Couple things. First off, this sentence in the beginning nearly turned me off - way too many ands & convolutions:
Financial fraud is an old story and not really worth writing about, except for the fact that SBF is in his own way Grey Tribe; and except for the fact that he was a major donor to Effective Altruism causes, and perhaps the most prominent advocate of such giving in the minds of the general public.
You mention you predicted this by complaining then the tweet seems to be after the fact? Kind of confused as to the point of it.
Nevertheless, I may have some value to add in one of my areas of moderate competence: being aware that predatory social actors exist and want to play me like a fiddle. This is one area where, in my opinion, EA and rationalist organizations could stand to revise their practices.
It's a fine line to walk. To me one of the implicit benefits of the EA community is that they explicitly tried to get away from social games and make things more honest and high-trust. For the most part in my personal experience, it works and is very nice for finding like minded intelligent people. On the outliers though I agree it can be bad.
All that said, I think the rest is fair. I'm embarrassed by the fact that I mostly hand-waved away EA getting involved in politics even though I specifically repeated that one of my favorite things about EA is that they stayed away from politics.
A close friend actually brought up the issue of having only two major donors control the vast majority of the funding in EA, and I brushed it off. I have updated since. I like the people in EA, but the higher-ups and the structures/funding I am now deeply distrustful of.
Edit: Also PLEASE capitalize the post title in the future. :)
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Notes -
Couple things. First off, this sentence in the beginning nearly turned me off - way too many ands & convolutions:
You mention you predicted this by complaining then the tweet seems to be after the fact? Kind of confused as to the point of it.
It's a fine line to walk. To me one of the implicit benefits of the EA community is that they explicitly tried to get away from social games and make things more honest and high-trust. For the most part in my personal experience, it works and is very nice for finding like minded intelligent people. On the outliers though I agree it can be bad.
All that said, I think the rest is fair. I'm embarrassed by the fact that I mostly hand-waved away EA getting involved in politics even though I specifically repeated that one of my favorite things about EA is that they stayed away from politics.
A close friend actually brought up the issue of having only two major donors control the vast majority of the funding in EA, and I brushed it off. I have updated since. I like the people in EA, but the higher-ups and the structures/funding I am now deeply distrustful of.
Edit: Also PLEASE capitalize the post title in the future. :)
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