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This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
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Question:
Is blaming EA for FTX like blaming Elie Wiesel for Bernie Madoff?
Background:
Elie Wiesel was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor who trusted his personal finances and his foundation's endowment to Bernie Madoff. Wiesel's foundation and personal finances were decimated when Madoff's Ponzi scheme fell apart. Madoff is famous for a Ponzi scheme that destroyed the finances of thousands of investors of tens of billions of dollars.
Question:
Is the analogy apt?
Unfortunately, it's probably a really bad look to imply that we're akin to Holocaust survivors.
I don't think this is apt. FTX was formed by a team of people who very much seemed to be EA-aligned and EA-inspired at the time of forming. Elie and Madoff had no such connection - Elie's only interaction with Madoff was as a victim.
You can quite reasonably make the claim that EA has very little blame, but certainly if you were going to rank both scenarios, we would at least be somewhat more at fault than Elie was.