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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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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).

Mr. Bankman-Fried has said his law-professor parents instilled in him an interest in utilitarianism, the philosophy of trying to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He said he started putting those ideals into practice while majoring in physics at MIT. Concerned with the suffering of animals on factory farms, he said, he stopped eating meat.

Will MacAskill, then a philosophy graduate student, pitched Mr. Bankman-Fried on the idea of effective altruism, a way of applying some utilitarian ideas to charitable giving.

...Mr. Bankman-Fried had considered different career paths, he said in the “80,000 Hours” interview, but Mr. MacAskill suggested he could do the most good by making a lot of money and giving it away, a popular idea in the community.

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:

The FTX Foundation’s favored causes included pandemic prevention and protecting humanity from the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. At a July meeting of the foundation, Mr. Bankman-Fried became deeply engaged in a discussion on how lightbulbs equipped with a particular frequency of ultraviolet light could eradicate airborne pathogens, Mr. MacAskill told the Journal this summer.

He has distanced himself now, but unfortunately that may be too little, too late:

[Future Fund’s] two largest public grants, of $15 million and $13.9 million, were awarded to effective altruism groups where Mr. MacAskill held roles. Mr. MacAskill, now a professor at Oxford University, wasn’t paid for his involvement in those organizations “other than expenses,” a spokeswoman for one of them said.

...Mr. MacAskill distanced himself from FTX as it was crumbling. In a string of tweets, he accused Mr. Bankman-Fried of personal betrayal and abandoning the principles of effective altruism. He was also one of the Future Fund staffers who quit.

But wait, that isn't the best bit:

Mr. MacAskill at times advised Mr. Bankman-Fried on more than just philanthropic matters. When Elon Musk started his campaign to buy Twitter, Mr. MacAskill sent the Tesla chief executive a text message, according to documents made public in the litigation over his purchase of the social-media firm. “My collaborator Sam Bankman-Fried has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it and then making it better for the world,” he wrote.

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.

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'.

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 fact that FTX not only failed but caused billions of dollars in collateral damage suggests that something is deeply wrong with the core philosophy.

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.

Maybe there's something deeply wrong with the core philosophy of crypto? FTX is EA's one big scandal

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.

Actual specifics I've identified in this story:

  1. 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.

  2. Said mentally ill person attributes their mental problems to MIRI. "I had paranoid fantasies about a MIRI executive assassinating me...."

  3. Multiple people at CFAR had mental health issues. One person took a seminar then did some crimes.

  4. The word "corruption" is used with no specifics.

  5. "I had disagreements...and there was quite a lot of effort to convince me of their position..." :O

  6. 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/

  7. "I was certainly socially discouraged from revealing things that would harm the “brand” of MIRI and CFAR, by executive people." :O

  8. 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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