was in charge of IT and software at Alvea ex-boardmember of EA Germany co-founded two small startups ex-human rights observer with Peace Brigades International
Yeah, pacing weekends could be a similar success as Anthropic's end-of-year 2025 2x usage + free invite passes promo. That kicked off a wave of developers suddenly realising how far agentic capabilities had come, because they had both the free time and the extra tokens to actually build something. So the PR/marketing effects of this could offset some of the costs.
One costly public signal they could use during those days would be to give away inference at an extreme discount or even for free to demonstrate that they don't use the compute for training or research.
I'm happy that people overwhelmingly think that this is a bad idea. When I posted the comment, this wasn't clear to me. I posted this because all I had seen at that point was a stream of positive comments on substack which all celebrated that Caroline was given a second chance in this way. I wanted there to at least be one comment expressing why this is bad.
I may have overestimated Manifunds importance since it was regularly recommended to me as where I should apply to fund a side project of mine, and I seriously considered it.
So no, I don't reconsider my involvement after every bad action by any org, only when something seems to me like one of the worst moves, while seeing people I respect celebrating it, with little to no pushback (which now is clearly happening).
I wish that the public would see "EA" as something like, idk, "Catholic", where one bad or disagreeable act doesn't make a particular statement about others.
I may have been more short tempered and aggressive than necessary, and arguing the specifics of what harm the Catholic Church has done is indeed beside the point.
What I was gesturing at was: Wishing that EA were the same as a 2000 year old world-spanning religion in terms of public perception when scandals happen has some obvious problems.
It took the Catholics 2000 years to get to the point where they could systematically protect and enable paedophiles and still survive the blowback. It should be quite obvious why EA's reputation is far more brittle, especially when it comes to funding organisations.
I think you have every right to hire any cofounder you like if you run a startup, whatever their history, but then it shouldn't be a 501c associated in such a big way with Effective Altruism.
From the perspective of someone who spent years in tedious discussions about being extremely careful with public outreach to not damage the perception of EA as a brand when we were building EA Germany, this feels like a slap in the face.
After researching this a little more, I'm quite taken aback that apparently you still didn't return the 500.000$ FTX investment, and instead let it go to litigation. So the Trust that is making the victims whole is currently suing you (Manifold for Charity) for that Money, while you hire one of the perpetrators.
Surely, even though you may not consider these facts related, you must understand how this looks from the outside. Let me spell it out: It looks like Caroline is continuing to benefit from the fraud by being paid by an organisation that kept the money she helped steal.
While I am thankful for the transparency and understand that you don't want to take part in discussing this in public forum threads, I, and maybe others, want to.
I have to say, I think this is harming what remains of the Effective Altruism name/brand and is making me reconsider openly associating with it.
If we ever hope to rebuild the trust that was lost and construct a better public image of EA, we need to have strong community norms that people who commit wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering have no place in any type of financial role in organisations that make up this community.
I get that you have personal ties, and I can understand wanting to act from a position of forgiveness towards a friend and uphold norms of redemption. From an outside perspective, though, these same personal ties can be perceived as more of the same mixing of professional and personal lives that infamously happened at FTX.
I, too, believe people can redeem themselves and, after completing their sentence, should be able to rejoin society. And I also think that the EA community can only ever gain a positive public image if they beat the accusations of fraud and favouritism through an abundance of care about these things and strict professional norms. Background checks for financial roles that exclude people with felony convictions for financial crimes are, in my opinion, justified.
Flo 🔸
Information Security Consultant @ ```Three Backticks Consulting
Yeah, pacing weekends could be a similar success as Anthropic's end-of-year 2025 2x usage + free invite passes promo. That kicked off a wave of developers suddenly realising how far agentic capabilities had come, because they had both the free time and the extra tokens to actually build something. So the PR/marketing effects of this could offset some of the costs.
One costly public signal they could use during those days would be to give away inference at an extreme discount or even for free to demonstrate that they don't use the compute for training or research.
Yes, sorry if I'm coming on to strong, it just feels like more “everything’s vibes, we just do whatever” for me
Wait, so pledges from you personally on the blog revival project site can just be retroactively declared a joke with no intention of paying out?
I'm happy that people overwhelmingly think that this is a bad idea. When I posted the comment, this wasn't clear to me. I posted this because all I had seen at that point was a stream of positive comments on substack which all celebrated that Caroline was given a second chance in this way. I wanted there to at least be one comment expressing why this is bad.
I may have overestimated Manifunds importance since it was regularly recommended to me as where I should apply to fund a side project of mine, and I seriously considered it.
So no, I don't reconsider my involvement after every bad action by any org, only when something seems to me like one of the worst moves, while seeing people I respect celebrating it, with little to no pushback (which now is clearly happening).
Look, Austin made the comparison
I may have been more short tempered and aggressive than necessary, and arguing the specifics of what harm the Catholic Church has done is indeed beside the point. What I was gesturing at was: Wishing that EA were the same as a 2000 year old world-spanning religion in terms of public perception when scandals happen has some obvious problems.
I don't expect you to; this is mostly about the optics, no internal details needed.
It took the Catholics 2000 years to get to the point where they could systematically protect and enable paedophiles and still survive the blowback. It should be quite obvious why EA's reputation is far more brittle, especially when it comes to funding organisations.
I think you have every right to hire any cofounder you like if you run a startup, whatever their history, but then it shouldn't be a 501c associated in such a big way with Effective Altruism.
From the perspective of someone who spent years in tedious discussions about being extremely careful with public outreach to not damage the perception of EA as a brand when we were building EA Germany, this feels like a slap in the face.
After researching this a little more, I'm quite taken aback that apparently you still didn't return the 500.000$ FTX investment, and instead let it go to litigation. So the Trust that is making the victims whole is currently suing you (Manifold for Charity) for that Money, while you hire one of the perpetrators.
Surely, even though you may not consider these facts related, you must understand how this looks from the outside. Let me spell it out: It looks like Caroline is continuing to benefit from the fraud by being paid by an organisation that kept the money she helped steal.
While I am thankful for the transparency and understand that you don't want to take part in discussing this in public forum threads, I, and maybe others, want to.
I have to say, I think this is harming what remains of the Effective Altruism name/brand and is making me reconsider openly associating with it.
If we ever hope to rebuild the trust that was lost and construct a better public image of EA, we need to have strong community norms that people who commit wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering have no place in any type of financial role in organisations that make up this community.
I get that you have personal ties, and I can understand wanting to act from a position of forgiveness towards a friend and uphold norms of redemption. From an outside perspective, though, these same personal ties can be perceived as more of the same mixing of professional and personal lives that infamously happened at FTX.
I, too, believe people can redeem themselves and, after completing their sentence, should be able to rejoin society. And I also think that the EA community can only ever gain a positive public image if they beat the accusations of fraud and favouritism through an abundance of care about these things and strict professional norms. Background checks for financial roles that exclude people with felony convictions for financial crimes are, in my opinion, justified.