It was for me. Also, I had read about Tara and others leaving Alameda and having issues with Sam, but not the gory details.

I'd say there are two main aspects that impact negatively on EA portrayal. One I've mentioned below - Lewis goes out of his way to establish that the inner circle were 'the EAs', and implicitly seems to be making the point that Sam's mentality is a perfect match to EA mentality. But much more damning is how he depicts The Schism in early Alameda. Even though he is practically siding with Sam in the dispute, from what he describes it beggars belief how the EA community -and more so its top figures- didn't react in a stronger way after hearing what the Alameda quitters were saying. The pattern of the early Alameda mess very eerily prefigured what would happen, and Sam's shadiness. 

Reading the book right now like everybody else, I guess. If Lewis is to be believed (complex in parts, as he is clearly seeing all this through Sam-tinted glasses), ALL the members of his inner circle (Caroline, but also Nishad and Wang) were committed EAs, which is something I find disturbing.

I was surprised too, and would be more except for awareness of human fallibility and how much of a sucker we are for good stories. I don't doubt that some of what Lewis said in that interview might be true, but it is being massively distorted by affinity and closeness to Sam.

I think that it has been said that among the leadership, Nishad Singh was pretty close to EA too. Further down the line, it is commonly said that Alameda especially attracted a lot of EA people as it was part of its appeal from the beginning. Needless to say, though, these people would have been completely in the dark about what was happening until they were told, in the very end.

I mostly agree that people seem to have overreacted and castigated themselves about SBF-FTX, but also feel the right amount of reaction should be non-trivial. We aren't just talking about SBF, as the whole affair included other insiders who were arguably as 'true believers' in EA as it is reasonable to expect (like Caroline Ellison) and SBF-FTX becoming poster-children of the movement at a very high level. But I think you are mostly right: one can't expect omniscience and a level of character-detection amongst EAs when among the fooled were much more cynical, savvy and skeptic professionals in finance.

For what it's worth, I feel some EA values might have fueled some of Sam's bad praxis, but weren't the first mover. From what I've read, he absorbed (naive?) utilitarianism and a high-risks stake from the home. As for the counterfactual of him having ending up where he has without any involvement with EA... I just don't know. the story that is usually told is that his intent was working in charity NGOs before Will McAskill steered him towards an 'earning to give' path. Perhaps he would have gone into finance anyway after some time. It's very difficult to gauge intentions and mental states- I have never been a fan of Sam's (I discovered his existence, along with that of EA after and because of the FTX affair), but I can still assume that, if it comes to 'intent', his thoughts were probably more in a naive utilitarian, 'rules are for the sheep, I am smart enough to take dangerous bets and do some amoral stuff towards creating the greater good' frame than 'let me get rich by a massive scam and fleece the suckers'. Power and vanity would probably reinforce these as well.

You're right, but it does feel like some pretty strong induction, though not just to not accepting the claim at face value, but for demanding some extraordinary evidence. I'm speaking from the p.o.v. of a person ignorant of the topic, and just making the inference from the perennially recurring apocalyptic discourses.

Just listened to a podcast interview of yours, Geoffrey Miller (Manifold, with Steve Hsu). Do you really believe that it is viable to impose a very long pause (you mention 'just a few centuries'). The likelihood of such a thing taking place seems to me more than extremely remote -at least until we get a pragmatic example of the harm AI can do, a Trinity test of sorts.

Another probably very silly question: in what sense isn't AI alignment just plain inconceivable to begin with? I mean, given the premise that we could and did create a superintelligence many orders of magnitude superior to ourselves, how could it even make sense to have any type of fail-safe mechanism to 'enslave it' to our own values? A priori, it sounds like trying to put shackles on God. We can't barely manage to align ourselves as a species.