It seems that SBF had some character issues that were systematically overlooked by senior members in the community. The natural follow up question is, who else has been overlooked and might act in ways that cause a lot of harm in the future?
It seems that SBF had some character issues that were systematically overlooked by senior members in the community. The natural follow up question is, who else has been overlooked and might act in ways that cause a lot of harm in the future?
I think it's a good question, but I'm unsure whether a public discussion calling out names is the right way to go. And I think it might be net negative.
On the one hand, publicly calling people out could raise red flags about potential bad actors in the EA community early and in a transparent way. On the other hand, it could lead to witch hunts, false positives, etc. You can also imagine that whatever bad actors are in the community would start retaliating and listing good actors here who are their enemies, so it could cause a lot of confusion and infighting. (Think about the way Donald Trump uses public discourse.)
I think private discussions about this with others you trust are probably a good idea, to help guide personal decisions about who else to trust, work for, donate to etc. And this issue might make more decentralization actionable. For example, to mitigate bad actor risk, we might just have a background expectation that there is always X% chance that any individual in the EA community--even someone who is currently beloved--actually turns out to be a bad actor. And so no individual in the community should be responsible for more than Y% of the money, power, reputation etc. of the community to give EA more resilience against the inevitability of bad actors popping up here and there.
There may be other systemic ways to manage the risk too without making publicly outing suspected bad actors a regular thing. I'm also still open to the idea that public bad actor callouts might be a good idea, but I think it's a really delicate thing and I'd like to see a convincing argument/plan for how to make the discussion be productive before I would support it.
I don't think these concerns hold up. EAs are highly engaged and can distinguish between ... (read more)