I hate to add to the number of FTX posts on the forum, but after some (imo) inappropriate and unkind memes[1] and comments in the Dank EA Memes fb group and elsewhere, I wanted to push back against what seems like a bandwagon of anger and ridicule spiralling too far, and I wish to call attention to it.
But first, I should point out that I personally, at this time, know not nearly enough to make confident conclusions regarding what's happened at FTX. That means I will not make any morally relevant judgments. I will especially not insinuate them without sufficient evidence. That just amounts to irresponsibly fuelling the bandwagon while maintaining plausible deniability, which is arguably worse.
You are not required to pretend to know more than you do just so you can empathise with the outrage of your friends. That shouldn't be how friendship works.
This topic is not without nuance. There's a good case to be made for why ridicule can be pro-social, and I think Alex makes it here:
"Ridicule makes clear our commitment to punishing ultimately harmful behavior, in a tit-for-tat sense; we are not the government so we cannot lock up wrongdoers, and acting as a vigilante assassin is precluded by other issues, so our top utility-realizing option is to meme harmful behavior out of the sphere of social acceptability."[2]
I don't disagree with condemning someone for having behaved unethically. It's a necessary part of maintaining civil society, and it enables people to cooperate and trade in good faith. But if you accuse someone of having ill-advisedly forsaken ethics in the (putative) service of the greater good, then retaliating by forsaking compassion in the service of unchecked mockery can't possibly make anything better.
Why bother with compassion, you might ask? After all, compassion is superfluous for positive-sum cooperation. What we really need for essential social institutions to work at all is widespread trust in the basic ethics of people we trade with. So when a public figure gets caught depreciating that trust, it's imperative that we send a strong signal that this is completely unacceptable.
This I all agree with. Judicious punishments are essential for safeguarding prevailing social institutions. Plain fact. But what if prevailing social institutions are unjust? When we jump on a bandwagon for humiliating the accused transgressor after their life has already fallen apart, we are exercising our instincts for mob justice, and we are indirectly strengthening the norm for coercing deviants more generally.
Advocating punitive attitudes trades off against advocating for compassion to some extent. Especially if the way you're trying to advocate for punishments is by means of gleefwly inflicting harm.
In a society where most people are all too eager to join in when they see their in-group massing against deviants, and where groups have wildly different opinions on who the deviants are in the first place, we need an alternative set of principles.
Compassion is a corrective on unjust social norms. It lets us see more clearly where prevailing ethics strays from what's kind and good. In essence, that's the whole purpose of effective altruism: to do better than the unquestioned norms that's been handed down to us.
Hence why I hope we can outgrow--or at least lend nuance to--our reflexive instinct to punish, and instead cultivate whatever embers of compassion we can find. Let that be our cultural contribution, because the alternative, advocating punitive sentiments, just isn't a neglected cause area.
[mod of Dank EA Memes here, but not speaking on behalf of the entire team]
I agree with parts of what you say "in theory." The memes you tagged don't seem like the most dank ones in the group, there are certainly better ones. It's unclear to what extent you are trying to cast shade on the moderation rules, mods' own opinions, or the group behavior of likes. Your comment to me in the group feels like a massive nitpick on the world "firmly," when my tagging of SBF was a very basic question. I have also mentioned that we don't condone "vigilante violence" and would start banning posts if there's too much insinuation of that. So we already have lines that we don't want to cross, maybe yours is way more strict.
Given the above, it's unclear what your critique is proposing in a positive sense? We are not going to forgive SBF. We should not ignore the situation without looking at it. Should we make "less memes"? It's a distributed forum, many people are contributing. We are even spreading important information regarding the hack and the need to remove people's apps. Has EA forum done that? No. Why not?
As SE Montgomery mentioned humor is an important mechanism for coping, however, it's not just "coping" to create "fake feelings" of better. It is also about getting everyone on the same page about certain philosophical stances and stating that particular bad behaviors are, in fact, bad.
It is very clear to me that EAs have massive blind spots that have led to this debacle. While the responses so far have been good, I worry that people expect them to be enough.
As I have mentioned, extremely shady FTX funded non-profilts as such as https://www.againstpandemics.org are still operating and have not taken the correct move of employees resigning or shutting down.
I personally have a ton of disagreement with EA on the meta-level and DAEM feels like the only place I could surface them with any reach.
There's a difference between arguing to stop using stolen funds “GOING FORWARD”, and shutting down an NGO just because it was funded by FTX in the past. The more obvious alternative is merely changing funding sources, which is what most NGOs affected by the FTX situation are already trying to do.
As for the last part, I think you're really exaggerating the risk associated to having received FTX funds. It seems extremely unlikely regulatory agencies will start investigating NGOs just for having received funds from the FTX Future Fund. Even if such risk comes... (read more)