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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.
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!
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