those having the capability to save or dramatically better the lives of people in the developing world, but decline, or those who thoughtlessly contribute to the torture of animals through their participation in the animal product economy. 

I wish him comfort and hope that he can find a wiser path forward with the remainder of his life.

There's a lot of competition the "frontpage" regarding linked articles and direct posts by forum participants. I can understand why people would  think this article should not be displacing other things. I do not understand this fetishization of criticism of EA.

For comparison, a link to an article by Peter Singer on businesses like Humanitix with charities in the shareholder position with some commentary that benefit charities got 16 cumulative karma. I don't understand why every self-flagellating post has to be a top post.