I'm less approving of the EA community now than before the FTX collapse

Relevant:

Go to any psychiatrist at the conference and criticize psychiatry in these terms - “Don’t you think our field is systemically racist and sexist and fails to understand that the true problem is Capitalism?” and they will enthusiastically agree and maybe even tell you stories about how their own experience proves that’s true and how they need to try to do better.

Is there any criticism that can touch these people at all?

Here’s my proposal: ask why they prescribe s-ketamine instead of racemic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression.

If you say this, psychiatrists will push back. If you say it in a confrontational way - maybe you hint that they’ve outsourced their thought processes to a handful of regulators and pharmaceutical companies even when this severely disadvantages patients, because thinking for themselves is hard and scary - they’ll get offended. The world is full of psychiatrists who will confess to systemic racism with a smile on their face, then get all huffy when you ask them about esketamine.

Jeffrey - thanks for your kind comment! Appreciate it.

How long after / can you give an example of what you have in mind? At a glance, it sounds to me like you're interacting with a different subset of EA than I've seen.

Sadly I can't give any explicit examples without giving people material information about my identity that I would not be comfortable revealing. I agree that it's possible I've been interacting with a different subset of EA. I also can't share the exact date but you can assume it was some weeks after Nov 11.

I said that he gained positive points from me for the tweet throwaway791 linked to, not that he's net positive in my books for the entire FTX saga.

I assume you know that it's possible for E[X] < E[X | A] and E[X | B] > E[X | A, B] to hold simultaneously. I agree that to a totally uninformed observer MacAskill's tweet thread could be slightly positive evidence, but if you put his tweets within the broader context of his activities connected to Sam Bankman-Fried in the past decade or so, they give cause for an update in the opposite direction.

MacAskill has previously been dishonest by pushing the misleading image that Bankman-Fried had a frugal lifestyle despite knowing better, and he has a further track record of instrumental dishonesty e.g. when promoting What We Owe the Future to the public. In general, EA often covers up facts about the philosophy or community that would not be palatable to a general audience, and MacAskill has engaged in such behavior far too frequently for me to enumerate all examples of it here.

For him to say that honesty is very important is laughable and is only further evidence of his dishonesty. If he wants to provide Bayesian evidence that he's actually honest, he should try being honest instead of linking passages from his old books that extol honesty as a virtue. Talk is cheap, action is not.

This is a really bad system, one that almost always leads to wild misappraisals of exactly how good or bad something or someone is, and that unnecessarily frequently leads to villains being idolized and innocents being vilified, because the group doesn't trust itself to do a fair and accurate accounting of each local incident, and people hold back their impressions and their data lest they be punished for giving aid and comfort to the Wrong Side.

Indeed, I'd claim that this is one of the key errors of process that protected SBF before things went to shit. When SBF is good, sharing any contrary take or data point is punished; and when he's bad, it's likewise punished, just with a different assumption about which take is "wrong".

How is it punished to share anything positive about SBF? I could post on this forum under my real name that SBF had a positive impact in some areas despite him running the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme and I wouldn't be concerned at all. Your impression of which claims are punished and which claims are not punished is wildly miscalibrated.

I agree that the error you're talking about is one of the key errors that protected SBF, but I don't agree that it's now operating in the opposite direction with anything like the same intensity.

Separately: What is "MacAskill's personal involvement in suppressing inconvenient information" alluding to?

I know for a fact that MacAskill knew SBF's "frugal lifestyle" image was fabricated and he fully assisted him in perpetuating this myth, effectively acting as a PR agent for him.  I also suspect MacAskill knew a substantial amount of information about events that happened in early Alameda and had good cause to suspect SBF's character. He also knew that FTX operated in a shady way in which they would deliberately conceal relevant facts about their business from the venture capitalists who had invested in FTX. He chose to reveal none of this.

I don't think he knew anything about the fraud, but he knew that attaching EA's reputation to a figure like SBF was a reckless move with serious potential downsides even if SBF had ultimately run a legitimate business and donated significant resources to EA causes. He didn't disclose these details in public because of his willingness to be instrumentally dishonest whenever he thinks dishonesty furthers the Cause.

I don't fully understand this. I think it's okay not to obsess over on-going events and try to figure out what's going on as quickly as possible.

The people I'm talking about have been following the FTX saga from day one, so lack of familiarity with the specific events is not an excuse for them. However, I have noticed a pattern that the people who thought "maybe SBF was just incompetent" were always people with no domain expertise in finance. This is an insufficient excuse for their lack of sound judgment, however, because there were domain experts all over Twitter whose expertise was easily verifiable for outsiders and who were being transparent about their thoughts on this subject.

Among other issues I've discussed in the comments so far, I also view this as an instance of the general problem that EA doesn't give sufficient weight to domain expertise.

My understanding is that this is after he posted the rebuttal and Alexey called him out on it, if I remember the situation correctly. 

I think the incident seems pretty clear-cut.

Obviously, I disagree with this. I think Guzey pulled together some fairly flimsy fragments of evidence of wrongdoing, and spun them into a story of deliberate, malicious conspiracy wildly out of proportion with the strength of the available evidence. His accusations here were entirely lacking in the kind of epistemic and rhetorical care I expect when making allegations like this, and his persistent refusal to moderate his claims or adduce additional evidence in response to pushback was a substantial negative update for me.

It's probably easier at this point if I just quote one of my comments to Guzey from last year (now sadly hard to find due to him deleting his posts & comments):

Do you believe that [Guzey's representation] of the incident is unfair?

Yes, at present I do.

I haven't yet seen evidence to support the strong claims you are making about Julia Wise's knowledge and intentions at various stages in this process. If your depiction of events is true (i.e. Wise both knowingly concealed the leak from you after realising what had happened, and explicitly lied about it somewhere) that seems very bad, but I haven't seen evidence for that. Her own explanation of what happened seems quite plausible to me.

(Conversely, we do have evidence that MacAskill read your draft, and realised it was confidential, but didn't tell you he'd seen it. That does seem bad to me, but much less bad than the leak itself – and Will has apologised for it pretty thoroughly.) 

Your initial response to Julia's apology seemed quite reasonable, so I was surprised to see you revert so strongly in your LessWrong comment a few months back. What new evidence did you get that hardened your views here so much? [NB: Guzey responded that he hadn't yet pulled together the threads that led him to make his accusations at the time.]

And that since "the actual consequences were so minor and that the alternative hypothesis (that it was just a mistake) is so plausible" this doesn't really matter?

It matters – it was a serious error and breach of Wise's duty of confidentiality, and she has acknowledged it as such (it is now listed on CEA's mistakes page). But I do think it is important to point out that, other than having your expectation of confidentiality breached per se, nothing bad happened to you. 

One reason I think this is important is because it makes the strong "conspiracy" interpretation of these events much less plausible. You present these events as though the intent of these actions was to in some way undermine or discredit your criticisms (you've used the word "sabotage") in order to protect MacAskill's reputation. But nobody did this, and it's not clear to me what they plausibly could have done – so what's the motive?

What sharing the draft with MacAskill did enable was a prepared response – but that's normal in EA and generally considered good practice when posting public criticism. Said norm is likely a big part of the reason this screw-up happened.

I continue to basically believe this. I think the lack of a credible story by which Guzey was or could credibly have been harmed by CEA's actions here is a big red flag, and the stories of harm that Guzey has provided have been very weak.

I also have a further claim, which is that what Guzey asked Wise to do in the first place is pretty strange and unreasonable. That doesn't make it right to break his confidentiality -- I think the correct response would have been to say "no, sorry, it doesn't make sense for me to do this, I'd need to share it with Will" -- but it makes the downstream mistakes much more understandable to me.

(Note that I'm not the author of the post, but someone else posting under a throwaway account.)

I really wish you'd chosen a more distinct username. I think not doing so is a disservice to the original post author.

FWIW: I've known Julia for nearly 10 years. She is scrupulously honest and careful.  I would bet all the money I have  (literally not figuratively) that she just made an honest mistake. I also don't understand how this is relevant to the current complaint (FTX). This happened years ago and she's already publically commented on it and apologized. 

Edited to add: I am seeing a pattern where commentaries lately pull out individual mistakes from any time frame and of any type to support a broader image of EA as committing malfeasance. I think this is epistemically shaky and beneath the standard of kind and collaborative criticism, I broadly hope for from members of this community. 

Second edit: I've added a strikethrough after my husband pointed out some language in our Terms of Service.

Big corporations have lots of subsidiaries, and I don't think it's super-rare to acquire what amounts to a dummy/shell corporation for non-fraudulent reasons. I'd call it a yellow flag if the grantee knew North Dimension had been "defunct phone stores." Except for perhaps recipients of the largest grants, I don't think that flag is bad enough that the grantee couldn't have reasonably relied on others' due diligence-- both in the investing world and in EA.

But more to the point: the only thing the grantee knew was that the money came from an entity with the generic name of North Dimension. I don't think that information alone put them on notice that they needed to dig or discuss with others.

To be clear, it seems that far too little due diligence was done as a whole, but I don't think the original poster should think less of most individual grantees for that.

Do you have a link for that claim? 

Sure, I don't know anything about North Dimension and am open to the claim that it in particular was dubious.

I think EA leadership should have learned from this and been much more cautious about the financial, legal and reputational risks of having large amounts of their funding provided by crypto billionaires. 

Yeah, but I feel like the situation with Ben Delo wasn't perceived as a highest-category catastrophe at the time because Delo never became a huge public figure within EA and wasn't particularly involved with any big project. (He worked with some EA funders briefly and it probably didn't reflect well on them, but they seemed like a smaller and newer org at the time and it was overall an extremely different situation than what happened with FTX and the Future fund.) This could explain why people didn't draw a big enough update.

Also, while I think "accepting money from someone and it later turns out it was based on fraud" is bad, I view it as the type of bad that I don't think one has to spend sleepless nights over, at least not under all circumstances. The circumstances where it's most unambiguously bad are when a donor is using their donations to build up a positive public image  and they become more active and powerful within the EA ecosystem. In those instances, it seems absolutely crucial to make sure they're not fraudsters.

However, if a donor is keeping a low profile and the amount of money doesn't make you too dependent on them, then IMO there's a strong argument to be made for "minimal vetting is perfectly okay." By "minimal vetting," I mean something like you check if there's an ongoing criminal investigation into the person in question and you comply with any laws regarding money laundering and so on. And if there's no criminal investigation and if the donation is compliant with money laundering laws, then that's it and you take the money without worrying about it too much. It's not your job to figure out if someone's a financial criminal – there are government agencies whose job that is. If it later turns out that there was fraud, you stop taking the money! (And maybe have to give some of it back for moral and legal reasons – so prepare for the possibility in your planning.) In practice, I think there's a problem where, by taking the money, you automatically "endorse" the donor in some sense, and this could be used by them to white-wash their reputation. So maybe you could write a disclaimer that describes the type of vetting that your org does for big donors, so it's apparent to outsiders that accepting a donation doesn't necessarily mean "we vouch for this donor being an A+ high-integrity person." But that should be pretty self-explanatory, since it would be an unreasonable standard to vet all donors in that way. I guess it's a special situation with crypto given how crazily high the fraud rates are. There are many honest people in crypto, but the risk is maybe elevated enough to warrant the awkwardness of a "how we vet crypto donors" disclaimer.

I'm aware that some people think there's a moral obligation to go beyond the process I described above, but IMO that's a legitimate thing to disagree over and we also have to consider the costs of turning down money or of asking big donors to go through time-intensive auditing for extra vetting. It's easy to virtue-signal that we should never do anything that could turn out to look bad, but that's not the right stance to take either given that the world is full of suffering and inaction is often costly, too.    

Moreover, I felt Will's statement was quite strong in outright denouncing SBF, and had this qualifier as an afterthought; not in the foreground. 

I just don't understand how you can say that. Almost every tweet had the qualification in the foreground. Certaintly it wasn't an afterthought. His offer to apologize was in the 4th tweet, before he even condemns Sam. (Edit: link to thread)

Based on publicly available information, it seems to me more likely than not that senior leadership at FTX used customer deposits to bail out Alameda, despite terms of service prohibiting this, and a (later deleted) tweet from Sam claiming customer deposits are never invested.

I read "more likely than not" to be ~60% confidence, which doesn't show a very high level of understanding of the situation (which is not very acceptable for someone who should have been monitoring this situation very closely). It also colors the rest of what I read as someone who doesn't think that there is much certainty to be had here.

I am not certain that this is what happened. I haven’t been in contact with anyone at FTX (other than those at Future Fund), except a short email to resign from my unpaid advisor role at Future Fund. If new information vindicates FTX, I will change my view and offer an apology.

But if there was deception and misuse of funds, I am outraged, and I don’t know which emotion is stronger: my utter rage at Sam (and others?) for causing such harm to so many people, or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception.

I want to make it utterly clear: if those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community.

If this is what happened, then I cannot in words convey how strongly I condemn what they did. I had put my trust in Sam, and if he lied and misused customer funds he betrayed me, just as he betrayed his customers, his employees, his investors, & the communities he was a part of.

For years, the EA community has emphasised the importance of integrity, honesty, and the respect of common-sense moral constraints. If customer funds were misused, then Sam did not listen; he must have thought he was above such considerations.

If FTX misused customer funds, then I personally will have much to reflect on. Sam and FTX had a lot of goodwill – and some of that goodwill was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting. If that goodwill laundered fraud, I am ashamed.

Emphasis mine, but I'm afraid we're either talking about different statements, or read these tweets very differently.

Yeah, I can understand how some people might have been uncertain about what happened, but given what was public at the time, anyone following closely would not have been as uncertain as you at that time.