Why hasn't EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?

4/2 Update: A former board member of Effective Ventures US, Rebecca Kagan, has shared that she resigned from the board in protest last year, evidently in part because of various core EAs' resistance to there being any investigation into what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried. "These mistakes make me very concerned about the amount of harm EA might do in the future."

Oliver Habryka says that I'm correct that EA still hasn't yet conducted any sort of investigation about what happened re SBF/FTX, beyond the narrow investigation into whether EV was facing legal risk:

I am quite confident there is no such investigation. I have been trying to convince people to do such a thing for like 1.5 years, but appetite for it seems low among leadership.

I might even offer for Lightcone to do it, if we could get EA orgs to collaborate.

(I've had conversations with Kagan, Habryka, and a bunch of other EAs about this in the past, and I knew Kagan's post was in the pipeline, though the stuff they've said on this topic has been independent of me and would have been written in my absence.)

Someone else messaged me to say that they thought there had been an investigation, but after talking to staff at CEA, they've confirmed again that no investigation has ever taken place.

Julia Wise and Ozzie Gooen apparently also called for an investigation, a full five months ago: 

• Action: 
  • Find someone to run an investigation into how EA individuals and organizations could have better handled the FTX situation. 
• Barriers:
  • People who did things that were bad or will make them look bad will not want to tell you about it. Everyone’s lawyers will have told them not to talk about anything.
• Existing work / resources:
  • EV’s investigation has a defined scope that won’t be relevant to all the things EAs want to know, and it won’t necessarily publish any of its results.
  • Oliver Habryka and friends have done a discussion series informally looking at what happened and how trust within EA related to the problem.

[Update Apr. 5: Julia tells me "I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly."]

So, bizarre as it seems, the situation does seem to be as it appears: there's been literally no action on this in the ~17 months since FTX imploded.

Will MacAskill's appearance on Sam Harris podcast is out now, and I'm very happy to hear the new details from Will about what happened from his perspective.

But while he talks (at 56:00) about a lot of individual EAs undergoing an enormous amount of "self-reflection, self-scrutiny" in the wake of FTX's collapse, and he notes that a lot of EA's leadership has been replaced with new leadership, I don't consider this a replacement for the whole (obvious, from my perspective) "actually pay someone to look into what happened and write up a postmortem" thing. If anything I'd have expected EAs to have multiple such write-ups by now so we could compare different perspectives on what happened, not literally zero.

I think someone should do an investigation much wider in scope than what happened at FTX, covering the entire causal chain from SBF first talking to EAs at MIT to the damage done to EA. Here are some questions I'm particularly curious about:

• Did SBF show signs of dishonesty early on at MIT? If so, why did he not have a negative reputation among the EAs there?
• To what extent did EA "create SBF"-- influence the values of SBF and others at FTX? Could a version of EA that placed more emphasis on integrity, diminishing returns to altruistic donations, or something else have prevented FTX?
• Alameda was started by various traders from Jane Street, especially EAs. Did they do this despite concerns about how the company would be run, and were they correct to leave at the time?
• [edited to add] I have heard that Tara Mac Aulay and others left Alameda in 2018. Mac Aulay claims this was "in part due to concerns over risk management and business ethics". Do they get a bunch of points for this? Why did this warning not spread, and can we even spread such warnings without overloading the community with gossip even more than it is?
• Were Alameda/FTX ever highly profitable controlling for the price of crypto? (edit: ruling out that FTX's market share was due to artificially tight spreads due to money-losing trades from Alameda). How should we update on the overall competence of companies with lots of EAs?
• SBF believed in linear returns to altruistic donations (I think he said this on the 80k podcast), unlike most EAs. Did this cause him to take on undue risk, or would fraud have happened if FTX had a view on altruistic returns similar to that of OP or SFF but linear moral views?
• What is the cause of the exceptionally poor media perception of EA after FTX? When i search for "effective altruism news", around 90% of articles I could find negative and none positive, including many with extremely negative opinions unrelated to FTX. One would expect at least some article saying "Here's why donating to effective causes is still good". (In no way do I want to diminish the harms done to customers whose money was gambled away, but it seems prudent to investigate the harms to EA per se)

My guess is that this hasn't been done simply because it's a lot of work (perhaps 100 interviews and one person-year of work), no one thinks it's their job, and conducting such an investigation would somewhat entail someone both speaking for the entire EA movement and criticizing powerful people and organizations.

See also: Ryan Carey's comment

I'm wary of EAs performatively self-flagellating and accepting more responsibility for the FTX thing than is warranted (given, e.g., that huge numbers of people with a very direct financial incentive in spotting FTX's fraud didn't spot it, so it's obviously not weird if random EAs failed to spot it).

I don't think this is about spotting fraud at all. I think the strong case for EA responsibility goes like:

• EA promoted earning to give
• When the movement largely moved away from it, not enough work was done to make that distance (such that the average person still strongly associates EA with earning to give)
• Sam adopted an extremely reckless approach to EV-maximisation that was highly likely, if not guaranteed, to lead to a severe loss in value, regardless of the illegality of that loss
• He publicly branded himself with this reckless EV-maximisation approach
• He publicly associated himself with the movement, with earning-to-give specifically, and donated lots of money to EA causes to prove it
• Many EA causes accepted that money and/or associated themselves with Sam
• Critics of Sam's recklessness did not speak up or were drowned out by other community members

The counterfactuals look something like this:

• If EA had strongly distanced themselves from ETG, Sam may not have considered it as a path, or been unable to tie himself to EA
• If EA had criticised Sam's recklessness this may have moderated it
• If EA orgs conditionalised their acceptance of his donations on financial transparency this may have mitigated the recklessness (and this would have been in their own interests since they stood to lose money!)

FWIW, I don't necessarily agree with this, but this is what feels either explicit or implicit in a lot of the EA criticism around this that I've read. The focus appears to be explicitly on the causal chain of Sam adopting a reckless flavour of ETG which motivated him to take risks which didn't pay off, and what EA, which was surely influential over his thinking, could've done to prevent it.

A few months ago, @Naomi N and I collected this overview of all post-FTX reflection-related projects we were aware of at the time - you and others might find that helpful!

Hi Rob,

Thank you for writing this post. I am also highly disappointed that no institutional post-mortem has been conducted, so I'm glad that you're speaking out about it. Now that the verdict has been officially handed down to SBF, there's no excuse for there not to be an investigation anymore.

Maybe somehow there are good excuses (and yes, they are excuses) for why a formal investigation has not taken place. But no matter how florid or sophisticated they are, they won't change my mind that a public investigation should take place. Pretty much no matter what, the reputation of the core EA leadership is going to take a hit if no public and formal investigation is carried out, at least in my eyes.

Regarding comments about psychopathy/sociopathy: I recently did a bunch of research on malevolence, so I feel confident in speaking on the subject. The term "sociopathy" seems to be the less well-defined term, so I would somewhat advise against using it, at least until greater clarity arises. However, psychopathy is a fairly established construct in the literature with a few widely-used instruments from the academy, so if you're choosing between using psychopathy or sociopathy, I would say use psychopathy. But even psychopathy is a pretty confused term because it captures so many different characteristics (including callousness, grandiosity, impulsivity, and criminality) which don't necessarily coincide. My opinion is that the cleanest way of talking about all this is to list out more specific and well-defined traits, such as callousness.

But, and I stress this, just because he wasn't a violent criminal doesn't prove he was a good, compassionate person. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that deficiencies in empathy/caring for others have distinct origins from violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions. Indeed, the main distinguishing point between psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is that psychopathy has a component that does not theoretically relate to violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions (according to an authority on Psychopathy). It would be most adaptive for a person to be able to abide by the most explicit and universal social norms (e.g., don't kill people) but still do harm in covert, neutral, or even socially desirable ways (e.g., being the CEO of a giant meat company). This is the type of malevolent person I expect SBF is, if he indeed is malevolent.

I also intend to publish a post on this topic, but I thought I'd clarify here since I saw a discussion regarding sociopathy in the comments.

I think it would have been better to speak up way, way sooner,

If and when this postmortem ever does happen, I hope they will address this, too. The lack of public engagement on the subject with the rest of the movement following the FTX disaster seems a comparable lapse of responsibility to anything that might have happened in the time leading up to it.

I would like to know what the disagree votes* mean here.

*At the time of this comment, it's 7 Agree - 7 Disagree

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/361-sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism

This podcast just came out with Will MacAskill talking about EA and SBF with Sam Harris 

(edit: listening to the podcast, which I haven't finished, I get the sense that both Sam and Will are surprisingly unaware of the enrichment of SBF, his family members, and others from FTX)

I’ve written a post adding my own call for an independent investigation, which also outlines new information in support of that position. Specifically, my post documents important issues where EA leaders have not been forthcoming in their communications, troublesome discrepancies between leaders’ communications and credible media reports, and claims that leaders have made about post-FTX reforms that appear misleading.

I've made a first attempt at this here: To what extent & how did EA indirectly contribute to financial crime - and what can be done now? One attempt at a review

I'd highlight that I found taking quite a structured approach helpful: breaking things down chronologically, and trying to answer specific questions like what's the mechanism, how much did this contribute, and what's a concrete recommendation?

"I’ll suggest a framework for how that broader review might be conducted: for each topic the review could:

• Establish the details of EA involvement, 
• Indicate a mechanism for how this could have indirectly contributed to the eventual financial crime, 
• Provide some assessment of to what extent that mechanism may have indirectly contributed, and 
• Provide a concrete recommendation for what the EA community could do differently to prevent any recurrence.

I’ll also provide some preliminary thoughts below, as an indication of what could be done in the full review. One way to approach a review is chronological, covering eight touchstone or 'gate' moments:

1. Bankman-Fried starts earning to give
2. Alameda founding 
3. FTX founding
4. Early political donations through Bankman-Fried’s family
5. FTX Foundation and Future Fund founding
6. Bankman-Fried becomes a public face of EA
7. Whistleblowing

This may be too exhaustive or “self-flagellating” for some, but I think it can identify areas to improve and fix. As will become clear, I think that step 5, the founding of the FTX Foundation and Future Fund, is where the biggest questions are raised and where I make the most recommendations."

The first consideration here is that EA needs to focus, primarily, on impact. That is the whole point of the movement, to maximise the positive impact we can have. 

So any investigation should focus on how the SBF fiasco impacted EA's ability to do good, and how we might address that. And also, if we'd want to change (something about EA) in order to minimise future events that could adversely impact our ability to do good. i.e. Actionable recommendations. 

IMHO, looking from outside, SBF has done a lot of PR damage to EA, and we have not done a good job of responding to that. Maybe this would be a good area to focus an investigation. 

One tangible example of each: 

• I have seen countless references to EA as an excuse to justify being rich and living in luxury by saying you are "earning to give," with SBF cited as an example. This is actively harming the EA movement. We need to get the word out that many more EA's are like EA founder Toby Ord, who chooses to donate most of his salary and lives a spartan existence. But how? 
• Do we want to create some criteria for accepting donations? Honestly, I would be very hesitant to do this, since donations do a massive amount of good, so unless they're coming from really bad people, the balance often favours accepting the donations. But if we feel that some sources will end up doing more harm to the movement than any tangible good they do, we could set up clear rules to manage such situation. Or do we want to have rules that state that, under some conditions, we'd return donations? Again, factoring in the good that each donation can do, it's not easy. 

On a more general note, we need to make it very clear that Effective Altruism is not some kind of closed society where you get accepted or rejected. The EA community is no more to blame for SBF's crimes than the New York Yankees are to blame if one of their fans commits a homicide while on vacation in Japan. 

Ultimately, if we do consider investigating this, we need to be clear that the investigation isn't going to do further harm to the EA movement (and therefore, to all the causes that depend on the EU movement). Is there any reason to believe that doing an internal investigation will help? I mean, will anyone outside the movement feel reassured or will the trust an investigation that shows we did nothing wrong? And if some EA's did do something wrong, or even cannot prove conclusively that they didn't, isn't there a risk that publishing that will massively damage the movement, disproportionately relative to any bad things done. 

I don't want to appear cynical. But right now, SBF has given the EA movement a massive PR problem. Whatever we do needs to factor that into consideration. 

If there were some smoking gun type evidence suggesting that several EA's probably did bad things, then obviously we'd need to investigate that to provide reassurance (which is also important for PR). But I haven't heard anyone accuse anyone of that. So what do we gain?