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.
Yeah, I think you are pointing towards something real here.
Like, I do think a thing that drove my reaction to this was a perspective in which it was obvious that most people in EA didn't literally actively participate in the FTX fraud. I have encountered very extreme and obviously wrong opinions about this in the public (the comment section of the WaPo article provides many examples of this), and there is some value in engaging with that.
But I do think that is engaging with a position that is extremely shallow, and the mechanism of it seems like its trying to attack shallowness with more shallowness, which I don't think is necessarily a strategy to rule out, but one that I am glad EA has avoided so far.
The way I would like Zack to have done it would have been to make a well-scoped statement that is honest and says "we might still be substantially responsible for SBF, but if so, we were because of indirect effects, not because we directly helped with the fraud. We really didn't know how bad the fraud was, and we did not directly participate in it, and here is an investigation that shows that"
I mean, as I mentioned as a concrete example, Will was told by CEA board members and leadership to not write anything detailed publicly about his FTX experiences due to the ongoing investigation. This seems like it has been extremely costly in terms of my ability and others ability to understand what happened, and I don't see the corresponding payoff in the investigation results. To quote from Will 9 months ago:
Will publishing backwards-looking posts on FTX seems like the obvious and most central thing that should happen as part of FTX reform. We have clear documentation that the investigation prevented that from happening (and as far as I can tell the reflections are still not published, so it seems like the investigations completely prevented this kind of information from entering the public record).