All of Tyrone-Jay Barugh's Comments + Replies

I'm surprised to see many comments that treat something other than this (particularly the request to transport drugs across a country border) as the crux.

From my read of Ben Pace's post, Nonlinear admits that this is true.

We chose this example not because it’s the most important (although it certainly paints us in a very negative and misleading light) but simply because it was the fastest claim to explain where we had extremely clear evidence without having to add a lot of context, explanation, find more evidence, etc. 

Even so, it took us hours to put together and share. Both because we had to track down all of the old conversations, make sure we weren’t getting anything wrong, anonymize Alice, format the screenshots (they kept getting blurry), and importantly, write i... (read more)

Kat just added context below, but I'll also note that the 'transport drugs across a country border' story is wildly distorted and we will provide evidence in the forthcoming post that we're working hard on.

Yes, although objectivity and independence trades off against other things EA orgs might value in a lawyer. I think of the 'EA lawyer' idea similarly to the idea of an in-house lawyer - and in my previous practice as an in-house lawyer sometimes we would go to external lawyers for objectivity/professional distance (and not just for, say, specialist expertise).

Apologies for the delayed response.

Quick thoughts, which are further questions rather than answers. I don't have a good answer off the top of my head, but these are the kinds of questions I'd think about to kick off my research if I were looking into this:

- pledge that you give to a particular legal person in the future might be enforceable by that person (but, depending on the rules in your particular jurisdiction, you might be able to evade such a pledge on the basis of how one-sided it would be);
- not sure whether you could make a more open ended pledge (to a particular cause but not a p... (read more)

To clarify, my update isn't that I think there shouldn't be a "did anybody know" aspect to the investigation - but rather that a broader fact-finding review would be useful, and that my original suggestion was probably too narrow.

I would like to know, for example, whether any large EA orgs (and EA thinkers, I suppose too) have formally engaged with those criticism contest entries. Like, was it somebody's job to think about when anything should change as a result? Or something discussed by a governance board (or similar)?

This comment is being downvoted, but I think it's probably a worthwhile exercise (even though I expect it to be really net negative)

pete
1y14
3
0

Absolutely, profoundly net negative. By EV what I mean is “harm.”

I'm updating towards the view that there are two different tasks - first, a fact-finding exercise and second, decisions about how to respond.

It doesn't seem appropriate to me that Open Philanthropy directly conducts the fact-finding exercise - it seems important to have an independent person(s) who are able to receive confidential feedback. It does seem appropriate to me, though, for Open Phil to commission that investigation/inquiry though.

I don't know how EA should decide how to decide how to respond. I'm not sure that the financial dependence on OP is as much of an issue in this context, but agree it's probably worth addressing.

This seems directionally right to me. My current view is that an investigation should stick to objective questions rather than normative stuff about, for example, whether the EA movement is in principle OK taking funding from the crypto industry (or some other potentially destructive industry). I think my thinking here is that a person who isn't involved in EA should think about those objective questions, and then folks in the EA movement itself should make arguments for and decide on the future direction in response. I trust a lawyer specialised in independent investigations to do the fact-finding work and the 'what went wrong' work, but not to make principled judgements  about what EA should think or do more broadly.

It’s definitely true that there are more philosophical questions that a lawyerly investigation wouldn’t be well-positioned to answer. But it seems likely that there were plenty of legal and financial risk-management mistakes that EA orgs made in the pst year that an independent investigator or other outside risk management consultant would be well-positioned to opine on.

Thanks Geuss.

The failure here is becoming so dependent upon, and promoting the virtues of, someone engaged in a crypto business with a lot of red flags. In my opinion, that is what merits 'review'. 

I agree, without prejudging what the answer to that would be. I think it's very likely that EA will do some soul searching, although this is a moral question rather than a question of fact, and so my sense is that it's probably less suitable for an independent fact-finding review.

Investigating your own personnel for something you have no probable cause for

... (read more)

But in what domain is it good practice to set up a formal investigation of persons about whom there is no knowledge of wrong-doing, and in which the alleged crime - knoweldge of a second-hand crime - would be almost impossible to independently verify anyway. And, in doing so, permanently tarnishing the movement, and its ability to effectively operate in the future. That is a big gamble for... what reasonable gain?

There is some possible optics benefit to it, yes, in that we could point to this action in (careful, measured) response to future criticism of EA from this angle. But I think the much more important reason to do it is for own health as a community of do-gooders. Even if we didn't expect criticism, I would still want to prevent someone who was so careless from making decisions about the trajectory of the movement or about grant allocation etc (at least initially; expressing no view about whether such a person could redeem themselves, as that seems pretty fact specific and I'm not in a good position to offer a view anyway).

1
Miguel
1y
That is another great point. Deterring future frauds through measures like this is very much recommended Tyrone.  Redemption? Unfortunately there are certain mistakes that one will not be able to redeem themselves no matter how hard they try.

Thanks Miguel. I am worried about a witch hunt too, although I think it's unlikely that a carefully conducted investigation that adheres to the principles of natural justice would destroy the EA community. My sense is that if the EA community is so weak that such an investigation would destroy the community, then the EA community will be toast anyway from the hit to community trust that is resulting/will result from the FTX situation.

Your suggestion is that there only be an investigation if some piece of evidence emerges. On first glance, my lawyer brain w... (read more)

1
Miguel
1y
I also think if this is your main objective in the post, change the title a bit to include the nature of your argument...
2
Miguel
1y
I see your point now Tyronne. It is to ensure that EA on itself will take its responsibility  on assuring the public that it is not in any way a fraud committed with EA involvement. I am agreeing on you on this one. 

Do you know how likely it is that United States law applies? I haven't thought about this properly, but it seems like the main entity that is insolvent is a Antigua and Barbuda company doing business in the Bahamas? And I'm also uncertain which FTX entities were actually distributing the grants.

This looks like the position under Bahamian law (which might be the relevant law, not Antigua and Barbuda law or US law, given FTX was operating in the Bahamas - I just don't know how this actually works). 

Re the 90 day rule in the United States, see here  under the heading 'Avoidable Transfers':  https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptcy-basics/chapter-11-bankruptcy-basics

Just to reiterate, I'm not a US, Antigua+Barbuda or Bahamas lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.

Edit: see Cate Hall's comment for a better summary of the position under US law, and Molly's comment re further information OP intends to share from its external counsel shortly.

Epistemic status: I am not a lawyer in either the United States, or in Antigua and Barbuda (where FTX Trading Ltd  was registered). I'm also not an insolvency expert. Take all this with a grain of salt. This comment is not legal advice.

There are lots of things that might make answering this question in theory tricky, including identifying:

  • which FTX entity paid your grant;
  • which
... (read more)
3
Jason
1y
As I commented to Cate, I would also think about whether any transfer could fall under 11 USC 548(a)(1)(B) which does not require actual intent to defraud creditors for something to be a "fraudulent transfer." That is not an opinion on whether there are fraudulent transfers here, which (although a lawyer) I am not qualified to give.
1
Elizabeth
1y
Where are you getting 90 days from?  I found six months, although this was very quick and I could easily have missed something.

Thanks for taking the time to explain, David!

Edit: 

sorry, I see now that you've discussed the point in my comment below (which I've now put in italics) in the linked document. I'm grateful for, but not surprised at, the care and thought that's gone into this.

If it's not too much of your time, I just am curious about one more thing. Is the paragraph below saying that surveying the general population would not  provide useful information, or is it saying something like 'this would help, but would not totally address the issue'. Like, is there any information value in doing this - or would it ... (read more)

3
David_Moss
1y
Thanks for the comments! It's just describing limitations. In principle, you could definitely update based on representative samples of the general population, but there would still be challenges. Notably, we have already run a large representative survey (within the US), looking at how many people have heard of EA (for unrelated reasons). It illustrates one of the simple practical limitations of using this approach to estimate the composition of the EA community, rather than just to estimate how many people in the public have heard of EA.  Even with a sample of n=6000, we still only found around 150 people who plausibly even knew what effective altruism was (and we think this might still have been an over-estimate). Of those, I'd say no more than 1-3 seemed like they might have any real engagement with EA at all. (Incidentally, this is roughly a ratio that seems plausible to me for how many people who hear of EA actually then engaged with EA at all, i.e. 150-50:1 or less.) Note that we weren't trying to see whether people were members of the EA community in this survey, so the above estimate is just based on those who happened to mention enough specifics- like knowing about 80,000 Hours- that it seemed like they might have been at all engaged with EA). So, given that, we'd need truly enormous survey samples to sample a decent number of 'EAs' via this method, and the results would still be limited by the difficulties mentioned above.

This is not a criticism (think that it's sick you do this survey, and grateful for your work), but I'm curious whether Rethink (or anyone else) has had a go at adjusting for a non-random sample of the total EA community (however that is defined) being made aware of the survey and choosing to participate.

Probably out of scope for this project - and maybe not even that useful - but I wonder whether it could be useful to survey a sample from an actually random frame to just get some approximate idea of the size and demographics of the EA community. That might... (read more)

Thanks! We think about this a lot. We have previously discussed this and conducted some sensitivity testing in this dynamic document.

I wonder whether it could be useful to survey a sample from an actually random frame to just get some approximate idea of the size and demographics of the EA community.

The difficulty here is that it doesn't seem to be possible to actually randomly sample from the EA population. At best, we could randomly sample from some narrower frame (e.g. people on main newsletter mailing list, EA Forum users), but these groups are not lik... (read more)

I think I could be a useful advisor to an initiative that CE is considering starting, but am already committed to a project of my own and so won't apply to the CE program. Is there a way to register my interest in helping? Would CE find that useful?

The answer might be signing up to be a mentor (https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/mentorship), but that seemed targeted at folks with experience starting/managing orgs.

3
SteveThompson
1y
Yes, signing up to be a mentor is a great way to get involved! 

Hi - I am one of the lawyers looking into establishing an EA legal services org (and am the recipient of the FTX regrant noted in another comment). I won't be the right person to help you with your substantive question, but it could be useful to have a quick chat to identify the legal issues you need help with - and potentially connect you with one of the US lawyers also looking at this. If you could DM me a calendar link - or otherwise the time zone you're in and some times you'll be free in the next week.

Thanks Ruth. I've updated the post to be clearer that we want feedback from the community generally, including from people who haven't been doing direct work so far - but that we also have specific questions for people with relevant backgrounds.

Others will have better answers, but I have decided to keep donating some if my income to global health and development orgs (despite leaning pretty strongly longtermist) on the basis that:

a) non-longtermist orgs are, AFAIK, not totally funded; and

b) I won't miss it that much, and so it won't really impact any direct work I do

Even if some of the big near termist stuff is funded enough in the near future (e.g. LLIN distribution), seems like there could still be lots of cool unfunded opportunities (e.g. paying for mental health support for people in low to middle income countries).

I'm a non-vegan who is pretty confident animals are moral patients.

I would not object to humans being farmed by non-humans provided that the result is more utils being created than the counterfactual (perhaps some utils being enjoyed by the non-human farmers/eaters, but most utils being enjoyed by the humans who are being brought into existence by farming and who would not counterfactually exist).

FWIW, I do think there are instrumental reasons for humans not to subjugate other humans - and those instrumental reasons are very strong - and so of course I wou... (read more)

2
tobycrisford
2y
I think this point of view makes a lot of sense, and is the most reasonable way an anti-speciesist can defend not being fully vegan. But I'd be interested to hear more about what the very strong 'instrumental' reasons are for humans not subjugating humans, and why they don't apply to humans subjugating non-humans? (Edit: I'm vegan, but my stance on it has softened a bit since being won round by the total utilitarian view)

Kia ora Markus, thanks very much.  I'd be grateful for a chat - will get in touch.

Austin, what sorts of legal needs did you have (/currently still have) in setting up Manifold Markets? Jurisdiction aside, anything not in the list above?

3
Austin
2y
I think your list covered it! Primarily, we'd appreciate advice on organizational structure (for our main product; nonprofit branch; offshore crypto subsidiary) and on regulatory barriers (figuring out what kinds of prediction market payouts would be acceptable)

Thanks for the suggestion, Luke. I hadn't considered this. I'm going to have a go at the Open Phil Calibration Training applet first, and will scour the forum and Lesswrong for other useful training.

I've had mixed experiences using probabilistic language in my legal advice. It really depends on the client and the advisor being able to think like that. But I've got some internal clients who have responded well to this sort of advice - explaining things in terms of expected value can be especially good when giving advice about counterparties who won't tell u... (read more)

Thanks, Devansh. Scaling a traditional law firm definitely requires that 'pyramid' approach - but it isn't unusual for boutique firms (both in law, and in other professional services areas) to be mostly comprised of reasonably experienced folk. I'm reluctant to think about scaling up too much (although have of course given it some consideration) as my focus is on seeing whether the idea has merit at a more modest scale, but the composition of a more scaled up org providing legal services (and/or other professional services) might be determined by the inter... (read more)

Logging back in for the first time in a while (regular reader, less regular poaster) - if anyone returns here, I wanted to note that the Triple-P enjoyed a 100% success rating (n=1, not including myself). I'm conscious that even very high quality social science research doesn't always easily replicate, but caution anyone reading this not to ignore such a powerful result.

2
Tomer_Goloboy
2y
Why is the Google Form closed?