I am basically not on X/twitter. Is your claim that the Future Fund was meaningfully separate from FTX and Alameda? My understanding is that it got its money from FTX/Alameda, and that it was controlled by the same people, and your feeling of gratitude toward Caroline seems to suggest that as well.
I started wanting to be in Austin and Caroline's camp on this. Austin is a friend. I do not believe in disassociating from people for PR reasons. And I do believe in forgiveness and second chances up to a point. Caroline flipped and served her time. There should still be a place for her. If I were in a position to, I'd invite her to a game night or consider hiring her for a research role.
That said, after reading through all this, I think Austin has made a serious mistake. Two dominant points stand out for me. Firstly, Austin appears to feel some notion of reciprocity for the funding received from FTX. This sets off alarm bells. If someone funds me or my activities with stolen money, I would consider myself to be wronged by that. I expect I would feel hurt by them. That Austin not only feels gratitude, but apparently endorses acting on that feeling of gratitude, that shows very poor judgement.
Secondly, forgiveness and second chances does not mean disregarding reasonable caution. Caroline committed a serious financial fraud. I would not put her in any role that would require her to have access to an organizational bank account. Austin has put her in a role where she is one of two employees of an organization that exists to shuffle money around. For the next couple of months it appears she will be the sole employee not on leave. I cannot imagine that she won't have access to the organizational bank accounts. This, again, shows very poor judgment.
That doesn't fully address the issue. When you file for and receive any kind of tax exempt status, the entire population of the US is essentially becoming your donor. We as Americans are giving you a subsidy, in exchange for the promise that you will use it in a reasonable way to advance whatever you have declared the mission of your organization to be. There is at least a plausible case that hiring Caroline, particularly for this kind of role, broke that promise. To put this in slightly more legal terms, nonprofits have an additional fiduciary duty that for-profits do not have, a duty of obedience to the organization's mission. The bar for a court to find a legal violation of that duty is very high and I don't think there is any risk of legal trouble here (assuming no future misconduct by Caroline), but I think the ethical obligations of people running nonprofits to serve the mission go a lot farther than the legally enforceable duty of obedience. The whole point of a non-profit structure is that your obligations aren't just to the people who write you checks, they are to the entire society that has chosen to subsidize you through a tax exemption.
I find this case very concerning. Trying to cut members of your own community off from the courts is classic cult behavior. It is kindof the opposite of community health. If this is what the CEA community health team does, then I think EA would be better off without the CEA community health team.
I agree that something like Give Directly is in principle the right thing to compare to as a baseline. I do not think the comparison is obvious, and I think it may go the opposite way. GiveDireclty has a positive effect on the people you are actually giving money to. First order wise, it is a big win. However, I am pretty doubtful that is has meaningful second order effects. It doesn't help an economy develop. It doesn't change a countries society long term, much less humanities. To succeed long term, we need economies to develop, which requires large pools of capital and lots of long shot bets, which is exactly what silicon valley specializes in. That is the kind of investment that has the potential to dramatically increase the number and well-being of humans many years and centuries down the road. That said, that makes any actual quantitative comparison to GiveDirectly extremely fraught. I don't know of a good way to do the comparison. If you think GiveDirectly still outweighs other uses of money, that is a respectable position, but it is not an obvious one even after accepting EA principles.
Lets back up and ask a more basic question: What, exactly, do you mean by "fascism"? What is this thing that you are "anti"? As used in modern discourse, it seems to be used more as a slur than as a word with actual semantic content, and the people I have encountered in the past who self-identify as "anti-fascist" have not come off as serious people to me. So don't use that word like we all have a shared understanding of what actual thing it refers to. I don't, and unless you define it, I question whether you do either.
I think I disagree. Admittedly I tend to use AI more for talking through ideas and editing than actual drafting, so maybe something different happens when AI is used for drafting, but to me this feels like a demand that writers tell you whether they used MS Word or Google Docs or Open Office or a type writer. Why? The use of a tool, whether an AI or a word processor, doesn't make the work any less the work of the human author, nor does it diminish the trust we should place in the claims made. The human author is still responsible for the accuracy of the claims.
The main thing I'm hearing here is a criticism of the choice to handle marketing only after strategy decisions have been made, rather than incorporating marketing in to strategy decisions. My instinct is to view that as a feature, not a bug. EAs strength is its epistemics. We figure out what is good to do based on facts and evidence, not based on how we think it will look. A marketing person is just an expert in how it will look, or how to make it look good. Seems like having them in the room when making strategy decisions would poison those decisions, not strengthen them. What am I missing?
The online format seems rather different from the in-person Inkhaven, which seems like the main difference. But in what way is literal Inkhaven not for EAs?
I'm not especially familiar with the history - I came to EA after the term "longtermism" was coined so that's just always been the vocabulary for me. But you seem to be equating an idea being chronologically old with it already being well studied and explored and the low hanging fruit having been picked. You seem to think that old -> not neglected. And that does not follow. I don't know how old the idea of longtermism is. I don't particularly care. It is certainly older than the word. But it does seem to be pretty much completely neglected outside EA, as well as important and, at least with regard to x-risks, tractable. That makes it an important EA cause area.
I am basically not on X/twitter. Is your claim that the Future Fund was meaningfully separate from FTX and Alameda? My understanding is that it got its money from FTX/Alameda, and that it was controlled by the same people, and your feeling of gratitude toward Caroline seems to suggest that as well.
I started wanting to be in Austin and Caroline's camp on this. Austin is a friend. I do not believe in disassociating from people for PR reasons. And I do believe in forgiveness and second chances up to a point. Caroline flipped and served her time. There should still be a place for her. If I were in a position to, I'd invite her to a game night or consider hiring her for a research role.
That said, after reading through all this, I think Austin has made a serious mistake. Two dominant points stand out for me. Firstly, Austin appears to feel some notion of reciprocity for the funding received from FTX. This sets off alarm bells. If someone funds me or my activities with stolen money, I would consider myself to be wronged by that. I expect I would feel hurt by them. That Austin not only feels gratitude, but apparently endorses acting on that feeling of gratitude, that shows very poor judgement.
Secondly, forgiveness and second chances does not mean disregarding reasonable caution. Caroline committed a serious financial fraud. I would not put her in any role that would require her to have access to an organizational bank account. Austin has put her in a role where she is one of two employees of an organization that exists to shuffle money around. For the next couple of months it appears she will be the sole employee not on leave. I cannot imagine that she won't have access to the organizational bank accounts. This, again, shows very poor judgment.
That doesn't fully address the issue. When you file for and receive any kind of tax exempt status, the entire population of the US is essentially becoming your donor. We as Americans are giving you a subsidy, in exchange for the promise that you will use it in a reasonable way to advance whatever you have declared the mission of your organization to be. There is at least a plausible case that hiring Caroline, particularly for this kind of role, broke that promise. To put this in slightly more legal terms, nonprofits have an additional fiduciary duty that for-profits do not have, a duty of obedience to the organization's mission. The bar for a court to find a legal violation of that duty is very high and I don't think there is any risk of legal trouble here (assuming no future misconduct by Caroline), but I think the ethical obligations of people running nonprofits to serve the mission go a lot farther than the legally enforceable duty of obedience. The whole point of a non-profit structure is that your obligations aren't just to the people who write you checks, they are to the entire society that has chosen to subsidize you through a tax exemption.
I find this case very concerning. Trying to cut members of your own community off from the courts is classic cult behavior. It is kindof the opposite of community health. If this is what the CEA community health team does, then I think EA would be better off without the CEA community health team.
I agree that something like Give Directly is in principle the right thing to compare to as a baseline. I do not think the comparison is obvious, and I think it may go the opposite way. GiveDireclty has a positive effect on the people you are actually giving money to. First order wise, it is a big win. However, I am pretty doubtful that is has meaningful second order effects. It doesn't help an economy develop. It doesn't change a countries society long term, much less humanities. To succeed long term, we need economies to develop, which requires large pools of capital and lots of long shot bets, which is exactly what silicon valley specializes in. That is the kind of investment that has the potential to dramatically increase the number and well-being of humans many years and centuries down the road. That said, that makes any actual quantitative comparison to GiveDirectly extremely fraught. I don't know of a good way to do the comparison. If you think GiveDirectly still outweighs other uses of money, that is a respectable position, but it is not an obvious one even after accepting EA principles.
Lets back up and ask a more basic question: What, exactly, do you mean by "fascism"? What is this thing that you are "anti"? As used in modern discourse, it seems to be used more as a slur than as a word with actual semantic content, and the people I have encountered in the past who self-identify as "anti-fascist" have not come off as serious people to me. So don't use that word like we all have a shared understanding of what actual thing it refers to. I don't, and unless you define it, I question whether you do either.
I think I disagree. Admittedly I tend to use AI more for talking through ideas and editing than actual drafting, so maybe something different happens when AI is used for drafting, but to me this feels like a demand that writers tell you whether they used MS Word or Google Docs or Open Office or a type writer. Why? The use of a tool, whether an AI or a word processor, doesn't make the work any less the work of the human author, nor does it diminish the trust we should place in the claims made. The human author is still responsible for the accuracy of the claims.
The main thing I'm hearing here is a criticism of the choice to handle marketing only after strategy decisions have been made, rather than incorporating marketing in to strategy decisions. My instinct is to view that as a feature, not a bug. EAs strength is its epistemics. We figure out what is good to do based on facts and evidence, not based on how we think it will look. A marketing person is just an expert in how it will look, or how to make it look good. Seems like having them in the room when making strategy decisions would poison those decisions, not strengthen them. What am I missing?
The online format seems rather different from the in-person Inkhaven, which seems like the main difference. But in what way is literal Inkhaven not for EAs?
I'm not especially familiar with the history - I came to EA after the term "longtermism" was coined so that's just always been the vocabulary for me. But you seem to be equating an idea being chronologically old with it already being well studied and explored and the low hanging fruit having been picked. You seem to think that old -> not neglected. And that does not follow. I don't know how old the idea of longtermism is. I don't particularly care. It is certainly older than the word. But it does seem to be pretty much completely neglected outside EA, as well as important and, at least with regard to x-risks, tractable. That makes it an important EA cause area.