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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34411 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.

He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it. The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting. He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:

I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

He throws shade everywhere:

The FTX.com platform grew quickly since its launch to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Mr. Bankman-Fried claimed that, by the end of 2021, around $15 billion of assets were on the platform, which according to him handled approximately 10% of global volume for crypto trading at the time. Mr. Bankman-Fried also claimed that FTX.com, as of July 2022, had “millions” of registered users. These figures have not been verified by my team.

(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)

The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”

Ouch. As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already. Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁

What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day. I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome. He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy. Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:

I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup? The one thing everyone told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t. Chapter 11. If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.

Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again. Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray. But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it. He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.

At the same time, negotiations were being held between certain senior individuals of the FTX Group and Mr. Bankman-Fried concerning the resignation of Mr. Bankman-Fried and the commencement of these Chapter 11 Cases. Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School. A document effecting a relinquishment of control was prepared and comments from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s team incorporated. At approximately 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday, November 11, 2022, after further consultation with his legal counsel, Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the Debtors’ CEO. I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis.

I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on. There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him. He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million"). Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.

And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.

I have a question. Why, after this fiasco with FTX, should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk? My impression is that this management of existential risk is a substantial part of EA's brand. Especially William MaCaskill and longtermism as a movement. Some of the leading lights of the EA movement (like MaCaskill) were apparently unable to manage the well defined risk of "maybe this guy running a cryptocurrency exchange is a scam artist" but I'm supposed to believe they have a handle on the vastly more nebulous and ill defined risk of "maybe an unfriendly artificial intelligence extincts humanity." Why should I believe this?

should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk?

My personal guidance has long been that faith in individuals (and small groups) is almost always misplaced. Faith in principles can do pretty well, but IRL humans are quite fallible and rarely live up to our expectations. There is no living person whose word I would treat as sacrosanct without a willingness to do my own research.

IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.

Many people within EA are also not convinced that AI risk outweighs all other risks. This is more of a strawman that gets heaped on EA because the most visible EA detractors latch onto the wackiest part of the movement.

Humans 'took over the planet' and displaced billions of other animals just by being smarter. Why wouldn't AI agents do the same? Our intelligence relates to physical mechanisms somehow, and computers are a much faster and more efficient way of implementing similar things, so why wouldn't computers be able to do so better? Look how rapidly technology is integrated into human life and the economy, won't that just continue to accelerate as it has over the past 300 years? What does a human do, what happens to the economy, when complex AI interactions drive more and more of it?

There's some debate on that, there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness.

there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness

Transformers and large neural nets generally are universal ML system that can do moderately-intelligent tasks like create images, play games, optimize all sorts of real-world tasks, and also understand language. Human intelligence is similar - use and understanding of language depends and is made of general intelligence. If dogs could talk, they wouldn't be smarter. And - they can talk, sort of, they have verbal and body-language signals that mean things, they just can't do larger-scale things with that.

This feels like affirming the consequent/assuming the conclusion.

If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter? How much rougher would the lions' life be if the Buffalos and Gazelles could collude?

If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter

yes, dogs can't play sports (even if they had the right physical form factor) or compose music as well as humans despite neither requiring language. buffalos can communicate, and do, the ability to understand complex communications wold require intelligence, and even if they had that minimal intelligence that doesn't get them to toolmaking, let alone physics or military planning. is this a bit?

Is this a bit?

No, because it seems equally clear that intelligence doesn't get you that far on it's own.

More comments

IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.

I feel like we actually DO have a pretty good handle on these existential risks. Definitely we can model the likelihood of extinction level asteroids and supernovas. The base rate here is very low, and we're improving our odds by tracking asteroids. Supervolcanoes are not extinction level events.

Nuclear war or ecological disaster seem unlikely to be extinction level events. Nuclear weapons are just not powerful enough, although they could potentially reduce the population by a lot. Global warming is centuries away from being an existential concern.

Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years. But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close. It combines high likelihood in the near-term with the potential to kill ALL humans, not just 5% of them or whatever.

We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years.

Yeah, but that's not the Drowning Child, is it? They charity-mugged everyone with that nugget from Singer: if you saw a child drowning right now, in front of your very own eyes, wouldn't you save it? What kind of heartless monster would not? And so if you accept that you should save the drowning child, then you must accept that you should save the children who will die without malaria nets.

I know the malaria nets projects have now got more money than they know what to do with, so it's not hypocritical for EA to move to a new good cause. But it is hypocritical to move to a cause where the advice now is "Forget about that drowning child, if you jump into the pond you might catch a cold and be home from work sick and then your contribution to stopping AI from paperclipping us all will be lost for that valuable period of a week! Sure, we don't know if the AI is coming in ten or fifty years, and the kid is drowning right now, but imagine all the kids in fifty years time instead!"

Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years.

There are people who also argue that it will happen "never". Anyway I'd say this is a threat in similar ballpark as "being invaded by alien species". What is a chance that humanity's technological progress woke up some Von Neumann probe from some ancient civilization somewhere in Oort cloud which is now ramping up self-replication capacities and building up an invasion spacefleet set to destroy Earth? Existence of such probes throughout the galaxy could definitely be one answer for Fermi paradox, whatever the chance you assign to such a possibility multiply it with existential threat and you are Pascal mugged toward giving it a lot of thought.

But similarly to the AI problem, it is hard to conceive what to do about it. Maybe not search for ancient civilization by Active SETI and maybe increase manufacturing of nuclear rockets capable of targeting things on our orbit?

Going back to AI, I have yet to see any material results of the supposed "friendly AI" research. We do not even know what technology will lead to such an AI which means it may be hard or even impossible to imbue it with certain morality. Not to even talk if EA people and affiliated researchers are the best people for that job given their own morality. In fact if one is as serious as you are here about it, probably the best course of action would be to go full Terminator 2 and assassinate all leading AI researchers and bomb all the research laboratories with hope that we will eventually land upon some form of AI Inquisition type government banning all research into the area under severe penalties. Of course this looks too crazy even for AI types, but it would be logical conclusion here.

There are people who also argue that it will happen "never".

Well they're not serious thinkers, are they? Where is the law of physics that says it's impossible to make a rogue AI? Even if such a law did exist, never is a very strong word. I'd be cautious before saying we would 'never' find some way around thermodynamics, the most solid foundation we have. Who knows what could be achieved 500,000 years after the Scientific Revolution? We're only 300 or so years in, there may be a few revolutions to come.

It's outrageously silly to say 'never' when we have so many questions still unanswered, when AI is advancing at such a rapid pace.

I almost put aliens in my comment. The threat from extraterrestrials is similar to AI in that it is difficult to quantify but at the same time the potential damage is 100% extinction. And since, in either case, we have no base rate we have to make assumptions of likelihood from first principles. This is what some people have difficultly accepting, probably the same type who weren't worried about nuclear weapons in the 1940s.

I also agree that there is not much that can be done. Although actively trying to get aliens to find us does seem uniquely stupid. I guess I just get frustrated when people conflate "minor" threats such as climate change or supervolcanoes with things that are much more serious.

I mean, huge amounts of talent and capital are being poured into building AGI, and we know it's physically possible (because human brains exist). So to be sure that it'll never happen seems like a stretch.

But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close.

Not really. At least we know those other things are actually within the realm of possibility. We have no reason to even believe (yet) we can invent an AI that could kill us all, let alone one that would. AI risk is just not worth taking seriously at this point in time.

It seems important to consider before you create something that could (because if you wait it might be too late).

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