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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Annals of Great Friday-at-6:00PM Announcements: "Caroline Ellison Has Joined Manifund."

For those needing a refresher, Caroline Ellison was Sam Bankman-Fried's lieutenant in charge at Alameda Research, the hedge fund he used to embezzle FTX customer funds. She pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Manifund is an effective altruism grantmaking and infrastructure provider spun-off from Manifold Markets.

I think this is definitive evidence that no, the Effective Altruism community did not properly internalize the lessons from the FTX crisis. This is going to get a lot of bad press, and it will be easy to criticize the decision as bad optics, but this is not simply "bad optics". Aella's Twitter feed is bad optics. This is bad practice. It is bad practice to hire people with bad decisionmaking records for decisionmaking roles. It is bad practice to establish a norm of soft-landings for people culpable in major scandals.

I had sort of expected Caroline to remain a semi-public figure associated with EA/AI/rationalism after her release from prison, but I didn't expect her to get hired for a financial infrastructure job. She should be blogging for pennies on Substack or working in the bednet mines.

I am not surprised, it just confirms the quokka meme for EA and broader rationalist movement. By the way I will use this opportunity to remark on "surprising" development of free malaria nets so much pushed for by EA. Apparently these nets are used by natives for fishing, but given the small diameter of the mesh size, it catches everything - including baby fish. The whole project contributes toward destroying whole ecosystems in Africa, exacerbating the food security in whole regions. I am sure there will be another rationalist "solution" to this problem thus adding on to previous catastrophe. Also I'd love to see how this impacts the util calculation of the whole program and if it potentially turns saints into villains retrospectively - at least for now.

Add this HR decision to whole battery of stupid and naive decisions made so far.

That Substack post is so plainly dumb that it's remarkable. From my vantage, one of EA's most controversial attributes is that they're willing to discuss letting a small number of people die in order to improve the lives of many. I approve of these discussions!

This CEO (leader? whatever he is) then makes the most childish argument I've ever seen, which is "She's smart and I like her, so I'm hiring her, damn the consequences to my organization." It's as if he's shouting at the top of his lungs that his company does nothing important!

If you read the comments on the substack post, he even acknowledges that he knows he'll lose business over this. So here's a case where someone who is supposedly an "effective altruist" is making a decision to help one convicted felon in order to damage his company's future, likely permanently. I know that the only thing I'm going to remember out of this is "Oh, Manifund? Those are the retards that hired Caroline Ellison".

The only thing to take out of this is that Manifund is a non-serious organization that doesn't believe it has an important mission. Or that this clown thinks Caroline Ellison is so, so smart that by her employment alone, Manifund can be successful beyond the bounds of any other collection of employees. Or maybe, as mentioned by @Tractatus, they're fucking and she gives extraordinary head.

Edited to add: This also reinforced my belief that Caroline Ellison, and indeed most effective altruists, are likely lying scumbags doing the mental equivalent of making jerking off motions in a closet while claiming they're getting a good workout. If Caroline was ACTUALLY AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST she would never do anything visible in the movement again, because she is smart enough to understand how damaging having someone like her around is. Just by virtue of being willing to do this (nobody forced her!) it shows how much of a sham it all is.

If you read the comments on the substack post, he even acknowledges that he knows he'll lose business over this. So here's a case where someone who is supposedly an "effective altruist" is making a decision to help one convicted felon in order to damage his company's future, likely permanently. I know that the only thing I'm going to remember out of this is "Oh, Manifund? Those are the retards that hired Caroline Ellison".

It is not as if EA has any coherent definition of morality. Morality is whatever is convenient for utils. "Ellison is smart and she will do more good than bad eventually" is all that is needed for an argument. I really mean it, there is no stable grounding, no deontological laws or even heuristics that would inform you on what action to take inside EA. It is all about if you can produce some good sounding 20 page parable about baby eating aliens, thus making your decision correct and moral.

Or maybe, as mentioned by @Tractatus, they're fucking and she gives extraordinary head.

I don't think that, but I do think (whether you consider this to be worse or better than the above possibility) that there's a definite trace of "Excellent, let me hire on someone personally indebted to me, anxious about losing this job because they know they won't get anything comparable to it, and proven to be malleable under pressure of personal relationships into doing criminal acts" about this, almost as if "I got a suitcase of cash, a Swiss bank account, a fake passport, and a plane ticket to someplace without an extradition treaty to the USA, so long and thanks for all the free money suckers" is a possible future outcome for Manifold/Manifund/Mox and all that regranting cash. Especially given that he's hanging on for grim death to the 500 grand of dodgy FTX funding his organisation already received and damn the bankruptcy lawyers suing to get it back.

Not that being in the Bahamas helped SBF, but maybe Chen is smarter and a better planner?

At the very least, he's hiring on nepotism grounds, and I watch several Youtube channels of fictional revenge stories about why this is bad for companies to do 😁

isn't this going to cause problems when trying to hold onto the FTX funding. one of the criminals involved in FTX is hired and then becomes a benefactor of the stolen FTX funding. very suspicious.

An astonishingly unwise decision, even by the standards of Silicon Valley rationalists. If I am an investor, I am pulling my money out as fast as possible. If I am a partner, I am screaming over the phone at Austin. If I am an underwriter or fraud investigator at a bank that does business with Manifund, I am calling them to have a quieter but even more interesting kind of conversation.

Do these idiots think everyone else in the world is blind? They now not only have this convicted fraudster on their staff, but also have proven themselves to be the kinds of people who would employ her. Sorry, the kinds of people who would employ her and only announce it publicly after two months, while letting her work for them behind a false name. At least they have great reasons for doing this, like "I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund" and "I [...] enjoyed [her] Tumblr". PROTIP: Tumblr is free, which is a lot less than 8 billion dollars.

The comments section here is fascinating. There are of course a lot of actually sensible commentators who get it, but there are also many cute vacillating messages like "[this] does not seem like the best decision" (but Caroline truly, deeply regrets sealing all that cash, so personally I forgive her), or long-winded attempts to model things with fake math. There is a lot of concern about reputation. What about the EA community? What about our reputation? Not much about the money. It's not just that they think this is only bad optics rather than bad practice, but that they have no interest in practice at all.

What's interesting is that in his replies Chen seems to be very strongly "I'm the founder, ergo I can do what the heck I like, I am not accountable to anyone". Which, as you say, were I an investor or someone with money in his different iterations of Manifold/Manifund/Mox would have me immediately padlocking my wallet and looking into any ways of clawing back already disbursed funding.

That attitude, coupled with what some commenters have pointed out about the $500+K funding received from FTX which he is refusing to pay back even as the bankruptcy lawyers sue for it, would seem to indicate that his view is "It's my money now". If you give money to his organisations, now it's his and no take-backs. And as the founder (he admires Paul Graham's "founder mode") he is the one deciding what happens to it, and you can just butt out with your "compliance" and "due diligence" Boomer dusty antiquity.

I don't know anything about Austin Chen. He may be honest as the day is long! Or he may not be. Not just EA, but charity work in general is ripe for exploitation by scammers and embezzlers because people want to donate to good causes, and it's way easy to gouge money out of people for "this is to help the wide-eyed orphans", even if you wrap it up in "we need to research AI alignment - in order to protect the wide-eyed orphans" than if you are stating up front that this is a business and the main end is to make you rich. And that's before we get into the incestuous little bubble of EA (another FTX funding and Chen case is about a former FTX employee who was also, or later, on the board of one of Chen's vehicles, wanted to steer a nice chunk of his bonus money to that vehicle, and was embroiled in the bankruptcy 'give us that money back'/'no I earned it fair and square' case where eventually the compromise was he would give it to a different charity).

Someone who exhibits "what's yours is mine, what's mine is my own" attitude in relation to FTX money, hired on someone from FTX deeply involved in murky transactions, and putting her around decisions on "where should grant money go?" after putting that hire under personal obligation is not resonating with me as someone squeakier-cleaner than Dudley Do-Right. It starts giving off intimations that if perchance he feels that as a hands-on 'founder mode' guy he should be the one steering funding to what he feels is the 'right' grantee, he might put some pressure on employees to do what he wants, even to the extent of "just lodge that to my account, I'll pass it on" orders. And Ellison's record is that when personal relationships are involved, she is malleable by that sort of pressure.

I'm not saying she should not get a second chance. I'm not even saying she shouldn't be hired on by Manifund. Just not in that sort of position, Austin!

The thing with people who have a toxic past is like, can't you just not hire them? I'm sure there are other people out there who are just as qualified who aren't nationally famous criminals.

I feel like there must be some kind of other angle. Some kind of favors or backroom dealings that is securing her this position, and probably the fact it may also be a sinecure.

His answers to queries about it were all primarily "I like her, my kid likes her, I owe favours to FTX from back in the day" and not "as a business decision this is good sense because X, Y and Z" (he then gave a second set of 'this is why it's a good idea' reasons). Not very inspiring of confidence.

This is just my own personal view and I'm probably as wrong as a clock striking ninety, but I get some kind of aura of "she is now very grateful to me for this second chance which nobody else would give her and that obligation of gratitude is going to be very useful to me going forward" from the whole thing. I do think Ellison is vulnerable in that she's radioactive right now, she probably could only get hired on as low-level admin in a one-man-band operation in Podunk, and if she gets on the wrong side of Chen she could get booted from Manifund and that's her only new chance gone up in smoke. So she has every incentive not to get on his wrong side, and unfortunately that includes going "yes sir no sir three bags full sir" if he ever expresses a view on "Don't you think that maybe we should do A not B? Just think about it, Caroline, but I'm not saying you have to decide that, just that I personally feel it's the right choice" when it comes to her research on grant-making and the rest of it.

I'm not saying this is what is going on, just that the perception is that she now owes him a big favour (and seems to be well aware of it*) and that the view formed of her from previous actions is not reassuring that she would have the confidence to say "No" when or if that favour gets called in.

*From Chen's Substack announcement:

But I’m very grateful to Austin for giving me a second chance, and judging me on my current work performance rather than my past. I feel very lucky not only to have a job, but to be working somewhere that I think is doing great work and has a mission I believe in.

It's very human to have difficulty refusing a favour to someone who once helped you. I think certain areas have a problem where people do well and rise because they're nice, intelligent chaps and then they get to the level where you need to be nice, intelligent, and a bit of a bastard when appropriate and they flounder.

EA is worse at this than most because it's at least partly a refuge for mildly autistic do-gooders from the cruelty of the world.

I feel like not hiring a convicted financial criminal to run your grant-issuing charity's finances, even though they're a friend who helped you in the past, doesn't rise to the level of being a bastard. Being a nice guy doesn't require you to violate your fiduciary responsibilities by handing out massive sinecures (funded by charitable donations) to literal criminal fraudsters. If Manifund were a publicly traded company, this would be grounds for a shareholder derivative suit.

It just requires you to adhere to traditional business practices, and unfortunately all the Silicon Valley/Bay Area types are infected with the whole "move fast, break things" ethos and with EA you get "we are so smart, we have Bayes!" on top of that, which encourages "those darn brakes are holding us back, just rip 'em out, accelerating down this hill is what we need to do!" views.

What I'm saying is that there's a level of pathological niceness I've observed in certain friends where they absolutely would feel compelled to do this. It makes them an absolute menace to be around or work with.

Maybe if you get rich off some crypto you send her a million dollars if you really think you owe her, or give her some equity in a startup you’re invested in. If you want to plausibly give her some VC funding then you have her register an ‘institute of leadership and learning from mistakes’ type self help organization of the kind most convicted former fraudsters with fame and chutzpah create (like the Wolf of Wall Street guy, or the Barings guy) and hire her to give a few lectures and teach some classes at an inflated fee.

Hiring her as an actual employee is extremely stupid even if you’re an autistic do-gooder.

Oh, that was last year's scandal. Further back than that, even! Now we're all worried about climate change roasting us alive and/or AI taking over the world, giant embezzlement schemes under the guise of doing good are so 2022.

EDIT: I have to agree that hiring someone whose CV is most notable for "easily persuaded by guy in charge to go along with massive swindle" is not looking good for Manifund as to what kind of organisation dealing with lots of funds and the leadership of same it will be. "So what are you looking for in a CFO?" "Someone who will shut up and sign the cheques as they're told to do".

I see that this is more back-scratching, or to be charitable, gratitude and repayment of favours:

I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold. They funded the retreat which drew me into the EA community, and the conference where I met my wife. Much of Manifund’s work today is directly inspired by the Future Fund’s approach.

On FTX itself, I remain conflicted. It was their money and spirit that enabled the Future Fund, and I still admire many aspects of FTX and the individuals who worked there. But also: FTX did wrong. Its collapse harmed users (myself included), and damaged the movement which I deeply care about. I may write more about this in the future, but in any case:

I believe in redemption. Caroline has admitted her faults, worked to make creditors whole, and served her time in prison. I’d like to give her the opportunity to contribute back to the world; I hope that the world will concur.

Redemption is good. But you don't do it by giving the job of "develop[ing] our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars" to someone whose last job ended in "Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering". Give her a job with Manifund as helping her get back on her feet and return to society, sure. But not a job where she is handling money or decisions around money.

This makes EA look gullible at best and corrupt at worst.

I wonder if she is benefitting from everyone's curiosity about whether that grippy really is worth throwing away a $16 billion fortune.

What makes you think that Caroline Ellison's pussy had anything to do with the collapse of FTX?

It's a long running joke, someone else posted the copypasta.

She clearly was not qualified to be CEO of Almeda Research, which as best I can tell was the portion that failed first. There were reports coincident with the failure that linked Ellison and Bankman-Fried romantically. So, its not unreasonable to believe that she got the position based on her relationship rather than her qualifications

Going by the book, the entire personnel list and turnover of same in the intertwined entities was nuts. People were joining, moving around, resigning, being replaced, by the new time. Ellison ended up as CEO of Alameda more or less as "the only person still around" and she was pushed into a position that she was not prepared or suited for, but Sam convinced her.

Sam seems to have been able to convince a lot of people to trust him and do this crazy thing, and the crazy thing worked out, so next time he proposed something crazy people's barriers were lowered over "well he was right last time". Also the EA jargon he was spouting was believed in by a lot of the people, and when you have a cult going on that is convinced it's making huge money by being smarter than the normies and using that money to save the world, nobody inside wants to rock the boat by pointing out the Emperor has no clothes.

The Sequoia Capital article on it all (right before it went belly-up) is fantastic for the kind of moondust he was selling and how otherwise (you would imagine) smart people disbursing funding who should have been a lot more cynical just bought it by the bushel.

The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

“This thing couldn’t have taken off without EA,” reminisces Singh, running his hand through a shock of thick black hair. He removes his glasses to think. They’re broken: A chopstick has been Scotch taped to one of the frame’s sides, serving as a makeshift temple. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”

EA has no say to weed out people who are in it for status or select for people who have a well-developed sense of justice or guilt. That’s probably its fundamental vulnerability. Studies find that people judge men with psychopathic traits as more trustworthy and genuine. EA’s level of character selection is apparently to ignore behavior and focus on blog posts and appearance, which means they are just going to be selecting for the psychopathic continually.

I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold.

This is a display of keen clannishness. “I have a social debt to the thief whose stolen funds helped my career”, yeah, you might as well just join the mafia at this point.

This is yet more of "being smart is not the same as being wise".

I wonder if her weasel-pinning days are behind her.

Thank you for making me have to delete the browsing history on my work pc.

It was my privilege.

First thing I read on the internet today

Last thing I read on the internet today

Gm gents, I'm out

Sorry bro, I couldn't resist.

At least EA forum users are unhappy: https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/pMpEKwY2ATJK5yrvG/caroline-ellison-has-joined-manifund#comments

Manifund strives to be unusually transparent. And so, I apologize for our minor deception, in using a pseudonym over the last couple months. I still endorse having done this — I think it’s relatively common to work with people pseudonymously, when their real identity is famous. But I want to call out that we compromised on transparency here, which I do not take lightly.ception, in using a pseudonym over the last couple months. I still endorse having done this — I think it’s relatively common to work with people pseudonymously, when their real identity is famous. But I want to call out that we compromised on transparency here, which I do not take lightly.

This right here is why utilitarianism is an evil genie of a moral system that cannot be trusted. A dedication to transparency that's subject to pros and cons analysis is not a dedication to transparency. Any amount of evil can be justified as instrumentally useful toward the greater good if you want it badly enough. You can't trust a utilitarian's promise, because it's only good for as long as it's useful.

Plus the transparency only happened after she worked there for two months under a pseudonym. That's not as transparent as it might be.

A slightly wiser utilitarian would know that reputations matters and not on a case by case basis decide to deceive everyone.

My problem with some critiques of utilitarianism is that they assert utilitarians have to be very short sighted to the point of obvious self-harm. I don't suppose that's actually the case.

Utilitarianism is flawed because most long-term or even medium-term effects are impossible to predict and almost any candidate is easy to plausibly justify. For example, here one can argue that avoidance of transparency isn't utilitarian, because it craters Manifund's reputation, so they lose funding, so they create less positive impact (or argue that it actually is utilitarian, because cratering their reputation is good, because they were going to waste the money...) Even common utilitarian arguments, like "if a healthy person walks into a hospital, harvest their organs to cure 5 sick people", miss second-order effects that question their utilitarian alignment.

As a complete outsider, what this sounds like to me is "This guy has got his fingers in the till". He's hired on someone who, demonstrably, is easily persuaded to go along with dodgy decisions, particularly where a personal relationship is involved, under the aegis of "but think how much good we are doing! can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, the end justifies the means, so on and so forth".

She is now in a position where she feels personal obligation to him*, a sense of gratitude, and maybe fear that this is her only second chance and if she blows it then she's finished. How much pressure would he have to exert to get her to go along with "Now, Caroline, I'm not saying you should do this, but wouldn't it be really the best decision all round for everyone if...."?

And then three to five years later we have another FTX type scandal on our hands, and all the mealy-mouthed piety about "I’d like to give her the opportunity to contribute back to the world" will sound like the hypocrisy it was, when the real rationale was "I wanted to hire on someone I could manipulate".

I am not saying this is what is happening, I'm giving the "moron in the street" view of how it will be received. "Bad optics", indeed. Yet more EA "we are so much smarter than the average bear, what could possibly go wrong?/how were we to know you shouldn't push the big red button?"

*In her own words from that link:

But I’m very grateful to Austin for giving me a second chance, and judging me on my current work performance rather than my past. I feel very lucky not only to have a job, but to be working somewhere that I think is doing great work and has a mission I believe in.

EDIT: Whooops, guy got funding from FTX which he has not returned (and is apparently being sued over returning fund). When even politicians were publicly giving back the gibs they received, in order to reduce the stink of criminality, this is a very bad look and reinforces my view "this bloke has got his fingers in the till and in a couple of years there will be another blow-up about missing/misappropriated/the money was only resting in my account funding".

In fact, there were two disputed Manifold donations: one was when Manifold Markets applied to FTX Philanthropy and got a total amount of €508,000 via two grants for the launch of a charity prediction market and prize payouts for a forecasting tournament. This is what the FTX bankruptcy lawyers are suing (since 2024) to get back, and Mr. Chen is saying "Nuh-uh, and my lawyer tells me to zip my lip about anything else".

The second was more convoluted, seeing as how a guy named Ross Rheingans-Yoo was recruited in 2022 by FTX Foundation. His contract said half his $1 million discretionary bonus would be paid to a charity of his choice. "In September 2022, after about five months of working with Rheingans-Yoo, SBF told him that as a bonus for the first half of 2022, he will receive $650,000 in cash, plus an additional $650,000 in targeted grants "to any effective altruism-driven charity of your choice."

Then later in 2022 FTX went kablooey, and like any decent EA philanthropist, Rheingans-Yoo immediately sued for what he claimed he was owed. Bankruptcy judge ruled okay, he should be paid, and "Rheingans-Yoo initially chose to donate the money to Manifold for Charity—the charitable branch of the prediction market platform Manifold Markets. This choice was not surprising, as Manifold is closely connected to the effective altruism community, and Rheingans-Yoo herself (sic) serves on the board of Manifold for Charity." FTX bankruptcy lawyers then went "Wait a minute, we're already suing these bozos for money, you can't give them more!". Rheingans-Yoo then went "okay, as a compromise, give it to a different charity". FTX lawyers went "nope" but eventually in 2025 the judge said "let him give it to who he likes". However, the FTX lawyers fired in an appeal, and God knows what will happen in the end, particularly as they're also suing Rheingans-Yoo over different funding for different organisations he also got from FTX.

Oh, and Rheingans-Yoo's younger brother also got in trouble over FTX funding, including 'his business partner was a former squeeze of SBF'.

This entire FTX/SBF dĂŠbacle just never ends. This is why Chen hiring on Ellison for Manifund is really bad PR for EA causes, amongst everything else.

Chen does not seem to want to explain his position (he falls back a lot on "my lawyer says I can't comment"), but the impression I'm getting is a combination of "this is our money, it was given to us!" and "well it's all spent now so tough luck" which does not cause me to trust him more. Definite whiff of snake oil in the air, and as Emerson says "the louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons".

So this is not just "nice guy gives second chance to former EA starlet", this is "guy who benefited from FTX funding glommed onto the money and is refusing to pay it back, then hires on one of the people who was involved in the business of dodgy dealings". That's a much less noble version of events!

I had actually interviewed for a job with SBF and realized I was simultaneously interviewing for a job at three companies at once: Alameda, FTX and some crypto product. I had a decade of quant finance experience at that point and I was talking to a bunch of kids with like, 2. I won't say I predicted they were up to the shenanigans they were but that they had people at the top stepping between companies so casually struck me as conflicted and I didn't continue. These kids felt in over their head and I didn't want to be part of the shit show.

Anyway, the optics are bad but if you ignore them Ellison is probably a decent employee. She did pass a Jane Street interview and left them to pursue Alameda; she would probably be good at most technical jobs. She probably comes cheap given how radioactive she is otherwise. On paper, if you ignore the optics, she's probably a bargain.

Did she fuck up? Oh sure. She should have done more to pump the brakes on bad record keeping practices but that's incompatible with the move fast break things model SBF was pushing. The fact that they had a romantic relationship would also compromise her.

Red flags abounds but that's not something I expect most people to navigate well. Iln most industries what she did doesn't even matter but in quant finance you need a large compliance team and you need to check with them every time you take a shit. I am not surprised they didn't grow this out in 18 months and racked up process crimes left and right because building cool shit was more fun than meeting with the compliance team[1]

I'm looking forward to more drama though. Austin doesn't strike me as a lunatic but the way he writes about her reeks a bit romantic. Oh no!

  1. SBF also did some blatantly criminal things but a lot of why they imploded was confused record keeping and a lot of why he got such a severe sentence was because US courts pulled FTX Bahamas into US jurisdiction. You don't build FTX Bahamas because you are trying to follow US law and handle US money; they had FTX.US for that and they were solvent and weren't taking the same risks.

Anyway, the optics are bad but if you ignore them Ellison is probably a decent employee.

But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?

Are we high decouplers or not?! The whole idea of the CW thread is decoupling.

Decoupling is not a concept with infinite elasticity.

I was simultaneously interviewing for a job at three companies at once: Alameda, FTX and some crypto product.

From the CFTC filing:

Samuel Bankman-Fried (“Bankman-Fried”) co-founded Alameda Research LLC (“Alameda”), a digital asset trading and investment firm, in Berkeley, California in 2017. In May 2019, he and others launched FTX Trading Ltd. b/d/a FTX.com (“FTX Trading”) and various subsidiaries, affiliates, and related entities, collectively doing business as “FTX.com” or simply “FTX,” a centralized digital asset exchange.

I think the crypto product must have been FTT their own "in-house digital token" which Alameda used and relied on heavily, so when it went "kaboom" that started the dominoes falling.

Interestingly, one of the SDNY charges was "Conspiracy to Defraud the United States and Violate the Campaign Finance Laws" because they were backing candidates and getting involved in party donations, all in the cause of getting crypto regulated and putting FTX into a favourable position under the new regime.

These kids felt in over their head and I didn't want to be part of the shit show.

That is the impression I got both from the Michael Lewis book and reading the initial trial depositions: the boring men in grey suits with all the red tape rules around fiscal responsibility were dumb and stupid and we were so smart and so cutting-edge and knew better. The original sin of EA, in fact: we can do better than how it's always been done because we have such big IQs.

The jumping around between Alameda etc. was "well it's all one big pot of money we're handling, so long as we're making massive returns does it really matter if we take some from pot A and put it into pot B and then draw it out for pot C?" liberally seasoned with "anyway, this is only dumb red tape, we're tryna save the world here!!!"

John J. Ray III's testimony in the Chapter 11 declaration in Delaware gives a good sample of the exasperated reaction of old-school business types to the shenanigans (and his televised appearances to committees etc. were very funny):

  1. 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.

My own personal take is that part of SBF's problem was he wanted to buy Mommy's love by making tons of money and donating it to all her pet progressive causes, and get a big name for himself so he could live up to the "son of two Stanford law professors" family mantle, where he was smart but one amongst a lot of smart, mathy, geeky kids so he didn't particularly stand out, especially in the milieu of "His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number". I got the impression that he was regarded with some indulgence by his parents, especially Mom, as "well bless him, he tries, not quite the top drawer academically though" in their circle of liberal academics who liked to talk about how to put the world to rights.

He got such a severe sentence because he didn’t plead guilty and repeatedly violated the terms of his bail, annoying the judge.

I think he was up shit's creek anyway once they pulled FTX Bahamas into the US but all of that other stuff didn't help either.

Yeah, you have to imagine at least some neurodivergence going on there where he could not understand the notion of "you have to do what the judge says" because 'but Mom, I'm so smart and these are dumb normies and I need my online access!'

Kept going online, commenting on the case, presenting his excuses, and would. not. shut. up. So of course the judge threw the book at him.

Someone may be a very competent carpenter but if they also have a history of burning down houses then it’s a bad idea to hire them to build a house.

In this case the carpenter decided to also be an electrician and plumber and mason and the house burned down because her psycho boyfriend, who owned the house, was tapping the gas line for his craft brewery down the street.

It's probably fine if she sticks to carpentry.

Somewhat related but I was thinking the other day about how a lot of EA people have gotten obscenely wealthy but none of the EA problems really got solved. Shouldn’t bed nets in Africa be fully funded by now?

The premise of many EA ideas was that you can “save” a life for extremely cheap, from hundreds to single digit thousands.

Given the insane wealth of EA people, the tech sector, and US progressives more generally, we should have made extreme progress in solving problems in Africa by now. As far as I can tell, we haven’t. All the progress in African is from catch up development and trade. The charities are just a hole into which money is poured, sometimes relieving suffering, sometimes causing harmful effects, but rarely solving any problems. (I will give credit to the guinea worm people).

I think the central premise of EA charity is wrong. You can’t save lives on the cheap. Many problems are intractable and can’t be solved by just giving money. You actually have to be in the trenches. Giving money to charities is mostly just waste.

Given the insane wealth of EA people, the tech sector, and US progressives more generally, we should have made extreme progress in solving problems in Africa by now. As far as I can tell, we haven’t. All the progress in African is from catch up development and trade. The charities are just a hole into which money is poured, sometimes relieving suffering, sometimes causing harmful effects, but rarely solving any problems.

Not only that, to the extent such charities are effective, they only create more problems: more mouths for Westerners to feed and more potential future migrants into Western countries. So worse than mere waste.

Garrett Hardin wrote a lot about this. Dumping food and medicine on 3rd world countries increases the number people dependent on aid to survive. Perversely increasing deprivation and suffering long term.

Googling him now I see Wikipedia lists him as a white nationalist. I read a bunch of his writings and never encountered that. Either I somehow missed his spicy works or a Wikipedia editor is character assassinating some dead academic.

Per Google Search’s AI, it’s nothing I haven’t heard here a dozen times from prolific posters:

While his early essays focus on resource allocation and overpopulation from a Malthusian ecological lens, watchdog organizations and historians trace his white nationalist label to several specific actions:

  • Leadership in Nativist Groups: Hardin served on the board of directors for the Social Contract Press, a publication designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group. He was also heavily involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Californians for Population Stabilization.
  • Funding from the Pioneer Fund: Hardin accepted funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation established to promote eugenics and fund controversial research into the hereditary basis of intelligence and race psychology.
  • Writing and Correspondence: He contributed to far-right publications like Chronicles and The Social Contract. Decades of his private correspondence—such as letters with heiress and population control financier Cordelia Scaife May—revealed explicit support for policies aimed at maintaining a white, English-speaking majority in the U.S. and promoting racial segregation.
  • Belief in Racial Homogeneity: Later in his life, Hardin argued explicitly that multicultural societies were unstable and that only racially homogenous societies could successfully manage resources over the long term.

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-hardin/

I have no respect at all for the SPLC. "designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group" just means they aren't sufficiently progressive. Which this Malthusian born over a century ago certainly wasn't.

Based on my memories of reading his writings: he was very concerned about the fact that parts of Africa are desertifying. Those localities' ability to grow food is decreasing over time. So it is an enormous act of cruelty to dump food on them. That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply. That's endless escalating starvation and dependence. And if the aid ever stops it is mass starvation on the scale of the worst communist policies. He's concerned for their welfare so he cautions against poorly thought out aid programs.

I wasn't aware of his private letters. That's disappointing. Oh well. I would also like an English speaking majority in the US. I'm sure the SPLC would smear that popular and valid view as "hate". Using their non-standard understanding of that term.

That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply.

It's not a requirement that any region, state, or even nation be self-supporting in terms of food production, even if it is probably a good idea where possible for a few regions. But Singapore is never going to grow enough food for itself, for example.

Singapore has a functioning modern economy. They can buy food. The poorest people on earth with desertifying land cannot.

a publication designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group

Oh well, if the SPLC says it! At this stage, I wouldn't trust the SPLC if they said "This new German politician with the first name Adolf seems a bit dicey", given their track record on "scaring the crap out of older people is a perfectly cromulent fund raising technique" and "the supply of hate groups fails to meet the demand, let us redress that balance".

Here's a modest proposal I think you can appreciate.

Let's send every person of child bearing age in Africa an iPhone with satellite internet. TikTok, Instagram, and Bumble will come pre-installed. Birth rates won't be a problem for long. If treatment ineffective, free college education through grad school for every girl.

If they have Tiktok and Insta, they'll end up wanting to move to Europe because who wants to live in Tanzania when you can see Germany or Britain instead?

Can you imagine how much more wealth the Somalian Empire would be able to extract from the colonies in Minnesota if they knew how to spell 'Learing Centre' correctly? College education would be devastating, turning a bunch of low-skill thieves and crooks into much more sophisticated, much more eloquent fraudsters.

I’d prefer a less circuitous and more direct intervention, such as just paying teenaged girls and young women in Africa to get their tubes tied.

Go listen to one of these lizardmen elite conferences like the WEF / IMF / etc. That's literally their plan.

An awful lot of ea people argue that not giving money now is better if they can leverage it into obscene wealth and donate more in the future. The thing is, you can continue justifying not giving using that equation unto perpetuity.

It's a cool trick.

Source?

Scott keeps talking about things, like the Giving What We Can Pledge, which are designed to counteract this exact failure mode. I expect that a random EA is more likely to give than a random American, let alone a random investor.

My brother in Christ, we are in a thread about Sam Bankman Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the fallout of FTX and you are asking for a source?

How about William McAskill, in his paper Investing to Give?

There's also Sam Harris and Sam Bankman Fried in Sam Harris' podcast.

Ellison herself brought it up during her trial.

Even Scott's arguments against it are lukewarm at best, and he accepts it as a valid practice. The giving pledge is Earning to Give in drag. It's the same mechanics - defer giving for an extended period of time under the nebulous promise that it will do more good in the long run. The giving pledge it simply says that your kids don't get to keep up the grift forever. That doesn't matter much. In the long run, we're all dead.

You can argue that I may have been imprecision in my terminology, but "perpetuity" vs an "entire human lifespan" feels like a distinction without a difference.

Yes, I’m asking for a source. The biggest, most dramatic scammer in the movement doing something does not imply an “awful lot.”

I couldn’t find a talk or paper called Investing to Give. I did see this proposed framework, which doesn’t give a single threshold, and this, where he talks about the theory. But I also note that this guy donates all income past $32,000. It sure sounds like this guy is giving and not just earning.

The baseline level of charity for an American is less than $1300. I’m pretty sure that’s an average, too, and I expect the median is much lower. I am confident that EAs, as a group which self-selects for neurotically caring about this stuff, clear that bar.

Sorry - I was wrong on my title. I was working from memory while on mobile. I'm back at my desk now.

The actual paper is "When should an effective altruist donate", from 2019, by William MacAskill, published by the global priorities institute. He establishes a proposed mathematical framework that determines whether to donate now or later (page 14 of the PDF). Reading through his own definitions above, he sets it up so that it's almost always beneficial to give later. Take the "Values" section. He explicitly state that values are unlikely to change over time. I find that just as unlikely as he finds it likely.

On a deeper note, this goes back to a problem I have with utilitarianism in general and effective Altruism in particular. I used to hang out with some effective Altruists. I also volunteer at an animal shelter, doing unglamorous work that most volunteers don't particularly want to do. My EA acquaintances mocked me for that choice, and earnestly argued that I would be better off quitting my job, moving to a HCoL area, getting paid "what I (was) really worth", then donating back to the animal shelter in question to hire somebody else to "do that kind of work".

I don't talk to them much anymore. I'm still disinfecting ringworm and mending fences at the animal shelter, and they're donating to groups like METR, because that will allegedly do more good than anything I'm doing.

hire somebody else to "do that kind of work".

That's the kind of unconsciously classist/condescending attitude that annoys me in EA discourse about the most effective and rational way to donate, and where the people involved would be highly insulted if you flat-out told them they think they are a superior class/caste of people and the lower orders are merely there to do the dirty work. But "hire someone of less value than you to shovel the shit out of the cages" is precisely that attitude at work. Manual labour is not worth much, even if we need it, because it is low paid (and besides soon we'll have robots to do it, so all the manual workers can... evaporate into thin air? get UBI and become creative artists? go back home to Central and South America?)

Exactly how do you think we should determine what something is worth then? Labor theory of value?

More comments

He establishes a proposed mathematical framework that determines whether to donate now or later

What he actually says:

However, because this framework is purely qualitative you shouldn't put much weight on the total scores

Reading through his own definitions above, he sets it up so that it's almost always beneficial to give later.

Not really - he lays out seven categories of considerations which he suggests qualitatively scoring from 1 to 7 and summing the scores. If the scores add up to less than 24, the considerations lean in favor of giving now.

Take the "Values" section. He explicitly state that values are unlikely to change over time.

What he actually says:

The potential for one's values to change over time is similarly important... the potential discrepancy in the amount of money one can donate over time is small compared to the possibility that you will rationally change your moral views.

He is in fact saying that the impact of changing values is bigger than the impact of donating now or later.

You've also dodged the fact that the guy is donating all his income past $32k. Hard to accuse him of cynically withholding donations until the future.

Chadakin: I don’t donate any money now in case I can leverage it into obscene wealth

Padme: Because then you can donate even more in the future to save African lives, right?

Chadakin: …

Padme: Because then you can donate even more in the future to save African lives… right?

Secretly based. Economic development has done far more for the people of Africa than all charity, probably by multiple orders of magnitude. The tycoons should focus on what they are good at instead of blowing it on conscious-assuaging causes in distant places.

It turns out you can just keep growing GDP and helping people without giving your money to grifters along the way.

I'll go further and say we'd be better off as a society with fewer charitable donations. Billionaire deaths and divorces have been a disaster for the human race. The unprecedented cash bazooka that is about to hit SF will be even worse.

Maybe this time the billionaires will something good with their charity. But I doubt it.

Seems similar to Christ talking about the Pharisees declaring their wealth as "Corban" (ostensibly dedicated to some future contribution to the temple) to avoid having to use it to support their parents in need.

I hadn't considered that comparison before. It's funnier than it should be.

Poverty is a long-standing problem. A lot of well-meaning do-gooders have gone "we have tons of money, if we just throw enough at it by our clever plans, surely we can solve it once and for all!" and then they find out no, you can't.

Plus, this is the kind of bread-and-butter issue that gets boring. The new shiny issue comes along, be it shrimp welfare or AI existential risk, and this is so big and exciting and novel, it's much more fun to talk about than "more bednets for malaria, yes malaria is still happening, no there isn't a cure yet, yes we're still working on different approaches, no I can't tell you when it will finally be gone".

Somewhat related but I was thinking the other day about how a lot of EA people have gotten obscenely wealthy but none of the EA problems really got solved. Shouldn’t bed nets in Africa be fully funded by now?

I think bednets are in fact fully funded and they try investing elsewhere now I misremembered, the marginal bednet today is lower impact than the average bednet. Still worth funding but the bang for the buck isn't as high as it used to be.

I think the central premise of EA charity is wrong. You can’t save lives on the cheap. Many problems are intractable and can’t be solved by just giving money. You actually have to be in the trenches. Giving money to charities is mostly just waste.

Part of moving the needle in Africa or other hell holes is figuring out where to allocate the money so it doesn't get immediately embezzled and also doesn't contribute to poverty trap issues. This isn't just a throw money at it problem. Indeed, part of why DOGE gutting USAID hurt so much is because EA relied on some of this existing infrastructure. Aside from funding odd trans art in Ecuador here and there, and for being a vector for soft power in foreign policy, it also helped make aid auditable. USAID paid for the census data, the logistics chain, and the in-country people who notice when money goes missing, which is exactly the infrastructure GiveWell can't do itself.

It turns out the EA people were wrong about their signature policy: they should have been funding malaria vaccines.

But yeah, Africa's problems can't be solved by throwing money at them. Because even if your target is good, when you throw money, there's always people happy to get between you and your target.

You've also got the difficult question of how well EA people can commit to it -- FTX sponsoring a concusionball stadium should have been one of those Murder-Ghandi moments -- but yeah. The systems here are hilariously corrupt, the tooling is corrupt, and even the numbers being used to extrapolate any analysis are huffing their own farts.

They are saving lives, are they not? It's just that there are more lives to be saved every minute.

No, they aren't The utter refusal of EA's to actually look at what happens after they implement their policies, and update accordingly, is breathtaking. It's amateur hour "reasoning from 1st principles" all the way down: Malaria is devastating! Malaria nets are cheap and easy to use! Give Africans Malaria Nets! ← stop here, completely refuse to think if there are any second order effects to take into account, or consider what, if anything, could go wrong, then loudly insist that you are, in fact, very smart.

Austin doesn't strike me as a lunatic but the way he writes about her reeks a bit romantic. Oh no!

This will come across as "uncharitable," but show this announcement to 100 of your normie coworkers and 100% of them will answer "They're fucking. No doubt about it."

Edit: Hold the phone, this is the organization that got $500k from FTX, and is currently fighting to not have to give it back? We're well past "good optics"

Nothing in that article actually says that malaria nets aren't saving lives.

If people are using them to fish with, it's pretty clear that (at least) those particular nets are indeed not helping stop malaria at all?

Pedantically, no, because those particular nets could have been used correctly before being used for fishing, which would make them less effective, not completely ineffective.

But in general, "Malaria nets aren't saving lives" is a statement about malaria nets as a whole, not each individual net, so you would have to weigh the benefits of the correctly used nets against the harm caused by incorrectly used nets to know that. And the linked article doesn't do that analysis.

Austin is married with his wife only days away from popping out the sprog ("...and my wife is due to give birth ~5 days and didn't want to worry about the announcement while on paternity leave"). Let's hope for the sake of all concerned that there is no workplace romance going on, always a terrible idea and Caroline should be well aware from what happened the first time round that it's even more of a terrible idea.

(Also this is the second time I've seen "paternity leave" mentioned online in the context of a female, is this a Californian thing?)

It's a progressive state thing to also give the father some time off to spend with their newborn. It's in addition to maternity leave.

I just found it strange phrasing where I would have expected him to say either "my wife didn't want to worry about this while on maternity leave" or "while I was on paternity leave". The way it was written made it sound like the wife was on paternity leave, and since it's in the Californian context, I would not have been surprised if some woman (perhaps in a same-sex marriage, but not necessarily) had taken a court case that denying her paternity leave was sex/gender-based discrimination and won 😁

I am quite confident that, in context, they are calling the entire concept “paternity leave” in a unisex way, as in “parental leave”. The same way some publications would call Anne Hathaway “an actor”, or the person who takes your order on a restaurant a “server” rather than a “waiter/waitress”.

To be fair, the EA side does have numbers and did look at them hard. They can give numbers for malarial infection rates and deaths, both in before/after, difference-in-difference, and comparing high-malarial and low-malarial-risk environments to make sure they weren’t getting some spurious signal. There were even a couple times this lead to use of different insecticides chasing maximized numbers.

The bigger problem is how real the numbers they looked at are. The infection rates at least have some random sampling going on, but it’s a tiny fraction with some selection effects crawling back in. The bigger problem is fatality rates, which are derived from a mix of ‘verbal autopsy’ and modeled estimates from infection rates. But the verbal autopsies are known to be terrible, and the models use local funding of anti-malarial supplies as an input. Start backing them out and you end up with 10x to 20x variations that might be real or might be sampling on the dependent variable. Worse, almost all of the modeled effects (and even the difference-in-difference studies) give drastically higher results than the early RCTs, often 2-3x, and they themselves depended on comparing against people sleeping without nets at all, a scenario that basically doesn’t exist. That’s not impossible, but it’s reason to treat them with a massive grain of salt.

But on the gripping hand, the pessimistic numbers still involve at minimum tens of thousands of lives saved, and more likely hundreds of thousands. It breaks the economic argument, but not the raw effect.

The fishing nets thing is an annoying problem from an environmentalist perspective, but it’s ultimately a rounding error. There’s not much risk of fishery depletion from these nets, very little of the target areas rely on fishing for a big source of calories, and the chemicals aren’t that toxic to mammals. It’s a hundred-life problem, not a hundred-thousand-life problem.

My brother in Christ, did you read the article you linked? Read the study it was centrally based on? I don't even like bed nets that much but lets actually discuss the facts of it here, in one of the places we can, rather than low effort sniping or whatever that was.

Firstly, and most confusingly, the article you link to is pro bed net use for malaria prevention, while also presenting some concerns about them being used for fishing, highlighting the need for mitigation - it's right there:

“Whilst we are wholly supportive of the efforts of the healthcare community to tackle [malaria], which is so damaging to people’s lives, we would strongly advocate further research into the potential impacts of this unintended consequence,” said Rebecca Short of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), who led the new research.

Bednets definitely save lives, many lives, even allowing for uses in fishing, that's a trivially dumb thing to argue. Furthermore EAs as whole totally have saved lives (as well as messed around with shrimps or whatever, lets critique bits for sure), and things like the Lead Elimination Project and many others have had crazy outsized impacts. Are you arguing they have saved none? No one? By what criteria?

Also, I'm a bit confused about your model of EAs. Do you think any of the above article is a surprise to Givewell? Given this from cursory googling? I mean, thats huge, and I'm sure you could critique a lot in there, but the fact you didn't try suggests to me you're not modelling your opponent very well, or even at all. I bet we have EAs here, have you tried asking them?

Come on dude. EA organizations make and publish analyses of effectiveness all the time, it's their whole thing. Here is an EA blog post about bednet misuse I found in a minute of searching. As it mentions, Givewell commissioned Rethink Priorities to research use of bednets in fishing:

Based on the available data, Rethink Priorities estimates that only 1.2% of bednets globally are repurposed for fishing.

Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:

For example, GiveWell estimates that only 60% of recipients will use their nets consistently and correctly. After accounting for this, they still find bednets to be extremely cost effective, with every thousand nets saving a life in expectation. That 400 will not be used correctly— and that 12 might be used for fishing— is already baked into the calculation.

And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:

The typical study design involves randomly assigning groups of people to receive (or not receive) nets. Researchers then wait to see whether mortality and malaria rates differ between the two groups. There is never an assumption that everyone who receives a net will use it. And yet, such studies consistently find that nets reduce child mortality by around 17 percent.

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