Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund

For me, this comes down to trust.

FTX collapsed because of fraud. Customers lost money they had trusted the exchange to hold, and the people responsible, including Caroline, were rightly held accountable.

I also believe in second chances and the possibility of redemption. I briefly managed cG's criminal justice reform program, and I deeply believe it's a moral good to give people a path back to participating in society after they've done wrong.

But I also believe that trust – especially trust from a community someone harmed – has to be earned, not simply extended. Going from prison for financial crimes and causing harm with philanthropy to a role with real influence over finances and philanthropy on an extremely short timeline is a leap I do not believe has been earned.

Organizations that ask donors to trust them with money should hold themselves to a higher standard. A recent financial fraud conviction would disqualify someone from a finance role at CEA, regardless of any reputational considerations. I am disappointed with the decision itself, not just its effect on our work.

I saw some of the harm Caroline and her colleagues caused up close. When I took over as CEO of Effective Ventures US to lead EV through the FTX crisis, I worked with core EA institutions who incurred significant damage from the trust they had placed in Caroline and her colleagues when they had claimed to be doing good. Tens of millions of dollars and years of people’s work were lost, as was a level of public and community trust that has taken years to even partially rebuild. One of the lessons I took from that period is that we, as a community, extended trust too easily and too fast. I worry Manifund's decision repeats that mistake.

Caroline hasn't done the work to earn that trust back. Moreover, her willingness to take on a role she should have known would cause harm to others makes me concerned that she is not on track to earn that trust back anytime soon. And Manifund hasn't earned the trust that it will be a responsible steward of the community's trust on her behalf. This was a unilateral call by Austin and Caroline, and I think it traded down our collective trust.

I’m writing this message in my capacity as CEO of CEA. It’s important to remember that nobody runs EA, including CEA, and Manifund has the ability to make hiring decisions on its own. But I think it's fair for people and institutions in the community to speak up when they believe an organization’s actions are out of step with the norms and values that hold this ecosystem together. For our part, CEA will be refraining from giving Manifund a platform through our programs for the foreseeable future, such as recruiting booths at our events.

To be clear, this isn't about writing Caroline off as a person. I believe people can change. I also hope Caroline finds good ways to use her skills. But I think it is wrong for Austin and Caroline to make a decision that affects so many of us given I don’t believe that change has been demonstrated, and I don’t believe diving into finance or philanthropy is the right way to attempt to earn the necessary trust.

While I am thankful for the transparency and understand that you don't want to take part in discussing this in public forum threads, I, and maybe others, want to.

I have to say, I think this is harming what remains of the Effective Altruism name/brand and is making me reconsider openly associating with it.

If we ever hope to rebuild the trust that was lost and construct a better public image of EA, we need to have strong community norms that people who commit wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering have no place in any type of financial role in organisations that make up this community.

I get that you have personal ties, and I can understand wanting to act from a position of forgiveness towards a friend and uphold norms of redemption. From an outside perspective, though, these same personal ties can be perceived as more of the same mixing of professional and personal lives that infamously happened at FTX.

I, too, believe people can redeem themselves and, after completing their sentence, should be able to rejoin society. And I also think that the EA community can only ever gain a positive public image if they beat the accusations of fraud and favouritism through an abundance of care about these things and strict professional norms. Background checks for financial roles that exclude people with felony convictions for financial crimes are, in my opinion, justified.

I don’t think you should make decisions like this based on “what’s good for EA reputation.” I am not swayed by those arguments here. 

I do think — unless you think Caroline was wrongfully convicted or convicted under a bogus law and you can say that — this seems a shockingly naïve decision. 

We’ve seen hubris and in-group biased naïveté before, the kind that treats EAs and EA orgs as if we’re somehow above boring, straight-up sensible, standard safeguards within a business because we’re too smart and too morally evolved for all that or something, or too rational.  This attitude caused some of the FTX failures. Now you’re here telling us that you’re ignoring boring, straight-up sensible standard safeguards within a business like “don’t hire someone with a finance-related felony conviction into a finance position.” And only 4 years after the crime was committed. What reasons do you have to ignore that standard? 

I can be sympathetic and even forgiving in my heart of Caroline as a person. I don’t need to turn that feeling into a finance job for her. I’d be less concerned if an org were hiring her in a comms role based on her writings or something and could assure everyone that she’d have nothing to do with finances. Still controversial, but not so out of touch. 

This is not smart or wise. It’s the kind of willful, wide-eyed foolishness, while fooling oneself into thinking it’s good, that we’ve seen before. It does not bode well. 

 

For context, Caroline Ellison has been recently convicted for financial fraud amounting to billions of dollars. Manifund has just hired her for a finance role. They couldn't find a single qualified person that hadn't committed billions of dollars worth of financial fraud?

Nobody has to be diplomatic or mince words here, or couch this in terms of "reputation": this decision is rank incompetence, plainly obvious to anyone with a whit of common sense. Nobody should trust Manifund after this. 

Some quick thoughts on this, cross-posted from a chat group, largely because I'm very confused by people's and organizations strong reactions to this announcement, and usually when I disagree with everyone in the EA community I find out I'm missing some important context.

1. If the concerns were about risks of misappropriation of donor funds, or anything object level, I would expect people to be more curios about what Ellison's role actually is, and what capital controls are in place, but nobody is asking about that, so my impression is that this is almost entirely about Ellison being unpopular and reputational concerns. If that is not the case I really don't understand why nobody is asking something like "What controls are in place to prevent Ellison, Austin, or anyone else, from stealing donations?". An organization like manifund should have systems in place to prevent anyone they hire (ex-convict or not) from stealing donor funds.
2. On reputational concerns, it's not clear to me that someone like Ellison (2 years at Jane Street, 3 times top 10% at the Putnam, very rich parents, ...) working on "improving technical infrastructure, operations and customer support, and posting newsletter updates" in a low-paid role at a small charity is that bad of a look. This is not an executive role, and it's not at Coefficient Giving or anything that large or core to EA.
3. I think a major problem in EA is the negative selection effects of all the most competent people working for Anthropic/METR/Coefficient Giving/... or starting their own orgs, and the talent left for organizations like Manifund is guaranteed to have them filtered out. Hiring someone like Ellison seems like a good (and potentially the only) chance for Manifund to get top talent while staying self-funded.
4. Several people heavily criticizing this contributed to mistakes that I think hurt the reputation of the EA community as much as FTX (e.g. in March 2023 Dustin Moskovitz wrote "My friends are less receptive to EA since the crisis, but it seems like it's because of multiple scandals/storylines from recent months, rather than FTX itself" ). At least one had terrible a reputation in their previous professional community. They are now leaders in EA, and I'm glad that the EA community decided not to fire/cancel them immediately (which could have been best for PR) but to allow them to contribute and learn from those mistakes, if EA moves to a movement even more obsessed with optics it will miss out on people like this and all the good they do.
5. Doing things for optics reasons and pretending it's not for optics reasons makes it harder for people to trust you and collaborate in the future.

It's hard to believe this is real. When you read it, it sounds like a joke. This is a shockingly terrible decision, truly beyond the pale.

On Substack and also a bit on here, people don't seem to draw a sufficiently complex, nuanced distinction between the ideas of forgiveness and accountability.

Can we show compassion, mercy, and even forgiveness to people have done wrong? Yes, absolutely!

When someone has badly abused a position of power, should they be given a similar position of power again soon after? No, absolutely not!

(And that's not even addressing the conflict of interest or potential corruption in this case.)

We can think of a hundred analogous hypotheticals to illustrate this point. Let's say a bartender was convicted of poisoning his patrons' drinks. This is a terrible crime. Can we still show him compassion and mercy? Could we even forgive him? I'd like to believe so, even in the case of such a heinous crime.

But let's say he gets out of prison in a few years. Would it be the right decision for a restaurant to hire him as a line cook? Would that be safe, ethical, and responsible? Hell no!

There are dozens of other jobs he could have that don't involve the risk of poisoning — a customer support agent, a cashier at H&M, or a landscaper, and on and on. Why on Earth put him in a position where he could poison people again?

You could imagine many such scenarios. If a security guard is convicted of assaulting women on the job, should he be hired as a bouncer at a club after he gets out of prison? If a teacher is convicted of abusing children, should she be hired to run a daycare centre upon release? This is not about whether we can forgive these people in a spiritual sense; it's about accountability, or, on an even more basic level, safety.

You could even think about animals. You can hold that animals have absolutely no moral responsibility for their actions; forgiveness is automatic or just not required. But you do not let the fox into the hen house.

Something similar needs to be said about the values of bravery and honesty. In their common use and meaning, bravery means something more nuanced and complex than just doing something scary, and honesty more than just disclosing information. The 9/11 hijackers did something scary, but we don't call what they did "brave". Hitler was honest about his opinion on the Jewish people; do we say Hitler was an honest man? We reserve the word 'brave' for daring actions that are independently good and the word 'honest' for patterns of actions that represent trustworthiness and ethicality.

(It should also be noted in this instance that it was going to leak that Caroline Ellison was hired and this was one of the stated reasons for the disclosure. The information was deliberately kept secret initially.)

Similarly, although we must have the liberality to make room for contrarian and oddball views, the "costliness" of someone's disclosure that they believe aliens control the government does not help my assessment of their epistemic judgment. Nor does it help my assessment of their moral judgment that it's costly for them to disclose they think slavery should be re-implemented.

(Also, how quickly sometimes supposedly costly choices become lauded and rewarded, turning everything upside-down...)

I have tried, at times brutally hard, in my life to live according to compassion and forgiveness, sometimes even at such a dear personal cost that I regret bearing it. It pains me to see the value of forgiveness misused to justify such a reckless, thoughtless decision. Forgiveness does not mean you let the fox back into the hen house. It doesn't mean the absence of accountability. It doesn't mean the absence of safety.

Further reading: emotions researcher Brené Brown on shame vs. guilt, and shaming vs. accountability.

This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn't express this directly, but I've seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline's message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).

I don't really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I'm a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you're right that she's an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.

As most commenters write, hiring Caroline for a finance role does not strike me as the best decision. One thing I find missing in this conversation is putting ourselves in Austin or Caroline's shoes.

Most comments are expressing amazement that Austin would hire Caroline when it's so bad for Manifund's reputation. If anything, this strengthens my view that Austin is doing something costly--much more expensive than the $500k FTX investment Manifund is trying to keep--because he believes it's the right thing to do. We should be encouraging people to do what they believe is right even if it's unpopular. Dragging Austin through the mud for doing what he believes is right does not seem like the ideal way to express disagreement. (On the FTX clawback, that legal dispute is several years old and doesn't strike me as relevant to the recent hiring decision.)

For Caroline, imagine you're an EA who made a catastrophic moral error. You'd feel horrible about it, you'd spend years reflecting on it, and then you'd hope you can do something useful and constructive with the rest of your life. Presumably you'd want a job where you can leverage your existing skillset to do something good.

Some other commenters give me the impression that they believe Caroline is a particularly bad person. When we look at historical atrocities, slavery, the fact that most people sleep perfectly well at night contributing to factory farming, etc, the main lesson we should draw is that most people do terrible things when their surroundings excuse it, and show far less regret than Caroline has.

In general, I believe people should have a concrete rule for when they forgive others. For myself, I need to believe that everyone has a path to redemption, no matter the magnitude of their crimes. So my personal rule for forgiveness is that I need to believe the person wouldn't commit the same crime again if they were in the same position. From Caroline's statements, it seems likely to me that she sincerely regrets her actions and wouldn't do it again, so while I wouldn't hire her as a finance professional, I do forgive her on a personal level.

It'd be constructive if we spent more time thinking about what the path should look like for someone who wants to contribute to the EA project but has committed catastrophic moral errors in the past. At present, hiring this person for a finance role in an org with a fiduciary duty to donors strikes me as premature. Still, to me, anyone who's sincerely repented deserves to be able to make use of the rest of their life to make the world a better place.

Personal notes: I've had friendly interactions with Austin and spent some time in the Mox coworking space. I've never met Caroline, though I liked her Tumblr and hope she finds ways to do good moving forward. The FTX collapse cost me thousands of dollars, destroyed a video game I loved, made my job much harder for the next year, and damaged a community I love.

Thoughts on the situation, as someone who cares a lot about EA's reputation and also thinks it's sometimes good to make unusual decisions based on controversial ethical principles:

Perspective-taking: Ariel's comment is really good. Read that first if you haven't.

Competence: Having read Going Infinite and a bunch of news stories, I don't feel qualified to distinguish between "Caroline is bad at operations/finance/judging ideas" and "Caroline is good at those things — after all, FTX/Alameda had lots of early success — but she got overwhelmed by the complexities of an org with billions of dollars in assets while struggling with interpersonal entanglements". If Austin thinks her abilities are a good fit, I'm not all that inclined to doubt him.

Personal ethics: My ethical qualms are with Austin, not Caroline. I don't think her ethics matter much for this role: she is unlikely to end up in a situation where the pressures on her, and decisions available to her, even vaguely resemble her situation at FTX. I'd still feel safe using Manifund's platform while she's involved.

Is this a good decision (impact)? Seems terrible from the standpoint of furthering Manifund's goals. It's also a small ding on EA's reputation as a whole, with whatever damage that implies. But I think Austin understood those things, and impact wasn't his primary focus. 

I wouldn't have made this decision in Austin's shoes, given the chance that it could undo years of work to build Manifund, but I respect that EA contains lots of people with unusual perspectives and that they'll sometimes do things I wouldn't. That said, I'll reserve my donations for people whose perspectives are closer to mine.

Is this a good decision (ethics)? I don't think it's unethical to hire people with criminal backgrounds, and the weak "finance" connection here doesn't change my view (see "personal ethics"). But I agree with others' concerns about paying someone with money they helped steal. If Manifund doesn't pay back the FTX money, that would breach my ethical standards; I'd hope that any org self-labeling as "EA" would do better.

Using loyalty and indebtedness as hiring criteria strikes me as unwise, but not unethical, as long as Austin is honest with his donors about his motives.

What does this say about Manifund? If I wanted to predict Manifund's actions, I'd care more about the years of activity they've documented than this particular hire. If you thought they were a good grantmaker before, it's reasonable not to update much. However:

• The situation presents other reasons for concern, unrelated to their grantmaking ability.
• Manifund supports lots of small projects with unclear impact. If you find their results hard to judge, you might care more about the judgment of their staff. If I were a Manifund donor in that position, I'd be updating in the direction of "Austin sees the world and makes decisions very differently from me", and that would affect my trust in Manifund's work.

EA's reputation: Overall, this is small potatoes. FTX is famous, but the fame is fading. Caroline is much less famous than SBF. Manifund is an obscure org. From my recent experience, EA's reputation seems to hinge more on AI safety (and the age-old GiveWell/ETG stuff) than FTX. If Caroline were broadly welcomed back, that would be unusual, but the most common reactions being either severe skepticism or outright condemnation is... pretty much what you'd see elsewhere, for better or for worse.

• However, I'd still describe it as a "small ding" — if someone hears about this, and cares at all, they're more likely to update negatively than positively against EA.
• If you see someone cite Manifund's decision as a reason to distrust EA, you could point them to this thread, or the comments on Austin's Substack post. They might realize that Manifund's decision doesn't say much about the EA community or EA's principles.
• If you judge a situation by its salience on the day it happens, you'll routinely overestimate its lasting impact. The Nick Bostrom letter felt like a disaster the day it came out — a perfect intersection of hot-button social issue, prominent figure, and scissor situation for the community — but in the end, I don't think it left much of an impression on the wider world.

Should Manifund be "organizatio non grata" in EA? This is up to the loose collection of orgs and people that comprise "EA", not any single entity. I respect anyone's decision to update on Manifund as they see fit. If I ran EA Global or made grants, and I had to decide whether to invite/fund the org, I'd consider it (assuming they paid back the FTX money). But I would expect to end on "nope, this crosses too many lines even if I like Manifund's work and see Austin's perspective".

You’re asking us to believe that Caroline can not only out-contribute the next best available candidate, but out-contribute that PLUS the negative externalities she brings to the project and everything associated with it. I urge you to set aside your personal feelings and consider how many projects this affects. 

I note that in this post Austin doesn't actually directly acknowledge that FTX misused customer funds, instead just saying that he's "conflicted," and that FTX "did wrong" and its "collapse harmed users". I'm particularly confused what there is to be "conflicted" about. For avoidance of doubt: Austin, do you think that SBF and Caroline acted unethically and illegally in misusing customer funds, and do you think it is right that both were given criminal sentences? I think it would be good to clarify this.

Note: "You" = Austin in this comment

The sense I get from reading this is that Ellison's history with FTX was a significant positive reason in your mind for hiring her, whereas people might have generally expected this to be a negative factor. This reminded me of your talk with Elizabeth Van Nostrand on the topic of FTX. There, you expressed similar conflicted feeling around the events of FTX. One of the things you expressed was feelings of concern around the community reaction in regard to a sense of loyalty, that the reaction created an impression that people might not stand by someone if things went badly. I feel like there is some tension with the idea that people from the EA community are engaging in backstabbing in terms of their reaction to the FTX fiasco, while presumably you don't view testifying against SBF as similarly implicating the concern about loyalty.

To me, this reminds me of a attitude that I associate with Silicon Vally VC culture and see coming through strongly in the sentiments around this issue. It seems to me like the feeling/pirnciple you are invoke here is more like downside protection than loyalty. I think there is a feeling prevalent in SV that entrenched interests are often the opponents of change and innovation, and that process and rules primarily serve those entrenched interests. Thus, brave innovators need to be willing to challenge and sometimes even break rules in order to change the world for the better. I think this is the idea you get at with your weak doge/buff shiba comment. A follow on from this that seems to have caught on among people of this subculture is that people who engage in these brave risk-taking effors deserve praise and high status, and ought to be protected and admired even if they fail.

You can try to cast that as being about protecting people from the mob (and this is explicitly brought up in the conversation), but to me that doesn't really seem to be the core value being served. Yes innovators and founders may get unfairly attacked by a public that doesn't really understand the underlying issues or a bureaucracy that is controlled by legacy players, but from what I can tell the core "ask" of this SV subculture is to support founders mostly regardless of whether evidence that those things are occuring is present. We are kind of meant to assume that of course that must be happening if someone is critizing a founder/ambitious innovator. The core value here is ambition, not loyalty.

In the talk, You and Elizabeth explore the tensions between your "winning" frame and her "truthseeking" one. I think the analysis I give above fits squarely within that, but I would offer a something of a synthesis that I think you two miss, and that is generally underappreciated in the wider rationality/EA ecosystem:

I believe your "winning" frame is well-modeled by the description I give above, but what of the "truthseeking" frame? Later in the talk you two consider the question of whether "truthseeking" often cause people/orgs to need to slow down. I think this does identify a core problem with "truthseeking" as it is often conceptualized. If I'm trying to make a new cure for cancer, and I'm 95% confident it is safe and effective, am I duty-bound for truthseeking reasons to never let anyone use it until I'm 99.999999% certain? "Truthseeking" sounds great in theory when you are just reading posts about meta-honesty or whatever, but when it comes to application it seems to really struggle with managing tradeoffs. You end up with a situation where people who are doing there best to navigate tough choices can too easily get called out for being "insufficiently truthseeking" for not meeting the arbitrary standards of someone else.

I think there is a reasonable synthesis of these that is actually fairly commonly held outside of EA/rationality, which is that you should try to win, according to your own definition of winning, while treating certain ethical contraints like truthfulness/honesty (in contrast to "truthseeking") as red lines that you need to stay on the correct side of. This solves the problem with truthseeking in that ambitious people have a safe harbor if they stay on the right side of those lines, will still reigning in bad behavior by unscrupulous innovators.

Game theory gets brought up in the talk as well. Within my interpretation of your framework, it makes sense to hire Ellison on these grounds. She was in a sense a victim of the powers that be because she was an ambitious person and the system failed to provide downside protection. You can provide that by giving her a job. Under this view, it is very important to do this in order to send the signal that innovation and ambitition are valued and people will still support you if you fail.

The trouble with this within the "truthfulness" framework that I articulate here is that it fails to disincentivize crossing red lines, and arguably even incentivizes doing so. There have been several incidences of fraud or related conduct in SV VC-funded startups in recent history, suggesting that this may a phenomenon that is genuinely playing out in practice.

I think it's good to give people second chances and I think Caroline deserves a second chance from society. I think it's extremely bad for that second chance to come from an organization that received money that she and others misappropriated from customers. 

It is concerning to me that this wasn't obviously disqualifying for this particular position. 

To single out one specific point … The sentiment around feeling indebted to FTX and by proxy people associated with it seems like a deeply worrying and flawed viewpoint?

If the argument was purely “she’s smart and can likely do good work, let’s give her a chance”, I’d be far less concerned. 

I'm co-director of Effective Altruism Netherlands, writing in a personal capacity. I think this decision is clearly wrong.

Hiring someone with a recent fraud conviction into a finance role at a grantmaking organisation is what ordinary safeguards exist to prevent. Justifying the bypassing of ordinary safeguards because the people involved are smart and well-intentioned is a fair summary of how FTX happened.

This is obviously going to be a very controversial post and action. I'll start by disclosing that I have always been very sympathetic to Caroline, and even with all that's happened, I think any exploration in depth of the whole FTX-Alameda fiasco will still show her to be 1) extremely talented,  2) hard-working (these two should be uncontroversial) and 3)  morally serious and conscientious (even though she participated in fraud and made catastrophic mistakes in her life). For argumentative purposes, I think premise 3 is not needed, but I think it is true.

If one wanted to speculate about the possible consequences of Caroline's hire by Manifund, I think it makes sense to consider two levels: the one that affects Manifund and the one that affects EA as a whole.

For the first, I think one can make a case that hiring Caroline is positive expected value for the company. Given premises 1 and 2 and the fact that her actions under SBF have effectively made her unemployable and (I presume) a pariah for most of the EA community, Austin may be getting access to an unusually valuable employee whom much of the labor market is unwilling to hire because of reputational risk. I know lots of you would dispute premise 3 -I have no personal knowledge of Ms. Ellison, but from everything I've read from/about her, I think it is inconsistent not to consider her a deeply moral even if flawed person (and aren't we all?). But even if you're skeptic here, there is no rational incentive for her to be less than extremely, scrupulously honest in the future for the second chance she gets. And I am willing to bet that it will pay out (so direct message me if you want to place a bet). The worst downside for Manifund I can envisage is that donors will refuse to collaborate with them. Will this be a big issue? I don't know. I do feel that there was a subset of possible donors who were already unlikely to donate to the anyway, given that  Manifund is, I think, an offshoot of Manifold. And this connects to what I perceive as a battle for the soul of EA that has been taking place for some time, with those who favor maximizing outcomes through making EA more mainstream, more aligned with left values and organizations and more publicly palatable EA causes versus those closer to Longtermism, Rationalism and maximizing outcomes through exploring riskier, unpopular but numerically/theoretically backed actions and interventions, and Manifund would clearly align with the latter. 

For the second case, I think it is likely that in the short run, having Ms. Ellison working in a charity that seems at least to some degree aligned to EA will likely be pretty terrible PR for EA. Perhaps in the mid-term too. Then again, given that I think Caroline satisfies premises 1, 2 and 3, I can also imagine her doing a lot of good, impactful work. In fact, my rough forecast for the next couple of years would be something like this:

• ~65%: the controversy fades, Caroline becomes an extremely competent but relatively low-profile Manifund worker, and little by little she  develops a respectable second career in philanthropy.
• ~20%: she becomes considerably more prominent, writing serious pieces about grantmaking, philanthropy, perhaps forecasting or institutional design, eventually becoming a recognizable intellectual/operational figure around Manifund and perhaps in the philanthropy space at large.
• ~15%: donor or partner backlash makes her employment sufficiently costly that either her role becomes more private or she eventually moves elsewhere.

I see some people seem to find it troubling that Caroline would be specifically landing a a 'finance job', but to my limited knowledge, the functions she's going to be doing (technical infrastructure, operations, customer support, and the Manifund newsletter, research on how philanthropic money should be invested) do not sound like a typical 'finance' job to me. Definitely not like executive ones, or implying she's going to be personally investing people's money. 

The first time I saw SBF in a newsletter from 80k and felt skeptical, I self-censored. Even as things unfolded, I talked very sycophantically and did not manage to speak out my doubts. 

I don't want this to happen again, and I'm afraid it's happening again, with people playing mind games similar to the ones that convinced them that SBF was living frugally and definitely trustworthy.

In doubt, I'll leave this comment for the record, and will happilly look at it full of shame if need be: 
1-I do not trust Caroline and reading the post and the discussion so far does not give me enough signal to trust her more. No hard feelings, but that's just how things are for me and part of my surroundings. If you think she is trustworthy, it means there is probably a way to make me update? It'd probably need to be a very hard-to-fake signal. Trust has to correlate to evidence.

2-Hoo boy, my friends at the EA table in university already had a hard time. It's gonna get even harder for them.

3-I'm afraid this will feed even more of the absolutely pointless EA vs LW war. Will not expand on that.

This is why people don't like EA. Astonishingly, monumentally bad judgement.

After some reflection, I realized what may be the worst part of this decision.

Austin Chen has decided to reward and endorse Caroline Ellison's crimes at FTX by giving her a job in exchange for the stolen money that FTX gave to Manifund. Austin explicitly said that this decision is out of "debt" to Caroline for the ill-gotten money FTX gave to Manifund. Austin's explicitly stated reasoning is: commit crimes that benefit me and I'll reward you.

Previously, Austin harshly criticized the EA community for its supposed disloyalty to Sam Bankman-Fried in the wake of the revelations of FTX's fraud.

In November 2022, Austin wrote of people in EA who denounced or dissociated themselves from Sam Bankman-Fried:

But from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful.

In April 2025, Austin said:

I think if you abandon people who have what I viewed as earnestly try to support you and your movement. If you just turn tail on them, be like, "oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this" and we like give up on all of the stuff that he did. Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think?

And:

...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.

This is a corrupt way to think. This is putting money above ethics.

If someone gives you $500,000 they stole and because of this (not in spite of it!) you give them a job in return, what else is this than corruption? What else is this than a reward for the crime? And an endorsement of the crime?

Nobody can control Austin's decisions and maybe nobody can change his mind. But EA organizations and individual members of the EA community can decide whether you can encourage criminality and engage in corruption and still be a part of the EA community. I think Austin and Manifund should be thrown out, along with Austin's other projects, Manifold and Manifest.

Enough is enough. The line has to be drawn here.

If you're wondering what it would mean to throw Austin and Manifund out of the EA community, here are some steps that could be taken:

• Ban Austin, Caroline, and any future Manifund employees from EA Globals and other EA conferences
• Ban Austin and Caroline from the EA Forum
• Stop working with or recommending Manifund

Only a few people have the ability to ban people from EA conferences or the EA Forum. But there are some steps anyone can take:

• Delete your Manifold account, if you have one
• Commit to not using or working with Manifund in the future
• Commit to not attending future Manifest conferences
• Commit to not working with Austin in the future
• Strongly condemn Austin's decision to hire Caroline Ellison

The EA community has the power to decide who it includes and who it excludes. It therefore has the moral responsibility for those decisions. Criminality and corruption should not be tolerated in the EA community.

1. An underlying assumption here seems to be not just that people deserve to make a living, but that forgiveness is inherently good. While this is a common axiom in the West, it is not obvious to me that this moral claim is correct.
2. Two issues regarding communications:
   1. On a macro level: “Reputation” is not a vanity consideration. It is integral to the theory of change of many EA orgs, particularly those focused on AI policy. A random legislative staffer is unlikely to see the comments on this post, but they may see the upcoming Netflix series on FTX. A google search on “FTX and EA” now reveals this post: https://whatweare.substack.com/p/no-one-is-going-to-save-the-ea-brand. It's not impossible to imagine this hiring decision making it harder for AI policy orgs to secure meetings with staffers to advance important safety legislation.
   2. On a micro level: Most people in EA probably would have opposed this hire anyway, but this press release seems to have only engendered more concern and, frankly, confusion. Several people have sought clarity regarding the rationale for the hire as this statement implied a mixture of personal considerations. I was most perplexed by the section on transparency, which reads: “I apologize for our minor deception, in using a pseudonym over the last couple months. I still endorse having done this”. These two sentences seem contradictory and read as something like: “I’m sorry if you were offended.” 

I understand why some EAs might be skeptical about the importance of communications. After all, lots of ineffective organizations have amazing comms. While good comms does not necessarily imply good work, bad comms often does indeed imply a real judgement issue, which one might reasonably expect would affect the core work as well.

Even though I understand part of the reasoning behind this decision, and I sincerely wish Caroline Ellison well, I feel very uncomfortable with it. I'm particularly uneasy about the personal reasons given as part of the justification.

I think this was overall a poor decision, and it makes me question what kind of governance and decision-making process Manifund has, and whether anyone besides Austin was meaningfully involved.

I weakly think that Austin can hire who he likes.

I moderately think that EA could do with caring a less about reputation and more about good work. Does Caroline do good work? Seems like the org will internalise that, so it's probably up to donors and other orgs to decide.

what

Adds additional context to https://revive.blog/b/worldoptimization on Manifold's new Blog Revival Project, with Austin pledging towards reviving his then-anonymous coworker's blog.

(Just found this interesting and mildly funny, not saying the pledging or project is bad. Though I agree with others that handling finances at a tiny org is very clearly a bad role for someone convicted of financial fraud )

As I read this comment section, the story my mind generates is a people want to express 'this is bad and I want people to see that I think it's bad'. Is that how people who are writing the negative comments feel? 

Or do you feel like you could be convinced this is fine/none of your business? 

Cos personally I think I could be convinced this is a bad idea, or that Manifund should not be considered an org in good standing^[1]. I don't think it would destroy me to come to that conclusion.

1. ^{^}

    I probably do think that Manifund is not an easy safe org for your sweet friend who is new to EA, though I guess I think that of CEA and CG and Nonlinear too

• Would you be able to speak more on why you decided to announce this publicly at all, rather than continue to use a pseudonym for Caroline and keep her away from outward-facing roles?
• Why do you believe that the EA-wide and Manifund-specific harms you’ve already acknowledged, are worthwhile to incur, and to what end?
• Do you believe there is some positive signalling value to be gained from announcing this that offsets the negative signalling?
• Did you specifically trade off broader harms to EA’s reputation in order to advance Manifund’s own reputation? (My sense is Manifund has a non-overlapping target audience with EA)

I’m struggling to understand why this had to be announced, given the harms that specifically come from publicising it.

I'm worried this means that my org could now be taking on an unacceptable degree of counterparty, governance, and reputational risk.

This could potentially affect our funding if there's any evidence of a relationship; good governance and risk management practices are a documented condition of some of our larger grants.

Without commenting on this specific case, I think society in general is bad at dealing with people who have made large mistakes, especially former criminals.

I'm sad that PR concerns and risk aversion are legitimate reasons not to do (much) better.

To be clear: I don't condone crime, and FTX's leadership committed serious fraud.

My original comment was a bit unkind—wrote something else after calming down a bit