- There is a new Time article
- Seems certain 98% we'll discuss it
- I would like us to try and have a better discussion about this than we sometimes do.
- Consider if you want to engage
- I updated a bit on important stuff as a result of this article. You may disagree. I am going to put my "personal updates" in a comment
Excepts from the article that I think are relevant. Bold is mine. I have made choices here and feel free to recommend I change them.
Yet MacAskill had long been aware of concerns around Bankman-Fried. He was personally cautioned about Bankman-Fried by at least three different people in a series of conversations in 2018 and 2019, according to interviews with four people familiar with those discussions and emails reviewed by TIME.
He wasn’t alone. Multiple EA leaders knew about the red flags surrounding Bankman-Fried by 2019, according to a TIME investigation based on contemporaneous documents and interviews with seven people familiar with the matter. Among the EA brain trust personally notified about Bankman-Fried’s questionable behavior and business ethics were Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher who went on to lead Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic arm, the FTX Future Fund, and Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of OpenPhilanthropy, a nonprofit organization that makes grants supporting EA causes. Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
MacAskill declined to answer a list of detailed questions from TIME for this story. “An independent investigation has been commissioned to look into these issues; I don’t want to front-run or undermine that process by discussing my own recollections publicly,” he wrote in an email. “I look forward to the results of the investigation and hope to be able to respond more fully after then.” Citing the same investigation, Beckstead also declined to answer detailed questions. Karnofsky did not respond to a list of questions from TIME. Through a lawyer, Bankman-Fried also declined to respond to a list of detailed written questions. The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) did not reply to multiple requests to explain why Bankman-Fried left the board in 2019. A spokesperson for Effective Ventures, the parent organization of CEA, cited the independent investigation, launched in Dec. 2022, and declined to comment while it was ongoing.
In a span of less than nine months in 2022, Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund—helmed by Beckstead—gave more than $160 million to effective altruist causes, including more than $33 million to organizations connected to MacAskill. “If [Bankman-Fried] wasn’t super wealthy, nobody would have given him another chance,” says one person who worked closely with MacAskill at an EA organization. “It’s greed for access to a bunch of money, but with a philosopher twist.”
But within months, the good karma of the venture dissipated in a series of internal clashes, many details of which have not been previously reported. Some of the issues were personal. Bankman-Fried could be “dictatorial,” according to one former colleague. Three former Alameda employees told TIME he had inappropriate romantic relationships with his subordinates. Early Alameda executives also believed he had reneged on an equity arrangement that would have left Bankman-Fried with 40% control of the firm, according to a document reviewed by TIME. Instead, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, he had registered himself as sole owner of Alameda.
Bankman-Fried’s approach to managing the business was an even bigger problem. “As we started to implement some of the really basic, standard corporate controls, we found more and more cases where I thought Sam had taken dangerous and egregious shortcuts,” says one person who later raised concerns about Bankman-Fried to EA leaders. “And in many cases [he] had concealed the fact that he had done that.”
“We didn’t know how much money we actually had. We didn’t have a clear accounting record of all the trades we’d done,” Bouscal says. “Sam continued pushing us more and more in this direction of doing a huge number of trades, a huge number of transfers, and we couldn’t account for that.” At the same time, she adds, Bankman-Fried was spending enormous amounts of money because “he didn’t have a distinction between firm capital and trading capital. It was all one pool.”
The meeting was short. Mac Aulay and the management team offered Bankman-Fried a buyout in exchange for his resignation as CEO, and threatened to quit if he refused. Bankman-Fried sat there silently, according to two people present, then got up and left. The next day, he came back with his answer: he would not step down. Instead, the other four members of the management team resigned, along with roughly half of Alameda’s 30 employees. Mac Aulay, an Australian citizen, was forced to leave the country shortly afterward, because her work visa was tied to Alameda.
edit: text added
Bouscal recalled speaking to Mac Aulay immediately after one of Mac Aulay’s conversations with MacAskill in late 2018. “Will basically took Sam’s side,” said Bouscal, who recalls waiting with Mac Aulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. (Bouscal and Mac Aulay had once dated; though no longer romantically involved, they remain close friends.) “Will basically threatened Tara,” Bouscal recalls. “I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and that he was just believing Sam’s side of the story, which made no sense to me.”
But one of the people who did warn others about Bankman-Fried says that he openly wielded this power when challenged. “It was like, ‘I could destroy you,’” this person says. “Will and Holden would believe me over you. No one is going to believe you.”
Sometime that year, the Centre for Effective Altruism did an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda, according to one person who was contacted during the investigation, and who said it was was conducted in part by MacAskill. Bankman-Fried left the board of the organization in 2019.
“You vouch for him?” Musk asked MacAskill.
“Very much so!” MacAskill replied. “Very dedicated to making the long-term future of humanity go well.”
None of the early Alameda employees who witnessed Bankman-Fried’s behavior years earlier say they anticipated this level of alleged criminal fraud. There was no “smoking gun,” as one put it, that revealed specific examples of lawbreaking. Even if they knew Bankman-Fried was dishonest and unethical, they say, none of them could have foreseen a fraud of this scope.
Some thoughts on how to hold a good discussion here:
- Please lets both write how we feel and how we think about this but clearly seperate them.
- Many senior figures just aren't likely to respond to this. Personally I both believe they have good reasons and take it seriously but am confused as to why there has been so little comment. But I don't think we should expect responses
- Note that downvotes and disagreevotes are a way of people expressing their views without having to spend the effort to type them and that is a good thing. It makes the discussion more representative, not less. In particular, in my anecdotal experience from discussion on facebook, if you give people the ability to vote, you see a much more representative set of participants than if poeple just write.
ETA July:
I regret posting my comments for several reasons. I'm sorry to anyone I upset.
Specifically, I regret not putting more effort into ensuring that my first comment is not going to be misinterpreted, and ensuring to put things into context, e.g., that "putting SBF on a pedestal", if meaning something like “holding SBF up as a role model”, was—certainly for those who didn’t know him well in person!—in the vast majority of instances reasonable and understandable at the time, and I would have easily done the same! (Some things like e.g. tying EA’s reputation to SBF to such a close extent were perhaps not super wise but much of this is probably hindsight bias).
I feel also bad about mentioning the flyers, mostly because I got important information wrong which is a grave mistake in such a situation, and partly because my phrasing was too harsh/critical (if the person who created those flyers is ever reading this, I'm sorry, you had good intentions and it wasn't a big deal at all!).
I wrote the comment because I was disconcerted by the original comment (and its initial high Karma count) which seemed to seriously question whether we “elevated [SBF] as a moral paragon and someone to emulate “, or “tied EA's reputation closely to his”, and asked for specific examples. I still feel like it’s a no-brainer that EAs, in general, obviously and understandably elevated SBF as a role model and someone worth emulating! Seriously questioning this still strikes me as defensive motivated reasoning and concerning. Many people seemed to agree with the commenter which made me worry that EAs would refuse to learn any lessons from this whole scandal which might risk repeating a similar monumental catastrophe. (Me being upset[1] is not meant to be an excuse but if anything a further reason why I should have written this comment differently. As a general rule, it's simply bad to write comments when one is upset because it clouds one's judgment and reduces compassion, and this is an obvious mistake which I should not have made.)
So why did the FTX scandal happen? One simplistic perspective is (ignoring many other, more important causal factors!): someone with dark triad/malevolent traits got more and more power and ended up doing something extremely bad. Other people did not realize that this person is malevolent, or suspected it and didn’t speak up (e.g., because of fear, miscalculation, or motivated reasoning, or opportunism). I’ve seen that story before and it really shaped my outlook on life.
That’s why I wanted to make the following argument: let’s not put too much faith in the character judgment of the people who championed SBF (and have known him very well) going forward, to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Let’s not be like “oh well, there is nothing we can learn from this, no need to change anything”. That does seem like a very important point to me and I stand by that.
Now, importantly, I wasn’t trying to imply that any EA leader knew about the fraud or did something illegal. I also wasn’t trying to imply that mistakes like ‘suboptimal character judgment’ are even remotely comparable to the mistakes that SBF made. Of course, it’s not even close. In some sense, it’s a minor mistake that probably more than 95% of people would have made (because lots of things would have to come together to not make such mistakes). In fact, in my experience, many amazing people don’t have great character judgment.
But on the other hand, it’s still substantial and worth keeping in mind and should be factored in when making, e.g., board decisions (as board members appoint executive directors and those should have good character) or when trusting these people’s character judgment in the future. (Also, I feel like some comments seemed to suggest that being naive and overly trusting is just cute but not worth worrying about which I don’t agree with.)
As I also wrote in the original comment, I’m not even sure that EA leaders, including Will, made any mistakes ex ante given the enormous uncertainty and complexity of the whole situation and all the important trade-offs involved. I do think that it’s plausible though that some mistakes were made, including significant ones.
I also regret having singled out Will and I’m sorry if this comment upset anyone. I worry that others may have interpreted my comment as trying to put all the blame on him which I really didn’t want to. I did it, because, to my knowledge, Will was really the EA leader who championed SBF the most and had the closest personal connection to him (aside from people like Caroline, etc., of course). And generally, I think it’s valuable to give specific examples when possible. It’s important to note that many others were involved in this too and could have stepped in!
To be perfectly clear, I think EA leaders, including Will, have done tremendous good and worked very hard to make the world a better place. I don’t want to belittle their extraordinary contributions.
Last, I worry that my comment was interpreted as taking the side of EA critics which is not the case. I think that much criticism of EA and EA leaders in the media has been unfair and exaggerated.
There is more I could write about all of this but this issue is emotionally taxing and I already spent several days on this comment, and I’m trying to move on. (Several days for just writing this crappy comment? Yeah, most of this was just feeling guilty without being able to do anything else productive. This ties to the general issue of how much time to put into comments. FWIW, in the months before writing the comments in March, I was actively challenging myself to write comments more quickly (and often). In hindsight, this could have been a mistake since I may lack the necessary verbal intelligence to pull this off.)
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[Original comment.]
Thanks, these are good points.
I do think it's plausible that (some!) EA leaders made substantial mistakes. Spotting questionable behavior or character is hard but not impossible, especially if you have known them for 10 years and work very closely with them and basically were in a mentee-mentor relationship (like e.g. Will, is my impression). I don't fault other people, e.g. those who rarely or never interacted with SBF, for not having done more.
Either people ignored warning signs -> clear mistake. Or they didn't notice anything even though others had noticed signs (like e.g. Habryka)-> suboptimal character judgment. I think the ability to spot such people and don't let them into positions of power is extremely important.
Of course, the crucial question is what could have been done even if you know 100% that SBF is not at all trustworthy. It's plausible to me that not much could have been done because SBF already accumulated so much power. So it's plausible that no one made substantial mistakes. On the other hand, no one forced Will to write Musk and vouch for SBF which perhaps wasn't wise if you have concerns about SBF. On the other hand, it's perhaps also reasonable to gamble on SBF given the inevitable uncertainty about other's character and the large possible upsides. Perhaps I'm just suffering from hindsight bias.
Also, just to be clear, I agree that much of the criticism against EAs and EA leaders we see in the media is unfairly exaggerated. I'm wary of contributing to what I perceive as others unjustly piling-on a movement of moral activists, probably fueled by do-gooder derogation, and so on (as Geoffrey mentions in his comment.)
Why have I been so upset? The usual. The ideals of EA are very close to my heart so it made me very sad to see so many people (outside of EA) hate on EA ideals and to ridicule so many important values and concepts. That's a terrible sign for the long-term trajectory of humanity and it has reduced the global level of good-will, cooperation, and trust. It made many people more cynical about the very ideas of altruism and truth-seeking itself.