Downvoted because I think this is too harsh and accusatory:

I cannot believe that some of you delete your posts simply because it ends up being downvoted.

Also because I disagree in the following ways:

• Donating anonymously seems precisely opposed to transparency. At the very least, I don't think it's obvious that donor anonymity works towards the values you're expressing in your post. Personally I think being transparent about who is donating to what organizations is pretty important for transparency, and I think this is a common view.
• I don't think FTX's mistakes are particularly unique to crypto, but rather just normal financial chicanery.
• "if the only way we aggregate how "good" red-teaming is is by up-votes, that is flawed"
  • IIRC the red-teaming contest did not explicitly consider up-votes in their process for granting awards, and the correlation between upvotes and prize-winners was weak.
• "What makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency."
  • For better or for worse, I don't think ruthless transparency is a focus or a strength of EA. I agree with your sentence right after that, but I don't think that's much related to transparency.

I strongly agree with the spirit of the reforms being suggested here (although I might have some different opinions on how to implement it). We need large-scale reforms of the EA community's social norms to prevent future risks to movement-wide credibility.

1. Strongly agree. The fact that net upvotes are the only concrete metric by which EA forum posts and LessWrong forum posts are judged has indeed been suboptimal for one of EA's main goals: to reflect on and adapt our previous beliefs based on new evidence. Reforms designed to increase the engagement of controversial posts would be very helpful for our pursuit of this goal. (Disclaimer: Most of my EA forum posts would rank highly on the "controversial" scale, in that many people upvote and many people downvote them, and the top comment is usually critical and has a lot of net upvotes. I think that we EAs need to increasingly prioritize both posting and engaging with controversial arguments that run contrary to status-quo beliefs, even if it's hard! This is especially true for LessWrong, which arguably doubles as a scientific venue for AI safety research in addition to an EA-adjacent discussion forum.)
2.  Agree, although I think EAs should be more willing to write and engage with controversial arguments non-anonymously as well.
3. Strongly agree in spirit. While a norm of unconditionally refusing non-anonymous donations above a certain threshold might be too blunt, I do think we need to have better risk-management about tying our EA movement's credibility to a single charismatic billionaire, or a single charismatic individual in general. Given how important our work is, we probably need better risk-management practices in general. (And we EAs already care earnestly about this! I do think this is a question not of earnest desire but of optimal implementation.) I also think that many billionaires would actually prefer to donate anonymously or less publicly, because they agree with the bulk of but not all of EA's principles. Realistically, leaving room for case-by-case decision-making seems helpful.

Upvoted because it's worth pointing out if people were hostile to suggestions the FTX wealth was unstable-- that should be openly considered and discussed. However, crypto being a speculative bubble isn't that related to SBF committing fraud, so I don't give you much credit for predicting this.

Also isn't anonymous donation kind of inimical to transparency? Seems like you're openly suggesting the kind of reputation-crafting that you condemned in the New Yorker quote.

I don't understand #3. At the megabucks level, wouldn't anonymity deprive the community of information needed to make plans? Here, we knew the approximate net worth of the donor and that the wealth was in a high-volatility domain (although admittedly this particular risk wasn't known...), and people made various decisions with that knowledge in hand. 

Although we would have probably been better off without that knowledge this time, in general trying to hide it would make long-term planning a lot more difficult. If you give enough information to allow for effective planning, you've probably given enough information to identify the megadonor.

Also, didn't FTX establish its own organization (i.e., the FTX Foundation) to grant its money? I guess one could argue that EA-aligned organizations shouldn't accept money from such an entity, although such a stance would mean that the money goes to less effective charities instead.

Finally, as a practical matter, I think some people have to know donor identity from a legal/compliance perspective. I suspect that "my large non-profit organization's major funder is an untraceable Bitcoin address" would cause some significant practical problems. So you've created a bifurcation where some people have the knowledge ( = a potentially significant source of power), while others do not benefit from that transparency.

Edit: punctuation

I took your post seriously and had an extended exchange with you in the comments section. I indicated that I shared some of your concerns. I also expressed that I thought you had mischaracterized some of SBF's views about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It appears that you have since edited the post to correct some of those mischaracterizations, but you did not acknowledge having done so, best I can tell. 

I also disagreed with your view that many good projects would lose funding if there were a crypto downturn. Unfortunately, with FTX collapsing so abruptly, there is a risk of that happening. I am hopeful that other donors will step up to fund the highest value projects funded by FTX, but this is a real challenge we face as a community. 

I'm puzzled by your statement in this new post that "It was quite obvious that this would happen..." There was certainly a risk things could go badly, and I think I personally underestimated the risk, but I don't think it is credible to say that it was obvious.

Response lifted from a different post:

"Members of the mutinous cohort told me that the movement’s leaders were not to be taken at their word—that they would say anything in public to maximize impact. Some of the paranoia—rumor-mill references to secret Google docs and ruthless clandestine councils—seemed overstated, but there was a core cadre that exercised control over public messaging; its members debated, for example, how to formulate their position that climate change was probably not as important as runaway A.I. without sounding like denialists or jerks." (New Yorker)

What makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency. If we are self-censoring because we have already concluded something is super effective, then there is no point in EA. Go do your own thing with your own money. Become Bill Gates. But don't associate with EA.

Being honest, I do genuinely think that climate change is less important than runaway AI, primarily because of both option value issues and the stakes of the problem. One is a big problem that could hurt or kill millions, while AI could kill billions.

But I'm concerned that they couldn't simply state why they believe AI is more important than climate change rather than do this over-complicated scheme.

3. Finances should be partially anonymized. If an EA org receives some money above a certain threshold from an individual contribution, we should be transparent in saying that we will reject said money if it is not donated anonymously. You may protest that this would decrease the number of donations by rich billionaires. But take it this way: if they donate to EA, it's because they believe that EA can spend it better. Thus, they should be willing to donate anonymously, to not affect how EA spends money. If they don't donate to EA, then they can establish a different philanthropic organization and hire EA-adjacent staff, making for more competition.

Disagree, this would make transparency worse without providing much benefit.

1. The new button of "support" is great, but I think EA forum should have a way to sort by controversiality. And, have the EA forum algorithm occasionally (some ϵ % of the time), punt controversial posts back upwards to the front page. If you're like me, you read the forum sorted by Magic (New and Upvoted). But this promotes herd mentality. The red-teaming and self-criticism are excellent, but if the only way we aggregate how "good" red-teaming is is by up-votes, that is flawed. Perhaps the best way to know that criticism has touched a nerve is to compute a fraction: how many members of the community disagree vs how many agree. (or, even better, if you are in an organization, use a weighted fraction, where you put lower weight on the people in the organization that are in positions of power (obviously difficult to implement in practice))

Disagree here because I don't want to see an EA forum that values controversial posts.

Thanks for this post. Not sure what it would take to get it onto the front page? The algorithm seems very opaque to me. 

Really like idea 1. Is there currently a way to view / find posts with overall negative votes?

Although I cheer for this,

What makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency

- although I really want to move to a world where radical transparency wins, I currently don't believe that we're in a world like that right now (I wish I could explain why I think that without immediately being punished for excess transparency, but for obvious reasons that seems impossible).

How do we get to that world? Or if you see this world in better light than I do, if you believe that the world is already mostly managing to avoid punishing important true ideas, what're the dynamics that preserve and promote that?

Hi there, 

How will anonymity of donations improve the governance process of funding? Also this move will affect conflicts of interests as eg. Competitions (or similar projects) may depend on the public being aware of which organizations and individuals cannot join/participate - to this point? how can this issue be avoided in anonymous funding?

Best regards, 

Miguel

I doubt EA can change because it prizes itself on being an ideological bubble and takes pride in having views that are heterodox. One of the first criticisms of EA that I was exposed to when I took the EA intro course did talk about the problem of diverting people to engage in morally ambiguous work in the finance industry (I just looked at the curriculum of the latest intro course and didn't see these criticisms linked anymore). I'm sure there are lots of criticisms that have been produced over the years about the kind of extreme utilitarianism that EA ostensibly promotes so I'm a little bit surprised that people are shocked that a concern highlighted in some of these criticisms has materialized. I guess that it maybe proves that EA criticism is more of an intellectual exercise rather than something that is truly digested and taken into account. The only thing that can burst an ideological bubble is when a catastrophe makes it clear that the ideology in question does not match reality. If EA survives the ensuing media fire storm (and probably a Netflix show that will be produced as a result of this conflagration) then I expect it will go back into an ideological bubble until the next time it pops. My bet on the next pop is when it becomes painfully clear that the ideological thinking behind imminent AI catastrophe doesn't match the facts on the ground but hopefully that will have less collateral damage on people outside of EA circles.