Yes, although this was much more OK with play money than it would be with quasi-cash. Especially since Manifold's heavy use of the play-money printing press wasn't a secret.

The crux for me is whether "published reply in journal" could and would be (mis?)construed by some people as a sort of quality signal.

To the extent that journals are allowing replies-by-permission by third parties, then we don't want to diminish the value of getting one of those published. As Richard notes, the incentives are already weak. Yet I think replies-by-permission are undervalued already, because I think ~ direct dialog is usually better than ~ talking past one another.

If I were too concerned about this issue for a reply author with standing, I'd probably at least offer to publish an Editor's Note with a link to the reply author's off-journal response.

I tend to agree with your co-founders on this one.

Manifold users don't actually cash out that much, so we shouldn't actually need that much cash on hand. 

I am not sure that the behavior of past Manifold users in a play-money economy where the only cash-out was to charity is a reliable guide to how future users will react to in a ~real-money environment.

Another point Zvi raised is that very few online sportsbooks maintain enough cash on hand to fully pay out all users -- it just doesn't make business sense to do this, you grow more slowly if you commit to holding extra cash.

When we're talking about play money potentially redeemable for charitable donations, that is one thing, especially where the vast majority was ~freely obtained (as opposed to being purchased with cash. If people can't donate play money they were largely given for free, that doesn't keep me up at night too much. It's something different where the quasi-cash was largely purchased with real cash (or obtained in wagers of quasi-cash that was largely purchased with real cash). In the latter case, I think you have to be prepared for the risk of a bank run.

The equity value of Manifold dominates the cash considerations (we last raised at $40m valuation), so from our business perspective we can eventually back assets just by raising more. 

Maybe, but conditioned on there being a run on the bank, Manifold equity would not provide a solid backstop for customer claims. If you are in a bankrun situation, there is a pretty decent possibility that Manifold equity is either illiquid or ~worthless. You might be hard-pressed to find buyers either because of the underlying facts that led to the bankrun or due to skepticism about the value of a business whose customers are in a panicked rush for the door. 

Moreover, the base rate of young startup failure is pretty high, so there could be a number of scenarios in which a run makes sense. If I thought Manifold might be going under soon, and my quasi-cash was backed only to a limited extent, I think I'd rather exchange my quasi-cash for real cash ASAP. 

Perhaps you could get an irrevocable line of credit for the next ~2 years backed by a certain amount of equity? If you can, then that could back the quasi-cash liabilities. If you can't, is evidence that you can't get a sophisticated lender to accept the equity as collateral also evidence that Manifold users shouldn't accept it as backing? 

I guess another way of saying this is that I think Manifold should treat quasi-cash holders as ~depositors, and thus should be unwilling to expose them to more than a tiny risk of loss due to anything other than bad trades on Manifold.

A serious right would mean journals would send you an email with the critical paper, the code and the underlying data, and give you time to create your response (subject to some word limit, copy-editing etc.) for them to publish. 

I generally agree with this to the extent that the person authoring the reply had a strong basis for standing -- e.g., the published piece represented a direct and sustained criticism on their previously published piece. I would not extend it to cases where the person authoring the reply was more of a third party, as in the story Richard shares here. I am unsure about extending it to cases where the challenged work was not published in an appropriate journal in the first place. It seems a bit odd to guarantee someone journal access to defend work where there is no clear reason to believe the original work was of journal-level quality in the first place. 

Agree that real money cash outs would largely supersede this, but that's conditional on them actually happening and sticking around. It doesn't sound to me like real money is likely to roll out next month, though.

I do think we could potentially give more “near-ban” rate limits, such as the 1 comment/3 days. The main benefit of this I see is as allowing the user to write content disagreeing with their ban.

I think the banned individual should almost always get at least one final statement to disagree with the ban after its pronouncement. Even the Romulans allowed (will allow?) that. Absent unusual circumstances, I think they -- and not the mods -- should get the last word, so I would also allow a single reply if the mods responded to the final statement.

More generally, I'd be interested in ~"civility probation," under which a problematic poster could be placed for ~three months as an option they could choose as an alternative to a 2-4 week outright ban. Under civility probation, any "probation officer" (trusted non-mod users) would be empowered to remove content too close to the civility line and optionally temp-ban the user for a cooling-off period of 48 hours. The theory of impact comes from the criminology literature, which tells us that speed and certainty of sanction are more effective than severity. If the mods later determined after full deliberation that the second comment actually violated the rules in a way that crossed the action threshold, then they could activate the withheld 2-4 week ban for the first offense and/or impose a new suspension for the new one. 

We are seeing more of this in the criminal system -- swift but moderate "intermediate sanctions" for things like failing a drug test, as opposed to doing little about probation violations until things reach a certain threshold and then going to the judge to revoke probation and send the offender away for at least several months. As far as due process, the theory is that the offender received their due process (consideration by a judge, right to presumption of innocence overcome only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt) in the proceedings that led to the imposition of probation in the first place.

The communication needs to be: EA was defrauded by SBF. He has done us massive harm. We want to make sure nobody will ever do that to EA again. We need to ensure that any public communication puts SBF on one side, and EA on the other side, a victim of his crimes just like the millions of investors. 

Upvoted. 

But a problem is: I don't think many people outside of EA believe that, nor will they believe it merely because EA sources self-interestedly repeat it. They do not have priors to believe EA was not somehow responsible for what happened, and the publicly-available evidence (mainly the Time article) points in the direction of at least some degree of responsibility. The more EA proclaims its innocence without coughing up evidence that is credible to the broader world, the more guilty it looks.

But I've worked for 20 years in a multinational and I know how companies deal with potential reputational damage, and I think we need to at least ask ourselves if it would be wise for us to do differently. 

Consistency in Following the Usual Playbook

The usual playbook, as I see it, includes shutting up and hope that people lose interest and move on. I accept that there's a reasonable case for deploying the usual playbook. But I don't think you can really pick and choose elements out of that playbook. 

For example, one of the standard plays is to quickly throw out most people in the splash zone of the scandal without any real adjudication of their culpability. This serves in part as propitiation to the masses, as well as a legible signal that you're taking the whole thing seriously. It obviates some of the need for a publicly-credible investigation, because you've already expelled anyone for whom there is a reasonable basis to believe culpability might exist. This is true even though the organization knows there is a substantial possibility that the sacrificed individuals were not culpable, or at least not culpable enough to warrant their termination/removal. 

Under the standard playbook, at least Will and Nick would be rendered personae non grata very early in the story. Their work is thrown down the memory hole, and neither is spoken of positively for at least several years. None of that is particularly fair or truth-seeking, of course. But I don't think you get to have it both ways -- you can't credibly decline to follow the playbook because it is not truth-seeking and is unfair to certain insiders, and then reject calls for a legible, truth-seeking investigation because it doesn't line up with the playbook. Although people have resigned from boards, and the extent of their "soft power" has been diminished, I don't think EA has followed the standard crisis-management playbook in this regard.

Who Judges the Organization's Crisis Response?

For non-profits, often the judge of the organization's crisis response is the donor base. In most cases, that donor base is much more diverse and less intertwined than it is at (say) EVF. Although donors are not necessarily well-aligned to broader public concerns, the practical requirement that organizations satisfy concerns of their donor base means that the standard playbook includes at least a proxy for taking actions to address public concerns. EVF has had, as far as I can tell, exactly one systematically important donor and that donor is also ~an insider. Compare to, e.g., universities facing heat over alleged antisemitism from various billionaire donors. There's no suggestion that Ackman, Lauder, et al. are in an insider relationship to Penn, MIT, etc. in the same way Open Phil is to EVF. Thus, the standard playbook is generally used under circumstances where there is an baseline business requirement to be somewhat willing to take actions to address a proxy for public concerns.

As I see it, at least some (but not all) of the calls for transparency and investigation are related to a desire for some sort of broader accountability that most non-profits face much more than EA organizations. As far as I can tell, the most suitable analogue to "a medium-size group of donors" for other nonprofits may be "the EA community, many members of which are making large indirect donations in terms of salary sacrifice." The challenge is that discussions with the EA community are public in a way that communications with a group of a few dozen key donors are not for many non-profits.

Also, there's a statement in a publicly-accessible stand up meeting summary (speaker unknown) that "I also tentatively think Manifund wants to end the charity program after this"

https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Standup-de82dcce7411478fa52048c229a2eda2

(screenshot on file in my email)

These are good arguments for providing stable levels of funding per year, but there are often ways to further that goal without materially dialing back the riskiness of one's investments (probable exception: crypto, because the swings can be so wild and because other EA donors may be disproportionately in crypto). One classic approach is to set a budget based on a rolling average of the value of one's investments -- for universities, that is often a rolling three-year average, but it apparently goes back much further than that at Yale using a weighted-average approach. And EA philanthropists probably have more flexibility on this point than universities, whose use of endowments is often constrained by applicable law related to endowment spending.

(Disclaimer: I'm not an antitrust lawyer, not that I can give anyone legal advice on the Forum anyway. Also, this is a US perspective.) 

The basic principle is that agreements "in restraint of trade" are illegal, with that term interpreted by reference to a "rule of reason" developed through over a century of caselaw. Neither student admissions nor employee hiring are really in the heartland of antitrust, although it has been applied to both in the past. 

I don't see how admissions and hiring are that different when it comes to determining whether use of a common application form would be in restraint of trade (i.e., whether it unreasonably impedes fair competition). I'm also unclear on what a good argument would be for an assertion that using the same first-stage application would unreasonably impede fair competition for employees in the first place. I'd argue that it would promote competition in the market for employees, by making it easier for employees to apply to more potential employers. But I didn't dig into any caselaw on that.