All of Jonas V's Comments + Replies

I recall feeling most worried about hacks resulting in loss of customer funds, including funds not lent out for margin trading. I was also worried about risky investments or trades resulting in depleting cash reservers that could be used to make up for hacking losses.

I don't think I ever generated the thought "customer monies need to be segregated, and they might not be", primarily because at the time I wasn't familiar with financial regulations. 

E.g. in 2023 I ran across an article written in ~2018 that commented an SIPC payout in a case of a broker co-mingling customer funds with an associated trading firm. If I had read that article in 2021, I would have probably suspected FTX of doing this.

Based on some of the follow-up questions, I decided to share this specific example of my thinking at the time (which didn't prevent me from losing some of my savings in the bankruptcy):

(See my edit)

A 10-15% annual risk of startup failure is not alarming, but a comparable risk of it losing customer funds is. Your comment prompted me to actually check my prediction logs, and I made the following edit to my original comment:

• predicting a 10% annual risk of FTX collapsing with FTX investors and the Future Fund (though not customers) FTX investors, the Future Fund, and possibly customers losing all of their money, 
  • [edit: I checked my prediction logs and I actually did predict a 10% annual risk of loss of customer funds in November 2021, though I lower

I don't think so, because:

• A 10–15% annual risk was predicted by a bunch of people up until late 2021, but I'm not aware of anyone believing that in late 2022, and Will points out that Metaculus was predicting ~1.3% at the time. I personally updated downwards on the risk because 1) crypto markets crashed, but FTX didn't, which seems like a positive sign, 2) Sequoia invested, 3) they got a GAAP audit.
• I don't think there was a great implementation of the trade. Shorting FTT on Binance was probably a decent way to do it, but holding funds on Binance for that p

I agree it's probably a pretty bad idea but I don't think this supports your conclusion that "the EA community may have hard a hard time seeing through tech hype"

• Going even further on legibly acting in accordance with common-sense virtues than one would otherwise, because onlookers will be more sceptical of people associated with EA than they were before. 
  • Here’s an analogy I’ve found helpful. Suppose it’s a 30mph zone, where almost everyone in fact drives at 35mph. If you’re an EA, how fast should you drive?  Maybe before it was ok to go at 35, in line with prevailing norms. Now I think we should go at 30.

Wanting to push back against this a little bit:

• The big issue here is that SBF was reckless

From personal experience, I thought community health would be responsible, and approached them about some concerns I had, but they were under-resourced in several ways.

I'd be interested in specific scenarios or bad outcomes that we may have averted. E.g., much more media reporting on the EA-FTX association resulting in significantly greater brand damage? Prompting the legal system into investigating potential EA involvement in the FTX fraud, costing enormous further staff time despite not finding anything? Something else? I'm still not sure what example issues we were protecting against.

I broadly agree with the picture and it matches my perception. 

That said, I'm also aware of specific people who held significant reservations about SBF and FTX throughout the end of 2021 (though perhaps not in 2022 anymore), based on information that was distinct from the 2018 disputes. This involved things like:

• predicting a 10% annual risk of FTX collapsing with FTX investors and the Future Fund (though not customers) FTX investors, the Future Fund, and possibly customers losing all of their money, 
  • [edit: I checked my prediction logs and I actua

I disagree-voted because I have the impression that there's a camp of people who left Alameda that has been misleading in their public anti-SBF statements, and has a separate track record of being untrustworthy.

So, given that background, I think it's unlikely that Will threatened someone in a strong sense of the word, and possible that Bouscal or MacAulay might be misleading, though I haven't tried to get to the bottom of it.

I wish this post's summary was clearer on what, exactly, readers could/should do to help with vote pairing. I think this could be valuable during the 2024 election!

Vote pairing seems to be more cost-effective than making calls, going door to door, or other standard forms of changing election outcomes, provided you are in the very special circumstances which make it effective.

What are those circumstances?

Tens of thousands of people have participated in swaps

Do you have a source for this? How many of those were in swing states?

I worry 'wholesomeness' overemphasizes doing what's comfortable and convenient and feels good, rather than what makes the world better:

• As mentioned, wholesomeness could stifle visionaries, and this downside wasn't discussed further.
• Fighting to abolish slavery wasn't a particularly wholesome act, in fact it created a lot of unwholesome conflict. Protests aren't wholesome. I expect a lot of important future work to look and feel unwholesome. (I'm aware you could fit it into the framework somehow, but it's an awkward fit.)
• I worry it'll make EA focus even more

If someone else had written my comment, I would ask myself how good that person's manipulation detection skills are. If I judge them to be strong, I would deem the comment to be significant evidence, and think it more likely that Owen has a flaw that he healed, and less likely that he's a manipulator. If I judge them to be weak (or I simply don't have enough information about the person writing the comment), I would not update. 

If there are a lot of upvotes on my comment, that may indicate that readers are naïvely trusting me and making an error, or have good reason to trust my judgment, or have independently reached similar conclusions. I think it's most likely a combination of all of these three factors.

Yeah, I think there's a lot more to be said about this topic, and I'm glad that your said some of it - thanks!

Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contribut... (read more)

I've talked to some people who are involved with OpenAI secondary markets, and they've broadly corroborated this.

One source told me that after a specific year (didn't say when), the cap can increase 20% per year, and the company can further adjust the cap as they fundraise.

If you're running an event and Lighthaven isn't an option for some reason, you may be interested in Atlantis: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ya5Aqf4kFXLjoJeFk/atlantis-berkeley-event-venue-available-for-rent 

(FYI, Atlas won't be ending up with a budget shortfall as a result of this.)

Regarding the second question, I made this prediction market: https://manifold.markets/JonasVollmer/in-a-year-will-we-think-that-sam-al?r=Sm9uYXNWb2xsbWVy

(Shorting TLT seems a reasonably affordable way to implement this strategy I guess, though you're only going short nominal interest rates.)

The really important question that I suspect everyone is secretly wondering about: If you book the venue, will you be able to have the famous $2,000 coffee table as a centerpiece for your conversations? I imagine that after all the discourse about it, many readers may feel compelled to book Lighthaven to see the table in action!

I think there aren't really any attendees who are doing meta work for a single cause. Instead, it seems to be mostly people who are doing meta work for multiple areas.

(I also know of many people doing AI safety meta work who were not invited.)

Yes, this.

Yeah, I disagree with this on my inside view—I think "come up with your own guess of how bad and how likely future pandemics could be, with the input of others' arguments" is a really useful exercise, and seems more useful to me than having a good probability estimate of how likely it is. I know that a lot of people find the latter more helpful though, and I can see some plausible arguments for it, so all things considered, I still think there's some merit to that.

How to fix EA "community building"

Today, I mentioned to someone that I tend to disagree with others on some aspects of EA community building, and they asked me to elaborate further. Here's what I sent them, very quickly written and only lightly edited:

Hard to summarize quickly, but here's some loose gesturing in the direction:

• We should stop thinking about "community building" and instead think about "talent development". While building a community/culture is important and useful, the wording overall sounds too much like we're inward-focused as opposed to t

Feeling a bit tired to type a more detailed response, but I think I mostly agree with what you say here.

Hmm, I personally think "discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot" applies a fair amount to my past experiences, and I think aiming too low was one of the biggest issues in my past, and I think EA culture is also messing up by discouraging aiming high, or something.

I think the main thing to avoid is something like "blind ambition", where your plan involves multiple miracles and the details are all unclear. This seems also a fairly frequent phenomenon.

If there's no strategy to profitably bet on long-term real interest rates increasing, you can't infer timelines from real interest rates. I think the investment strategies outlined in this post don't work, and I don't know if there's a strategy that works.

I want to caution against the specific trading strategies suggested in this post:

• Shorting LTPZ will cost you 7% per year in borrow fees.
• The short ETFs TBF, TBT, and TTT have 1% fees. In addition, short or levered ETFs rebalance frequently, and are known to have large hidden fees of 1-4% per year. Short ET

Accounting for fees, it's actually a lot worse than you wrote, see here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or?commentId=LmJ6inhSESoJGyWjQ 

I wouldn't be too surprised if someone on the GAP leadership team had indeed participated in an illegal straw donor scheme, given media reports and general impressions of how recklessly some of the SBF-adjacent politics stuff was carried out. But, I do think the specific title allegation is worded too strongly and sweepingly given the lack of clear evidence, and will probably turn out to be wrong.

I think both the original post and this comment don't do a great job at capturing the nuance of what's going on. I think the original post makes many valid points and isn't "90% just a confusion", and I suspect in fact may end up looking like it was correct about some of its key claims. But, I also suspect it'll be wrong on a lot of the details/specifics, and in particular it seems problematic to me that it makes fairly severe accusations without clear caveats on what we know and what we don't know at this point.

(I downvoted both this comment and the OP.)

At least 300 political contributions are suspected by the investigation to have been made with straw donors

This claim is false; the source says that they "were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds". Which is frustrating, as the former would be much more surprising and interesting than the latter.

I think this was the maximally best April Fool's post.

I read his comment differently, but I'll stop engaging now as I don't really have time for this many follow-ups, sorry!

What if the investor decided to invest knowing there was an X% chance of being defrauded, and thought it was a good deal because there's still an at least (100-X)% chance of it being a legitimate and profitable business? For what number X do you think it's acceptable for EAs to accept money?

Fraud base rates are 1-2%; some companies end up highly profitable for their investors despite having committed fraud. Should EA accept money from YC startups? Should EA accept money from YC startups if they e.g. lied to their investors?

I think large-scale defrauding un... (read more)

I think that's false; I think the FTX bankruptcy was hard to anticipate or prevent (despite warning flags), and accepting FTX money was the right judgment call ex ante.

I expect a 3-person board with a deep understanding of and commitment to the mission to do a better job selecting new board members than a 9-person board with people less committed to the mission. I also expect the 9-person board members to be less engaged on average.

(I avoid the term "value-alignment" because different people interpret it very differently.)

That was an example; I'd want it to exclude any type of fraud except for the large-scale theft from retail customers that is the primary concern with FTX.

I think 9-member boards are often a bad idea because they tend to have lots of people who are shallowly engaged, rather than a smaller number of people who are deeply engaged, tend to have more diffusion of responsibility, and tend to have much less productive meetings than smaller groups of people. While this can be mitigated somewhat with subcommittees and specialization, I think the optimal number of board members for most EA orgs is 3–6.

no lawyers/accountants/governance experts

I have a fair amount of accounting / legal / governance knowledge and as part of my board commitments think it's a lot less relevant than deeply understanding the mission and strategy of the relevant organization (along with other more relevant generalist skills like management, HR, etc.). Edit: Though I do think if you're tied up in the decade's biggest bankruptcy, legal knowledge is actually really useful, but this seems more like a one-off weird situation.

I would be willing to take the other side of this bet, if the definition of "fraud" is restricted to "potentially stealing customer funds" and excludes thinks like lying to investors.

You seem to imply that it's fine if some board members are not value-aligned as long as the median board member is. I strongly disagree: This seems a brittle setup because the median board member could easily become non-value-aligned if some of the more aligned board members become busy and step down, or have to recuse due to a COI (which happens frequently), or similar. 

TL;DR: You're incorrectly assuming I'm into Nick mainly because of value alignment, and while that's a relevant factor, the main factor is that he has an unusually deep understanding of EA/x-risk work that competent EA-adjacent professionals lack.

I might write a longer response. For now, I'll say the following:

• I think a lot of EA work is pretty high-context, and most people don't understand it very well. E.g., when I ran EA Funds work tests for potential grantmakers (which I think is somewhat similar to being a board member), I observed that highly skilled

I agree with you: When I wrote "knew specifics about potential fraud", I meant it roughly in the sense you described. 

To my current knowledge, Nick did not have access to evidence that the funds were likely fraudulently obtained. (Though it's not clear that I would know if it were the case.)

Overall, I think Nick did the right thing ex ante when he chose to run the Future Fund and accept SBF's money (unless he knew specifics about potential fraud). 

If he should be removed from the board, I think we either need an argument of the form "we have specific evidence to doubt that he's trustworthy" or "being a board member requires not just absence of evidence of untrustworthiness, but proactively distancing yourself from any untrustworthy actors, even if collaborating with them would be beneficial". I don't buy either of these.

I would still like an argument that they shouldn't be removed from boards, when almost any other org would. I would like the argument made and seen to be made. 

Here's my tentative take:

• It's really hard to find competent board members that meet the relevant criteria. 
• 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. 
• Similarly, while Nick took SBF's money, he didn't give SBF a strong platform or otherwise promote him a lot, a

I think it's very reasonable to remove Will, and much less clear whether to remove Nick. I would like to see some nuanced distinction between the two of them. My personal take is that Nick did an okay job and should probably stay on the relevant boards. Honestly I feel pretty frustrated by the lack of distinction between Will and Nick in this discussion.

Personally, I think it's useful if this decision is made by people who competently investigate the case and gather all the information, not by people acting primarily based on public information like this post. Even though I know Owen well, I personally find it hard to say how likely Owen is to make mistakes again; it seems plausible to me that he can learn from his mistakes and continue to be highly involved in the community without causing any further issues, and it also seems possible that he would  continue to make similar mistakes. It seems to me... (read more)