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.
(Sorry you're getting downvoted, this seems like a productive conversation to me.)
There's a big question about who things are being legible to. I don't think this would make things meaningfully more legible to you or people in your reference class of basically being high context on the org and having a lot of intersections in social circles.
I think there's a large crowd who are closer to "the general public" who only know about things via stuff that's written publicly, and will only ever read a small fraction of that. I think that these kinds of reform help to make legible to that crowd that the org isn't on some broad index-of-corruption where there is a culture of doing things for your mates, following the path of convenience (especially if that means getting more money), etc. That's not directly about "will there be another SBF?" (base rates are surely low), but pretty informative anyway for a bunch of questions about how excited people will be to interact with the org/community.
I think if EV had had a high corruption culture (even if they didn't literally know about any crimes), it would have been much more costly to have an external investigation (and such an investigation would likely have shaken out differently). This doesn't exclude the possibility that there would have been better/cheaper ways to signal this. And perhaps there are other effects I'm not tracking; I'd be interested if you wanted to elaborate on the view that it makes it harder for the public to tell what's going on inside EA.