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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.
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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I wonder if she is benefitting from everyone's curiosity about whether that grippy really is worth throwing away a $16 billion fortune.
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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.
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".
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I wonder if her weasel-pinning days are behind her.
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.
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At least EA forum users are unhappy: https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/pMpEKwY2ATJK5yrvG/caroline-ellison-has-joined-manifund#comments
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:
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 débacle 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!
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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!
But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?
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From the CFTC filing:
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.
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):
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.
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He got such a severe sentence because he didn’t plead guilty and repeatedly violated the terms of his bail, annoying the judge.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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".
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I think bednets are in fact fully funded and they try investing elsewhere nowI 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.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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:
And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:
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