Quick Update on Leaving the Board of EV

Update Apr. 4: I’ve now spoken with another EA who was involved in EA’s response to the FTX implosion. To summarize what they said to me:

• They thought that the lack of an investigation was primarily due to general time constraints and various exogenous logistical difficulties. At the time, they thought that setting up a team who could overcome the various difficulties would be extremely hard for mundane reasons such as:
  • thorough, even-handed investigations into sensitive topics are very hard to do (especially if you start out low-context);
  • this is especially true when they are vaguely scoped and potentially involve a large number of people across a number of different organizations;
  • “professional investigators” (like law firms) aren’t very well-suited to do the kind of investigation that would actually be helpful;
  • legal counsels were generally strongly advising people against talking about FTX stuff in general;
  • various old confidentiality agreements would make it difficult to discuss what happened in some relevant instances (e.g. meetings that had Chatham House Rules);
  • it would be hard to guarantee confidentiality in the investigation when info might be subpoenaed or something like that;
  • and a general plethora of individually-surmountable but collectively-highly-challenging obstacles.
• They flagged that at the time, most people involved were already in an exceptionally busy and difficult time, and so had less bandwidth for additional projects than usual.
• A caveat here is that the EV board did block some people from speaking publicly during the initial investigation into EV's legal situation. That investigation ended back in the summer of 2023. 
• Julia Wise and Ozzie Gooen wrote on the EA Forum that this is a potentially useful project for someone to take on, which as far as this person knew isn’t something any EA leadership did or would try to stop, and the impression of the person I spoke to was that Julia and Ozzie indeed tried to investigate what reforms should happen, though the person I spoke to didn’t follow that situation closely.
• The person I spoke to didn't want to put words in the mouth of EA leaders, and their information is mostly from ~1 year ago and might be out of date. But to the extent some people aren't currently champing at the bit to make this happen, their impression (with respect to the EA leaders they have interacted with relatively extensively) is that this has little to do with a desire to protect the reputation of EA or of individual EAs.
• Rather, their impression is that for a lot of top EA leaders, this whole thing is a lot less interesting, because those EAs think they know what happened (and that it's not that interesting). So the choice is like "should I pour in a ton of energy to try to set up this investigation that will struggle to get off the ground to learn kinda boring stuff I already know?" And maybe they are underrating how interesting others would find it, but that made the whole idea not so important-seeming (at least in the early days after FTX’s collapse, relative to all the other urgent and confusing things swirling around in the wake of the collapse) from their perspective.

I vouch for this person as generally honest and well-intentioned. I update from the above that community leaders are probably less resistant to doing some kind of fact-finding inquiry than I thought. I’m hoping that this take is correct, since it suggests to me that it might not be too hard to get an SBF postmortem to happen now that the trial and the EV legal investigation are both over (and now that we’re all talking about the subject in the first place).

If the take above isn’t correct, then hopefully my sharing it will cause others to chime in with further objections, and I can zigzag my way to understanding what actually happened!

I shared the above summary with Oliver Habryka, and he said:

Hmm, I definitely don’t buy the "this has little to do with EA leadership desire to protect their reputation". A lot of the reason for the high standards is for PR reasons.

I think people are like "Oh man, doing a good job here seems really hard, since doing it badly seems like it would be really costly reputation-wise. But if someone did want to put in the heroic effort to do a good enough job to not have many downsides, then yeah, I would be in favor of that. But that seems so hard to do that I don’t really expect it to happen."

Like, the primary thing that seems to me the mistake is the standard to which any such investigation is being held to before people consider it net-positive.

I'll also share Ozzie Gooen's Twitter take from a few days ago:

My quick guess (likely to be wrong!)

• There are really only a few people "on top" of EA.
• This would have essentially been "these top people investigating each other, and documenting that for others in the community"
• These people don't care that much about being trusted in the community. They fund the community and have power
• the EA community really doesn't have much power over the funders/leaders.
• These people generally feel like they understand the problem well enough.

And, some corrections to my earlier posts about this:

• I said that "there was a narrow investigation into legal risk to Effective Ventures last year", which I think may have overstated the narrowness of the investigation a bit. My understanding is that the investigation's main goal was to reduce EV's legal exposure, but to that end the investigation covered a somewhat wider range of topics (possibly including things like COI policies), including things that might touch on broader EA mistakes and possible improvements. But it's hard to be sure about any of this because details of the investigation's scope and outcomes weren't shared, and it doesn't sound like they will be.
• I said that Julia Wise had "been calling for the existence of such an investigation"; Julia clarifies on social media, "I would say I listed it as a possible project rather than calling for it exactly."
  • Specifically, Julia Wise, Ozzie Gooen, and Sam Donald co-wrote a November 2023 blog post that listed "comprehensive investigation into FTX<>EA connections / problems" as one of four "projects and programs we'd like to see", saying "these projects are promising, but they're sizable or ongoing projects that we don't have the capacity to carry out". They also included this idea in a list of Further Possible Projects on EA Reform.

I haven't heard any arguments against doing an investigation yet, and I could imagine folks might be nervous about speaking up here. So I'll try to break the ice by writing an imaginary dialogue between myself and someone who disagrees with me.

Obviously this argument may not be compelling compared to what an actual proponent would say, and I'd guess I'm missing at least one key consideration here, so treat this as a mere conversation-starter.

Hypothetical EA: Why isn't EV's 2023 investigation enough? You want us to investigate; well, we investigated.

Rob: That investigation was only investigating legal risk to EV. Everything I've read (and everything I've heard privately) suggests that it wasn't at all trying to answer the question of whether the EA community made any moral or prudential errors in how we handled SBF over the years. Nor was it trying to produce common-knowledge documents (either private or public) to help any subset of EA understand what happened. Nor was it trying to come up with any proposal for what we should do differently (if anything) in the future.

I take it as fairly obvious that those are all useful activities to carry out after a crisis, especially when there was sharp disagreement, within EA leadership, long before the FTX implosion, about how we should handle SBF.

Hypothetical EA: Look, I know there’s been no capital-I “Investigation”, but plenty of established EAs have poked around at dinner parties and learned a lot of the messy complicated details of what happened. My own informal poking around has convinced me that no EAs outside FTX leadership did anything super evil or Machiavellian. The worst you can say is that they muddled along and had miscommunications and brain farts like any big disorganized group of humans, and were a bit naively over-trusting.

Me: Maybe! But scattered dinner conversation with random friends and colleagues, with minimal following up or cross-checking of facts, isn’t the best medium for getting an unbiased picture of what happened. People skew the truth, withhold info, pass the blame ball around. And you like your friends, so you’re eager to latch on to whatever story shows they did an OK job.

Perhaps your story is true, but we shouldn’t be scared of checking, applying the same level of rigor we readily apply to everything else we’re doing.

The utility of this doesn't require that any EAs be Evil. A postmortem is plenty useful in a world where we were “too trusting” or were otherwise subject to biases in how we thought, or how we shared information and made group decisions — so we can learn from our mistakes and do better next time.

And if we’ve historically been “too trusting”, it seems doubly foolish to err on the side of trusting every individual, institution, and process involved in the EA-SBF debacle, and write them a preemptive waiver for all the errors we’re studiously avoiding checking whether they’ve made.

Hypothetical EA: Look, there’s just no reason to use SBF in particular for your social experiment in radical honesty and perfect transparency. It was to some extent a matter of luck that SBF succeeded as well as he did, and that he therefore had an opportunity to cause so much harm. If there were systemic biases in EA that caused us to err here, then those same biases should show up in tons of other cases too.

The only reason to single out the SBF case in particular and give it 1000x more attention than everything else is that it’s the most newsworthy EA error.

But the main effect of this is to inflate and distort minor missteps random EA decision-makers made, bolstered by the public’s hindsight bias and cancel culture and by journalists’ axe-grinding, so that the smallest misjudgments an EA makes look like horrific unforgivable sins.

SBF is no more useful for learning about EA’s causal dynamics than any other case (and in fact SBF is an unusually bad place to try to learn generalizable lessons, because the sky-high stakes will cause people to withhold key evidence and/or bend the truth toward social desirability); it’s only useful as a bludgeon, if you came into all this already sure that EA is deeply corrupt (or that particular individuals or orgs are), and you want to summon a mob to punish those people and drive them from the community.

(Or, alternatively, if you’re sad about EA’s bad reputation and you want to find scapegoats: find the specific Bad EAs and drive them out, to prove to the world that you’re a Good EA and that EA-writ-large is now pure.)

Me: I find that argument somewhat compelling, but I still think an investigation would make sense.

First, extreme cases can often illustrate important causal dynamics that are harder to see in normal cases. E.g., if EA has a problem like “we fudge the truth too much”, this might be hard to detect in low-stakes cases where people have less incentive to lie. People’s behavior when push comes to shove is important, given the huge impact EA is trying to have on the world; and SBF is one huge instance where push came to shove and our character was really tested.

And, yes, some people may withhold information more because of the high stakes. But others will be much more willing to spend time on this question because they recognize it as important. If nothing else, SBF is a Schelling point for us all to direct our eyes at the same thing simultaneously, and see if we can converge on some new truths about the world.

Second, and moving away from abstractions to talk about the specifics of this case: My understanding is that a bunch of EAs tried to warn the community that SBF was extremely shady, and a bunch of other EAs apparently didn't believe the warnings, or didn't want those warnings widely shared even though they believed them.

“SBF is extremely shady” isn’t knowledge that FTX was committing financial fraud, and shouting "SBF is extremely shady" from the hills wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the fraud from happening. But there's some probability it might have been the tipping point at various important junctures, as potential employees and funders and customers weighed their options. And even if it wouldn't have helped at all in this case, it's good to share that kind of information in case it helps the next time around.

I think it would be directly useful to know what happened to those warnings about SBF, so we can do better next time. And I think it would also help restore a lot of trust in EA (and a lot of internal ability for EAs to coordinate with each other) if people knew what happened — if we knew which thought leaders or orgs did better or worse, how processes failed, how people plan to do better next time.

I recognize that this will be harder in some ways with journalists and twitter users breathing down your necks. And I recognize that some people may suffer unfair scrutiny and criticism because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. To some extent I just think we need to eat that cost; when you’re playing chess with the world and making massively impactful decisions, that comes with some extra responsibility to take a rare bit of unfair flack for the sake of being able to fact-find and orient at all about what happened. Hopefully the fact that some time has passed, and that we’re looking at a wide variety of people and orgs rather than a specific singled-out individual, will mitigate this problem.

If FTX were a total bolt out of the blue, that would be one thing. But apparently there were rather a lot of EAs who thought SBF was untrustworthy and evil, and had lots of evidence on hand to cite, at the exact same time 80K and Will and others were using their megaphones to broadcast that SBF is an awesome EA hero. I don’t know that 80K or Will in particular are the ones who fucked up here, but it seems like somebody fucked up in order for this perception gap to exist and go undiscussed.

I understand people having disagreements about someone's character. Hindsight bias is a thing, and I'm sure people had reasons at the time to be skeptical of some of the bad rumors about SBF. But I tend to think those disagreements should be things that are argued about rather than kept secret. Especially if the secret conversations empirically have not resulted in the best outcomes.

Hypothetical EA: I dunno, this whole “we need a public airing out of our micro-sins in order to restore trust” thing sounds an awful lot like the exact “you’re looking for scapegoats” thing I was warning about.

You’re fixated on this idea that EAs did something Wrong and need to be chastised and corrected, like we’re perpetrators alongside SBF. On the contrary, I claim that the non-FTX EAs who interacted the most with Sam should mostly be thought of as additional victims of Sam: people who were manipulated and mistreated, who often saw their livelihoods threatened as a result and their life’s work badly damaged or destroyed.

The policies you’re calling for amount to singling out and re-victimizing many of Sam’s primary victims, in the name of pleasant-sounding abstractions like Accountability — abstractions that have little actual consequentialist value in this case, just a veneer of “that sounds nice on paper”.

Me: It's unfortunately hard for me to assess the consequentialist value in this case, because no investigation has taken place. I've gestured at some questions I have above, but I'm missing most of the pieces about what actually happened, and some of the unknown unknowns here might turn out to swamp the importance of what I know about. It's not clear to me that you know much more than me, either. Rather than pitting your speculation against mine, I'd rather do some actual inquiry.

Hypothetical EA: I think we already know enough, including from the legal investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried and who was involved in his conspiracy, to make a good guess that re-victimizing random EAs is not a useful way for this movement to spend its time and energy. The world has many huge problems that need fixing, and it's not as though EA's critics are going to suddenly conclude that EAs are Good After All if we spill all of our dirty laundry. What will actually happen is that they'll cherry-pick and distort the worst-sounding tidbits, while ignoring all the parts you hoped would be "trust-restoring".

Me: Some EA critics will do that, sure. But there are plenty of people, both within EA and outside of it, who legitimately just want to know what happened, and will be very reassured to have a clearer picture of the basic sequence of events, which orgs did a better or worse job, which processes failed or succeeded. They'll also be reassured to know that we know what happened, vs. blinding ourselves to the facts and to any lessons they might contain.

Or maybe they'll be horrified because the details are actually awful (ethically, not legally). Part of being honest is taking on the risk that this could happen too. That's just not avoidable. If we're not the sort of community that would share bad stuff if it were true, then people are forced to be that much more worried that we're in fact hiding a bunch of bad stuff.

Hypothetical EA: I just don't think there's that much crucial information EA leaders are missing, from their informal poking around. You can doubt that, but I don't think a formal investigation would help much, since people who don't want to speak now will (if anything) probably be even more tight-lipped in the face of what looks like a witch-hunt.

You say that EAs have a responsibility to jump through a bunch of transparency hoops. But whether or not you agree with my “EAs are victims” frame: EAs don’t owe the community their lives. If you’re someone who made personal sacrifices to try to make the world a better place, that doesn’t somehow come with a gotcha clause where you now have incurred a huge additional responsibility that we’d never impose on ordinary private citizens, to dump your personal life into the public Internet.

Me: I don’t necessarily disagree with that, as stated. But I think particular EAs are signing up for some extra responsibility, e.g., when they become EA leaders and ask for a lot of trust on the part of their community.

I wouldn’t necessarily describe that responsibility as “huge”, because I don’t actually think a basic investigation into the SBF thing is that unusual or onerous.

I don’t see myself as proposing anything all that radical here. I’m even open to the idea that we might want to redact some names and events in the public recounting of what happened, to protect the innocent. I don’t see anything weird about that; what strikes me as puzzling is the complete absence of any basic fact-finding effort (beyond the narrow-scope EV legal inquiry).

And what strike me as doubly puzzling is that there hasn’t even been a public write-up that CEA and others are not planning to look into this at all, nor has there been any public argument for this policy — whence this dialogue. As though EAs are just hoping we’ll quietly forget about this pretty major omission, so they don’t have to say anything potentially controversial. That I don’t really respect; if you think this investigation is a bad idea, do the EA thing and make your case!

Hypothetical EA: Well, hopefully my arguments have given you some clues about (non-nefarious reasons why) EAs might want to quietly let this thing die, rather than giving a big public argument for letting it die. In addition to the obvious fact that folks are just very busy, and more time spent on this means less time spent on a hundred other things.

Me: And hopefully my arguments have helped remind some folks that things are sometimes worth doing even when they're hard.

All the arguments in the world don't erase the fact that at the end of the day, we have a choice between taking risks for the sake of righting our wrongs and helping people understand what happened, versus hiding from the light of day and quietly hoping that no one calls us out for retreating from our idealistic-sounding principles.

We have a choice between following the path of least resistance into ever-murkier, ever-more-confusing, ever-less-trusting waters; or taking a bold stand and doing whatever we can to give EAs and non-EAs alike real insight into what happened, and a real capacity to adjust course if and only if some course-changing is warranted.

There are certainly times when the boring, practical, un-virtuous-sounding option really is the right option. I don't think this is one of those times; I think we need to be better than that this one time, or we risk losing by a thousand cuts some extremely precious things that used to be central to what made EA EA.

... And if you disagree with me about all that, well, tell me why I'm wrong.

Update Apr. 15:  I talked to a CEA employee and got some more context on why CEA hasn't done an SBF investigation and postmortem. In addition to the 'this might be really difficult and it might not be very useful' concern, they mentioned that the Charity Commission investigation into EV UK is still ongoing a year and a half later. (Google suggests that statutory inquiries by the Charity Commission take an average of 1.2 years to complete, so the super long wait here is sadly normal.)

Although the Commission has said "there is no indication of wrongdoing by the trustees at this time", and the risk of anything crazy happening is lower now than it was a year and a half ago, I gather that it's still at least possible that the Commission could take some drastic action like "we think EV did bad stuff, so we're going to take over the legal entity that includes the UK components of CEA, 80K, GWWC, GovAI, etc.", which may make it harder for CEA to usefully hold the steering wheel on an SBF investigation at this stage.

Example scenario: CEA tries to write up some lessons learned from the SBF thing, with an EA audience in mind; EAs tend to have unusually high standards, and a CEA staffer writes a comment that assumes this context, without running the comment by lawyers because it seemed innocent enough; because of those high standards, the Charity Commission misreads the CEA employee as implying a way worse thing happened than is actually the case.

This particular scenario may not be a big risk, but the sum of the risk of all possible scenarios like that (including scenarios that might not currently be on their radar) seems non-negligible to the CEA person I spoke to, even though they don't think there's any info out there that should rationally cause the Charity Commission to do anything wild here. And trying to do serious public reflection or soul-searching while also carefully nitpicking every sentence for possible ways the Charity Commission could misinterpret something, doesn't seem like an optimal set-up for deep, authentic, and productive soul-searching.

The CEA employee said that they thought this is one reason (but not the only reason) EV is unlikely to run a postmortem of this kind.

My initial thoughts on all this: This is very useful info! I had no idea the Charity Commission investigation was still ongoing, and if there are significant worries about that, that does indeed help make CEA and EV’s actions over the last year feel a lot less weird-and-mysterious to me.

I’m not sure I agree with CEA or EV’s choices here, but I no longer feel like there’s a mystery to be explained here; this seems like a place where reasonable people can easily disagree about what the right strategy is. I don't expect the Charity Commission to in fact take over those organizations, since as far as I know there's no reason to do that, but I can see how this would make it harder for CEA to do a soul-searching postmortem.

I do suspect that EV and/or CEA may be underestimating the costs of silence here. I could imagine a frog-boiling problem arising here, where it made sense to delay a postmortem for a few months based on a relatively small risk of disaster (and a hope that the Charity Commission investigation in this case might turn out to be brief), but it may not make sense to continue to delay in this situation for years on end. Both options are risky; I suspect the risks of inaction and silence may be getting systematically under-weighted here. (But it’s hard to be confident when I don’t know the specifics of how these decisions are being made.)

I ran the above by Oliver Habryka, who said:

“I talked to a CEA employee and got some more context on why CEA hasn't done an SBF investigation and postmortem.”

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard for them to just advocate for someone else doing it?

Or to just have whoever is leading the investigation leave the organization.

In general it seems to me that an investigation is probably best done in a relatively independent vehicle anyways, for many reasons.

“My thoughts on all this: This is very useful info! I had no idea the Charity Commission investigation was still ongoing, and that does indeed help make CEA and EV’s actions over the last year feel a lot less weird-and-mysterious to me.”

Agree that this is an important component (and a major component for my models).

I have some information suggesting that maybe Oliver and/or the CEA employee's account is wrong, or missing part of the story?? But I'm confused about the details, so I'll look into things more and post an update here if I learn more.

Not to state the obvious but the 'criticism of EA' posts didn't pose a real risk to the power structure. It is uhhhhh quite common for 'criticism' to be a lot more encouraged/tolerated when it isnt threatening.

I'm against doing further investigation. I expressed why I think we have already spent too much time on this here.

I also think your comments are falling into the trap of referring to "EA" like it was an entity. Who specifically should do an investigation, and who specifically should they be investigating? (This less monolithic view of EA is also part of why I don't feel as bothered by the the whole thing: so maybe some people in "senior" positions made some bad judgement calls about Sam. They should maybe feel bad. I'm not sure we should feel much collective guilt about that.)

Overall I feel relatively supportive of more investigation and (especially) postmortem work. I also don't fully understand why more wasn't shared from the EV investigation^[1].

However, I think it's all a bit more fraught and less obvious than you imply. The main reasons are:

• Professional external investigations are expensive
  • Especially if they're meaningfully fact-finding and not just interviewing a few people, I think this could easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars
  • Who is to pay for this? If a charity is doing it, I think it's important that their donors are on board with that use of funds
    • I kind of think someone should fundraise for this specifically; I'm genuinely unsure about donor appetite to support it
• I'm somewhat worried about the "re-victimizing" effect you allude to of just sharing everything transparently
  • Worry that it would cause in-my-view-unjust headaches for people is perhaps the main inhibitory force on my just publicly sharing the pieces of what I know (there's also sometimes feeling like something isn't mine to share)
  • If there were an investigation which was going to make all its factual findings public, I'd expect this to be an inhibitory force on people choosing to share information with them
• The possible mistakes we're talking about are all nuanced
  • It's going to be a judgement call what was or wasn't a mistake
    • (This is compatible with mistakes being large)
  • So if we're hoping for an investigation which doesn't make all its factual findings public, then we're trusting in the judgement of the investigators to make a fair assessment
    • This makes me not want independent lawyers (who may most naturally be drawn to assess things from a perspective of "was this reasonably minimizing of legal exposure")
    • But then who?
      • If this was just a question about conduct at one org, the natural answer might be "some sensible but uninvolved EA", but if the whole of EA might somehow be called into question, what's even appropriate?

At the end of this I would be most interested in multiple people who seemed very sensible giving their own post-mortems. I think that this would ideally include a mix of folks in EA and outsiders. I think some fact-finding should inform these people's takes, without all of the facts themselves necessarily being made public (in order to facilitate the facts actually being shared, as well as to mitigate possible re-victimizing). I'm not certain how much it's good for this to be via some centralized fact-finding exercise which is then privately shared, vs giving them the opportunity to interview people directly (as you get some more granular data that way). Perhaps ideally a mix. (But that's making it more time-expensive as an exercise.)

I think there are people close enough to what happened that they can meaningfully give post-mortems without a fact-finding investigation. And I am interested in their views and supportive of them sharing those. But they're also the people whose judgement is most likely to be distorted by being close to things. So even among EAs I'd prefer to have very sensible people who were further from what happened.

(That's all where-I-stand-right-now. I can certainly imagine being moved on this.)

1. ^{^}

   I guess that there would have been downsides for EV in doing so, but think these might well have been outweighed by the benefits to the community. However, I want to stress that I think the boards are sensible people making sometimes-difficult trade-offs; I don't know for sure what I'd have thought with full context; I have some deference to them.

We're happy to sink hundreds of hours into fun "criticism of EA" contests, but when the biggest disaster in EA's history manifests, we aren't willing to pay even one investigator to review what happened so we can get the facts straight, begin to rebuild trust, and see if there's anything we should change in response? 

I disagree with this framing.

Something that I believe I got wrong pre-FTX was base rates/priors: I had assumed that if a company was making billions of dollars, had received investment from top-tier firms, complied with a bunch of regulations, etc. then the chance of serious misconduct was fairly low.

I have now spent a fair amount of time documenting that this is not true, in data sets of YCombinator companies and major philanthropists.

It's hard to measure this, but at least anecdotally some other people (including in "EA leadership" positions) tell me that they were updated by this work and think that they similarly had incorrect priors.

I think what you are calling an "investigation" is fine/good, but it is not the only way to "get the facts straight" or "see if there's anything we should change in response".

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."

To be fair, this could trigger lawsuits. I hope someone is reflecting on FTX, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be keen on discussing their own involvement with FTX publicly and in great detail.

but I want to wait to publicly discuss my thoughts on these issues until I have the capacity to do so thoroughly and thoughtfully, rather than attempt to respond on the fly

You did speak publicly about them, in a large newspaper nonetheless: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/28/sam-bankman-fried-effective-truism-fraud

To be clear, I think it's still fine to take some time, but it does seem like you made claims that the EA community has engaged in successful investigation and reflection here, and so saying that you want to hold off on engaging unless you can do so "thoroughly and thoughtfully" rings a bit hollow and sounds a bit like avoiding critical conversation while actively trying to spread beliefs this post calls into question (though again, I recognize you have a hard job and I don't want to be too nitpicky about this, but I do feel like the confluence of releasing an article in a major newspaper combined with saying you want to hold off publicly discussing these issues feels off).

My guess is the timing of Becca's post is related to your Washington Post article, though that's really just a random guess.

ICYMI: I wrote this in response to a previous "EA leaders knew stuff" story. [Although I'm not sure if I'm one of the "leaders" Becca is referring to, or if the signs I mentioned are what she's concerned about.]

Am I correct in interpreting your comment as something like "Rebecca says it's costly to say more which might imply she is sitting on not yet disclosed information that might put powerful EAs in a bad light"? I did not really pick up on this when reading the OP but your comment got me worried that maybe there is some information that should be made public?

For example, I again respect you said that your full thoughts would be 'highly costly' to share, but it'd be enlightening to know which members of the EV board you disagreed with so much that you felt you had to resign. 

At the time of Rebecca's resignation, how many members did the EVF USA board have? As of January 2023, the board was [Beckstead, Kagan, and Ross] with Beckstead recused from FTX-related matters for obvious reasons. In April, her resignation and the addition of Eli Rose & Zach Robinson were concurrently announced (although it is not clear if she decided to resign prior to these appointments to the board).

I felt the Sam Harris interview was disappointingly soft and superficial. To be fair to MacAskill, Harris did an unusually bad job of pushing back and taking a harder line, and so MacAskill wasn't forced to get deeper into it.

And basically nothing about how to avoid a similar situation happening again? Except for a few lines about decentralisation. Quite uninspiring.

It now turns out that this has changed into podcasts, which is better than nothing, but doesn't give room to conversation or accountability.

Formatting error; this is something Siebe is saying, not part of the Will quotation.

I think in any world, including ones where EA leadership is dropping the ball or is likely to cause more future harm like FTX, it would be very surprising if they individually had not updated substantially. 

As an extreme illustrative example, really just intended to get the intuition across, imagine that some substantial fraction of EA leaders are involved in large scale fraud and continue to plan to do so (which to be clear, I don't have any evidence of), then of course the individuals would update a lot on FTX, but probably on the dimensions of "here are the ways Sam got caught, here is what I really need to avoid doing to not get caught myself". 

It would be very surprising if a crisis like FTX would not cause at least moderately high scores on a question like the one you chart above. The key thing that I would want to see is evidence that the leadership has updated in a direction that will likely prevent future harm, and does not push people further into deceptive relationships with the world. 

The concrete list of changes below helps, though as far as I can tell practically none of them have actually been implemented (and the concrete numbers you cite for people who mention them seems quite low, given that 50+ people were at the coordination forum). 

Briefly going through them: 

Shore up governance, diversify funding sources, build more robust whistleblower systems, and have more decentralized systems in order to be less reliant on key organizations/people.

I don't think much of any funding diversification has occurred (though I do think achieving that is hard). There are no whistleblower systems in place at any major EA orgs as far as I know, and my sense is we are more reliant on a smaller number of people in leadership than we were before (as more people decided to step back due to the conflict and stress that leadership has implied over the past months).

Create crisis response teams, do crisis scenario planning, have playbooks for crisis communication, and empower leaders to coordinate crisis response.

I don't think any such crisis response teams or crisis scenario planning has been done, at least to my knowledge. I don't know what people mean by "crisis communication" though IMO it's clear that the issue with FTX was not one of EA comms, though if people mean "do investigations into bad things that have happened and communicate the results in a credible and verifiable manner" then I think it's clear nothing of that sort has occurred, neither for FTX, and it seems like we also rolled extremely low on crisis communication in the OpenAI board crisis.

Better vet risks from funders/leaders, have lower tolerance for bad behavior, and remove people responsible for the crisis from leadership roles.

I don't think any such removals have happened, and my sense is tolerance of bad behavior of the type that seems to me most responsible for FTX has gone up (in-particular heavy optimization for optics and large tolerance for divergences between public narratives and what is actually going on behind the scenes).

Invest more in communications for crises, improve early warning/information sharing, and platform diverse voices as EA representatives.

I don'.t think there are any initiatives for that kind of early information sharing. My sense is the rumor mill has gotten less functional instead of more, as the environment in which people act has become more adversarial, though it's not super clear. But it seems like there are no serious efforts in this space.

Adopt lower default trust, consult experts sooner, and avoid groupthink and overconfidence in leaders.

I think this has probably happened implicitly, which I do think is good. 

Recognize the effect of stress on behavior, and be aware of problems with unilateral action and the tendency not to solve collective action problems.

This one is kind of vague. I don't know of anything we've done that helps here, and I think the OpenAI board situation is at least one point of evidence that people in EA leadership still lack on this dimension.

Value integrity and humility, promote diverse virtues rather than specific people, and update strongly against naive consequentialism.

My sense is integrit, trying to make sure that your de-facto actions and professed virtues line up, that you are generally open and honest, and that you are willing to stand up for your beliefs, seems to overall have gotten a lot worse, as people have re-emphasized the importance of good PR and optics in the wake of FTX.

Naive consequentialist plans also seem to have increased since FTX, mostly as a result of shorter AI timelines and much more involvement of EA in the policy space. 

Overall, I don't think the coordination forum survey is much evidence about good things happening here, and the things that people did want to see have not seen much movement since the coordination forum. 

At the risk of over-emphasizing metrics, it seems that at least some of these reforms could and probably should be broken down into SMART goals (i.e., those that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

Example: Better vet risks from funders/leaders might be broken down into sub-tasks like (1) Stratify roles and positions by risk level (critical, severe, moderate, etc.); (2) Determine priorities for implementation and the re-vetting schedule; (3) develop adjudication guidelines; (4) decide who investigates and adjudicates suitability; (5) set measurable and time-bound progress indicators (e.g., the holders of 75% of Critical Risk roles/positions have been investigated and adjudicated by the end of 2025).

[Note: The specific framework above borrows from the framework for security clearances and public-trust background checks in the US government. Obviously things in EA would need to be different, and the risks are different, so this is meant as an example rather than a specific proposal on this point. Yet, some of the core system needs would be at least somewhat similar.]

The post has a footnote, which reads:

Although EV conducted a narrow investigation, the scope was far more limited than what I’m describing here, primarily pertaining to EV’s legal exposure, and most results were not shared publicly.

As far as I know, what has been shared publicly from the investigation is that no one at EVF had actual knowledge of SBF's fraud.