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Whistleblower3

-83 karmaJoined Feb 2023

Comments
6

This seems like an incredible attitude. 

There are many laws we would contest, but the job of organizational leaders include awareness of the laws pertaining to their activities and staying on the right side of them. If those laws are bad, then campaigning to change them is reasonable - ignoring them is not.

Furthermore it's far from clear there's anything wrong with these laws, let alone that they're 'idoitic'. They exist to prevent all manner of scams, tax frauds and ways for self-serving ways for charity trustees to benefit at taxpayers' expense. One of the lessons from FTXgate (actively promoted by MacAskill) was supposed to be that EA organisations that consider themselves above the law for the greater good are extremely dangerous.

This seems like an appropriate place to ask, given that the claim in question is currently being hidden by what looks like a campaign of downvotes:

Do you agree that EVF have broken the law with regards to 1) conflict of interest/benefit to trustees and/or b) retaining detailed information on people in the EA community without their knowledge or consent?

In an ideal world we would have, but hiring a professional would take more money than we have, and speaking to a volunteer would run the risk of doxxing us.

We think the relative downside of posting this speculatively. If it turns out our suspicions are wrong, then it will be easy for someone with a legal background to explain why, and this post will be relegated to a graveyard where it would then deserve to be.

If it turns out that our suspicions are founded, then we believe this is important to highlight, in the context of all the recent discussion about Effective Ventures's past activities.

In any other context I would expect a reply this aggressively unhelpful to be heavily downvoted. 

Are you saying 

a) one or both of these activities was not illegal? (if so, why are they not?)

b) one or both was illegal, but it doesn't matter because it was in the service of effective altruism?

c) something else? (what?)