I’m Emma from the Communications team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). I want to flag a few media items related to EA that have come out recently or will be coming out soon, given they’ll touch on topics—like FTX—that I expect will be of interest to Forum readers.
- The CEO of CEA, @Zachary Robinson, wrote an op-ed that came out today addressing Sam Bankman-Fried and the continuing value of EA. (Read here)
- @William_MacAskill will appear on two podcasts and will discuss FTX: Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg and the Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris.
- The podcast episode with Sam Harris will likely be released next week and is aimed at a general audience.
- Update on April 1: this episode is now available for listening here.
- The podcast episode with Spencer Greenberg will likely be released in two weeks and is aimed at people more familiar with the EA movement.
- Update on April 16: this episode is now available for listening here. (A linkpost from the host, Spencer Greenberg, is also here.)
- The podcast episode with Sam Harris will likely be released next week and is aimed at a general audience.
I’ll add links for these episodes once they become available and plan to update this post as needed.
Yep, I think the investigation did screen off some extreme scenarios in which people at CEA were colluding very actively with Sam about his biggest crimes. I at least had very little probability on this, and while it's good to clear up such an extreme scenario, I don't think it has much to do with actually preventing future things like FTX.
I totally agree there is value in signaling to external stakeholders that CEA is not literally criminal, but I don't think this has anything to do with a claimed "internal reflection process" and "institutional reform".
If the section had said "my organization has been working hard on trying to clarify that we were not literally colluding on crimes with Sam" then I wouldn't have objected, or even something weaker like "I do think people overestimate the degree to which EA knew about Sam's crimes, and a recent investigation showed that at CEA nobody knew of the major crimes that Sam committed before FTX collapsed". But that's not what the section claims. It directly claims that the investigation was part of an "internal reflection process" and "instutitional reform", and I have been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform (which, to be clear, does not mean that others at CEA don't think it was important, but I think the case for that is quite weak, given the large costs it imposed on other people trying to do investigations, aggregating evidence, and the extreme narrowness of the questions investigated).