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The Bankman-Fried/FTX Saga just gets better and better. A "why oh why" article in the Wall Street Journal has plums to be plucked out, such as these.
(And if Will MacAskill wants to repair his reputation, he better make some moves sharpish because the media are painting him as Sam's guru who encouraged and indeed enabled him).
Yeah, does anyone think that someone who doesn't know the first thing about EA or any of the people here, when reading this, is going to come away with a good view of all concerned? Personally I'm very amused that veganism has been dragged into this: "guy who swindled billions is against meat eating" 🤣 So let's count 'em up: that's utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, cryptocurrency, and veganism all tainted by association!
As for MacAskill, it sounds like he was in contact with Bankman-Fried up until quite recently:
He has distanced himself now, but unfortunately that may be too little, too late:
But wait, that isn't the best bit:
Oh yes. Just imagine it. Instead of Musk buying Twitter, it could have been Bankman-Fried. If people are getting het-up about Twitter potentially collapsing, what would they think if Twitter was caught up in the undertow of the FTX collapse? 😈
I keep not seeing my perspective brought up in these threads so I guess I'll say what I can't believe isn't obvious. Why should I care at all about any of the people or things connected to this dude who I had not heard of until the collapse? If they had a knowing hand in the scam then sure, but what's next? Are we going to hear about his favorite ice cream shop and their complicity in selling such a monster ice cream? We don't even have two cases of EA adjacent scammers with which to draw a pattern, the only conceivable way I see this being bad for EA is that they're now down a lot of money that they expected.
We have that Oregon political campaign as well.
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The condemnation of EA over this is kinda funny. If SBF showed up to any other charity, or person or organization, including everyone criticizing him, and offered billions of dollars over a decade, I don't think they'd say "uh, what if this large heavily invested business secretly committing fraud though? I demand an invasive audit of your books to make sure, and I won't take the money otherwise." And that goes double for just 'advising SBF'.
Ah ah ah, EA built their entire case around being "not like those other charities, we investigate first and have all these tools to assess what is the bestest bang for the buck".
So they are on the hook for "so why didn't you check out how this guy was promising tons of money out of thin air then, clever-clogs?"
Susie Maye who runs the Save Our Fluffy Friends campaign out of her own house and is active mainly in the fifty mile radius around the town, accepting a hunk of cash from an anonymous donor who says "I love puppies and kitties and bunny rabbits, here's a thousand to help your good work, keep it up!" isn't held to the same standard as "I am an Oxford philosopher who is so important to the world I can't take time out to have kids because that would distract from my Important World-Saving Work, oh here's $30 million for Good Causes I am involved with and you want me to be on the team of your Big Donation Fund that is funded by you making money via magic beans? Don't mind if I do!"
Is it not intuitive that people looking to give money are more concerned with the output than the input? I don't quite understand why it should matter all that much to the people who aren't going to die of Malaria because of the movement whether the funding came from a perfect loving cute grandmother who loves all people equally or a scum bag serial murder rapist. Can someone actually articulate the harm of taking the money of bad people to do good things?
The only thing that really concerns me about the effective altruism angle is how poorly a lot of that money got spent.
That is intuitive, I agree. The thing that makes me hesitate to sign on to it, though, is that EA as a movement is actually involved not just in taking people's money but in encouraging people to make that money in the first place. So, if someone was going to be a bad person anyway, then, yes, you might as well take their money. But if you are (perhaps inadvertently) encouraging people to become bad in order to make lots of money that they then give to you, then it gets a bit more complicated. Especially if your movement then goes around loudly praising these (actually bad) people.
I'll admit that's a failure mode but it's not exactly a unique one. "Be fruitful and multiply" can advocate for some quite nasty practices if taken as loosely. Earning more to give more is a possible way to summarize as classic of tales as robin hood with the same moral ambiguity. Whether the ends justify the means is something that cuts through the heart of every member of every movement and I don't think it's fair to declare which side has won from the actions of one member.
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Derek Thompson makes a related point, when he says:
Thus far, EA has not been big on investigating where the money comes from -- only where it goes. That may change. We'll see.
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SBF didn’t just show up one day at an EA event with billions of dollars. He was homegrown. He was in effective altruism before he was rich. He literally worked for The Center for Effective Altruism before leaving to start Alameda Research. Caroline Ellison ran a semi-anonymous blog jam packed with rationalist and EA references for years before she even started at Alameda or got into crypto. (Seriously, read it. This is a person who really thought they were maximizing expected utility by running an undercollateralized hedge fund into the ground. Fascinating.) These were true believers in the movement. Effective altruism was central to their identities. The fact that FTX not only failed but caused billions of dollars in collateral damage suggests that something is deeply wrong with the core philosophy.
The Future Fund site is still up and yep, all of 'em on this page are in the entire "taking in one another's washing" circles that EA has become.
To take the example of Ellison, here's the potted bio for her:
Gary Wang with the 200 IQ play to never be photographed at FTX. He knew.
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Maybe there's something deeply wrong with the core philosophy of crypto? FTX is EA's one big scandal - but FTX was a crypto company, and while the rest of EA is not obviously fraudulent, the rest of crypto is covered in frauds! Crypto scams are prevalent, exchanges collapsing and coins rugpulling are a constant - the most popular exchange, Binance, was generally regarded as shadier than FTX and continues to operate with, iirc, unclear legal status. Most of crypto's popularity and price come from people seeing the coin go up and wanting to get rich, and making up weird sounding 'decentralization' reasons for why it's making them rich. It makes much more sense to blame crypto for FTX than EA.
To be clear, this doesn't prove crypto is bad - it's clearly significantly populated with scammers and groundless speculators, but that doesn't mean the original ideals or ethereum or w/e aren't useful anyway. And in a broader sense - again, frauds happen everywhere, much of accounting and finance exists as regulations to prevent fraud that would otherwise be ever-present, crypto's lack of that is just revealing why they were necessary in the first place, "crypto speedrunning the financial system".
"EA has both fraudsters and people willing to go along with them in it" isn't surprising, it's expected. "Being willing to do morally gray / black things is associated with success in crypto" also isn't surprising, it's expected. EA doesn't need to have any causal impact on the fraud for it to happen.
And - say one believes that HFT is just a legal way of taking other peoples' money via financial alchemy. Is what sam did really worse than that? Are SBF's ethics materially worse than those of a fast food company or 'actively managed fund' CEO, or are they just less well regulated?
To be clear - I'm not arguing sam isn't bad, and I'm not arguing EA is based, just that people who otherwise dislike EA (which I may also for very different reasons!) are using this to prove EA BAD in the same way that, like, iraq or epstein proves (from different angles) LIBS ARE MORALLY BANKRUPT, despite it not really connecting to their initial reasons for disliking it.
Not that this undermines the main thrust of your point, Chris Stucchio put out a series of posts explaining the mechanics and social value of HFT, as well as some of its problems. The gist is that HFT charges people for liquidity, which compensates them for taking on risk, and also helps expose the "true" value of assets that large buyers try to keep hidden. So there's at least a solid argument that it's not just "a legal way of taking other peoples' money".
Furthermore, its worth noting that a non-fraudulent FTX would be providing a similar sort of value to HFT (liquidity), which suggests that actual SBF running a fraudulent FTX is much worse.
The problem here is that price discovery for crypto doesn’t really make sense the way that it does for say, stocks or bonds. It’s not just a risk asset with a speculative component, the whole thing is speculation.
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FTX is EA's only big anything, because nothing else EA has done has captured mainstream attention like FTX has.
My sense is that EA does not lack for scandals (CFAR and MIRI are basically walking scandals), they're just not big enough to be interesting, and it feels kind of unsportsmanlike to publicize them, because they're basically all about maladjusted misfits hurting themselves and one another.
Can you clarify what you mean here? I thought MIRI just wrote not very exciting math papers and CFAR is just another self help seminars for $5000 program.
Check this shit out (hat tip @DaseindustriesLtd). I don't know the objective truth behind the accusations, but there's more than enough grist for CFAR/MIRI to get absolutely dragged by the mainstream press if they had anywhere near the public prominence or power that FTX had.
Good god, this and the Leverage scandals have made me want to basically entirely disavow rationality as a movement. I knew they were into some weird stuff but the links I found after going down that rabbit hole, especially this blog by Ziz(?) is just beyond the pale.
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Actual specifics I've identified in this story:
A mentally ill person who did psychadelics thinks MIRI is like Leverage and currently has assorted vague mental illness symptoms similar to the typical tiktok "I'm mentally ill" influencer.
Said mentally ill person attributes their mental problems to MIRI. "I had paranoid fantasies about a MIRI executive assassinating me...."
Multiple people at CFAR had mental health issues. One person took a seminar then did some crimes.
The word "corruption" is used with no specifics.
"I had disagreements...and there was quite a lot of effort to convince me of their position..." :O
Some anti-CFAR protesters were unruly and local cops in a rural area got really excited about trying out their SWAT gear: https://sfist.com/2019/11/19/four-people-in-guy-fawkes-masks-scare-sonoma-retreat/
"I was certainly socially discouraged from revealing things that would harm the “brand” of MIRI and CFAR, by executive people." :O
Leverage leverage leverage, it was like leverage. Did you hear leverage was bad? I want some of the attention that leverage girl got.
The allegations against Leverage are equally non-specific and mostly come down to "I didn't get the social status I was seeking."
https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
I do agree that some of these folks would be better off attending church than CFAR.
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I still haven’t seen or heard anything that can’t be explained by the fact that MIRI is a less-than 110% woke organization in Berkeley California. These are exactly the kind of fake “scandals” that I would have expected given such an arrangement.
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There's two things here; first, hell yeah there is something deeply wrong with crypto.
But secondly, also hell yeah EA needed this kick in the pants. They started off doing concrete good, but that's boring. So the movement has drifted away to this kind of pie-in-the-sky theorising (AI risk may or may not Doom Us All, but right now starving, sick and poor people need to be helped even if Paperclip Maximiser is around the corner) and once it got involved in politics, that was it.
For all the lofty ideals, the dull slog of practical charity in, yes, your local neighbourhoods and beyond remains to be done. EA pivoted to the big leagues where the big money was, and that they needed, so they fell prey to the likes of Bankman-Fried. Because they wanted to be the big, exciting, world-changing, shaping the future deal. And this is part of the fall-out of that philosophy, and the movement has to accept it and address it.
I know it's hard. I know the defensive reaction is natural and inevitable. I know the temptation is there to say "This has nothing to do with us and he wasn't really one of us, anyhow". But like it or lump it, this is now the image people have of EA due to Bankman-Fried and this financial scandal. Maybe going back to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick is better than "let's all get jobs in each other's foundations so we can lobby Congress about pandemic prevention and big glamorous events".
The local, "charity begins at home" organisations that are going out with soup kitchens and the likes are still operating today, doing the same dull, boring, tedious, repetitive work of hands-on interaction with the poor and needy. Even if it is inefficient by GiveWell metrics. Even if it doesn't have Oxford philosophers working on utilitarian theory to be the official philosophy.
If one feels that local widows and orphans are sufficiently well taken care of, there has been another strategy used to deal with the "starving children in Africa" problem. A local group decides to subsidize sending one of their members to a village in rural sub-Saharan Africa, and their agent is to live in the village and exchange knowledge with the villagers over a period of months or years. The agent reports back things like "the villagers want to dig a new well, and a sturdy pump would improve their lives significantly," so the home group fundraises and delivers payment for the needed pump.
This process is hard work, but note how well it accounts for information management (specific and individualized needs are identified and communicated to the backers) and cash security (cash passes through very few hands, and is assigned on a project-by-project basis, not commingled into a slush fund). More organized charitable infrastructure usually claims to be more efficient, but it's important not to lose the benefits of direct personal accountability and immediate knowledge of hyperlocal needs that almost certainly vary from place to place.
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Yeah the Seqouia article makes it clear he needed EA to get his initial wealth. The reason he became a sensation was arbitrage of Japanese exchange rates on bitcoin - only way he managed that was finding another EA who was a Japanese citizen.
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He donated to multiple media outlets (including some that reported on him, like Vox) and politicians.
It would be interesting if this hurts EA more than them.
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