I appreciate you for writing this! I don't agree with everything you've written here, but I vibe a lot with the spirit. Hindsight bias and "my personal pet peeve against EA is responsible for everything bad that happened here" seem everywhere. My guess is that while there are important updates to be made, and many short term fires to put out, the actually important updates will be far easier to make in a few weeks once things feel calmer and less emotionally raw.

Thank you very much for your decade of hard work for EA, and for sharing some thoughts vividly and articulately that many of us have probably been feeling over the last few days. 

I have seen a lot of 'blood in the water' reactions, where people with long-standing grievances about various alleged problems in EA (some real, some exaggerated, some imagined) have taken the FTX crisis as an opportunity for criticizing those problems in highly emotional and often unconstructive ways. This often seems driven not by a desire to strategize about how those problems can be rectified in the future, but to enjoy seeing certain people get their 'comeuppance' for some past misjudgment or misbehavior that is attributed to them, or to re-engineer EA's culture in some new ideological or political direction. 

This is standard human behavior. Whenever an organization or movement faces a sudden, massive PR crisis, people tend to start backbiting, recriminating, criticizing, re-opening old wounds, and, all too often, fracturing into warring cliques. 

I hope that as people who have devoted our lives to taking a big step back from 'normal' human emotional reactivity, tribalism, and signaling, and to trying to hold our values and actions to a higher, more rational, more empathetic standard, we can all calm down, treat each other better, remember our common mission, and have confidence that EA will survive, adapt, grow, prosper, and do more of the good that we're devoted to doing.

Personally, I’ve mostly seen people confused and trying to demonstrate willingness to re-evaluate what might have led to these bad outcomes. They may overly sway in one direction, but this only just happened and they are re-assessing their worldview in real-time. Some are just asking questions about how decisions were made in the past so we just have more information and can improve things going forward (which might mean doing nothing differently in some instances). My impression is that a lot of the criticism about EA leadership are overblown and most (if not all) were blindsided.

That said, I haven’t really had the impression it’s as bad and widespread as this post makes it seem though. Maybe I just haven’t read the same posts/comments and tweets.

I do think that working together so we can land on our feet and continue to help those in need sounds nice and hope you’ll still be there since critical posts like this are obviously needed.

Keep in mind that the people who are commenting, writing call-out posts, etc., online are both a) only a small fraction of EAs, and b) a particularly skewed sample in the current moment.

Some of us either chose to or were asked to be quiet for now, or are still reeling from our losses and not sure what to say.

Thanks for all your hard work in EA!

I think you (and lots of other EAs who feel the same way you do) are totally correct that you don't deserve the response you've been seeing to the FTX situation. You deserve a huge pat on the back for doing so much for the world.

Separately, I also agree with these paragraphs Oliver wrote a few days ago, and I'm (tentatively) glad that there's been more criticism than usual on the forum right now (even if it's ultimately unrelated to FTX):

I do think it is indeed really sad that people fear reprisal for disagreement. I think this is indeed a pretty big problem, not really because EA is worse here than the rest of the world, but because I think the standard for success is really high on this dimension, and there is a lot of value in encouraging dissent and pushing back against conformity, far into the tails of the distribution here.

I expect the community health team to have discussed this extensively (like, I have discussed it with them for many hours). There are lots of things attempted to help with this over the years. We branded one EAG after "keeping EA weird", we encouraged formats like whiteboard debates at EAG to show that disagreement among highly-engaged people is common, we added things like disagree-voting in addition to normal upvoting and downvoting to encourage a culture where it's normal and expected that someone can write something that many people disagree with, without that thing being punished.

My sense is this all isn't really enough, and we still kind of suck at it, but I also don't think it's an ignored problem in the space. I also think this problem gets harder and harder the more you grow, and larger communities trying to take coordinated action require more conformity to function, and this sucks, and is I think one of the strongest arguments against growth.

I know it may feel like someone "curb stomping you while you're on your knees". But in many cases I think a better model is (a) people doing public soul-searching or (b) people who were previously self-censoring no longer doing so.

I want a world where people feel appreciated for hard work, and (simultaneously) people feel comfortable in attempting constructive criticism, safe in the knowledge that their criticism won't have the sort of negative career repercussions your post implies. Here's my attempt to reconcile those two objectives; this goes out to all the EAs who are feeling burnt out right now:

It sounds like you've been working really hard at a job you hate, doing a lot of good. Maybe sometimes you think about taking a vacation or searching for a job that's more fun, but avoid it because of opportunity costs.

If you've been doing that, I want to push back. You deserve a vacation. A nice long sabbatical, even. Not only do you deserve it, it seems justified on consequentialist grounds -- I think the opportunity cost of your vacation will be less than the cost of the ingroup-hardening process you describe in your post. (Convenient that consequentialism sometimes calls for vacations, isn't it?)

In conclusion, please know that your work is appreciated, and please take care of yourself!

It has included attributing the cause of Sam’s actions to everything from issues with diversity and inclusivity, lack of transparency in EAG admissions, the pitfalls of caring if we all get eviscerated by a nuke or rogue AI, and, of course, our office spaces and dating habits. 

I have not seen any of this on the EA Forum^[1]. I imagine Twitter is a lot more toxic (as usual) though.

I get that you are angry. I'm sorry, and I wish you well. I'm angry from the other side - I'm seeing too much wagon circling, and not enough willingness to engage or change from the people at the centre. I've also invested a decade into EA, and I am upset with how things are going post-FTX Crisis.

Lizka-- I’m sorry-- I’ll see myself out.

This literally made me laugh out loud (you're a good writer!) :)

Anyway, I think I need to get off the EA Forum for a while. I'm going for a weekend away and will tell my partner to stop me if she sees me on the Forum!

1. ^{^}

   Apart from maybe dating habits - but the point there isn't the dating habits, it's the conflict of interest they cause if they also involve professional relationships!)

I disagree with your assessment of the reactions in EA (I can recognize some symptoms that you mention, but it doesn't seem to be the majority of people), but I thank you for helping the world, and I hope your disgust will diminish a bit and you will want to continue to participate in EA.

One view is that SBF's actions are a sample of one and therefore cannot justifiably be the premise for the kind of wide-ranging criticisms fielded against effective altruism on this forum and elsewhere over the last week. I think this is wrong-headed, however. The point is not that SBF's fraud in and of itself proves the existence of these problems, it is merely that it highlights problems which can be independently justified. For example, it highlights that that this is a fairly hierarchical movement that vests a lot of power in the hands of a small number of people, with few mechanisms to hold them accountable and transparent to the community at large. 

Across a wide range of domains, crises are productive moments where the legitimacy of the existing order of things breaks down and there is a space for new, open and critical thought. If you are happy with the current incarnation of the movement no doubt that is regrettable, but clearly, many people are not. Obviously some fraction of criticism - this is the internet, after all - is not thoughtful, constructive or made in good faith. But to say that criticism at a time of crisis is equivalent to seeing someone on their knees and curb stomping them is, I think, an extremely dangerous attitude. What you are effectively advocating for is a rally-around-the-flag effect.

I agree that some people are being too harsh on the 'leaders' of effective altruism, and especially Will. He was one of a great many people who were deceived. I don't think the problem is one of his or any one else's individual character. I think the problem is how the movement is organised. I would add that how it is organised is probably not entirely independent from utilitarian and rationalist philosophy.

I think it is appropriate for the movement to reflect at this time on whether there are systematic  problems or failings within the community that might have contributed to this problem. I have publicly argued that there are, and though I might be wrong about that, I do think its entirely reasonable to explore these issues. I don't think its reasonable to just continually assert that it was all down to a handful of bad actors and refuse to discuss the possibility of any deeper or broader problems. I like to think that the EA community can learn and grow from this experience.

I've been thinking about a conversation a friend of mine and I had while reading the book Unmask Alice, about the author Beatrice Sparks and how the books she passed off as authentic diaries contributed to the Satanic panic and the war on drugs. Specifically, we were trying to work out how to avoid making the terrible mistakes multiple grieving parents made and years later ended up deeply regretting, both in connection to Sparks and in cases we'd heard about elsewhere (at least one former advocate for the sex offender registry falls into this category). The place we got to in that conversation was that the kind of overwhelming grief felt in the immediate aftermath of tragedy makes it harder to make measured choices. It is easy to want to stamp out the problem forever, as quickly as possible, because the horrible thing that happened cannot be allowed to happen ever again. But that is not a good mental state to be in when trying to change the world.

I keep thinking about it because I feel like I'm seeing a similar pattern shaking out here. What FTX did was unacceptable, and it cannot be allowed to happen again. We have to find what allowed this and take quick decisive action about it, because anything less might let another FTX rise up. I can understand this impulse, and having seen my share of unresolved drama in related communities I too feel the fear that if we don't do anything now then nothing will ever be done. But I don't trust a lot of the solutions being floated right now. I think people have a sense that something must be done, and are reaching for anything that might be something. I just hope that we manage to come out the other side somewhere sensible.

Personally I'd rather be kicked when I'm down. Better to deal with all the pain at once. Maybe there can be a forum feature that can allow a person to tune the percentage of critical posts they see based on sentiment analysis and those who can't handle all the vitriol at once can take it in little bits at their own convenience.