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There is going to be a Netflix series on SBF titled The Altruists, so EA will be back in the media. I don't know how EA will be portrayed in the show, but regardless, now is a great time to improve EA communications. More specifically, being a lot more loud about historical and current EA wins — we just don't talk about them enough!
A snippet from Netflix's official announcement post:
Are you ready to learn about crypto?
Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Inventing Anna) and Anthony Boyle (House of Guinness, Say Nothing, Masters of the Air) are set to star in The Altruists, a new eight-episode limited series about Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison.
Graham Moore (The Imitation Game, The Outfit) and Jacqueline Hoyt (The Underground Railroad, Dietland, Leftovers) will co-showrun and executive produce the series, which tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye — and then seduced, coaxed, and teased each other into stealing $8 billion.
If it's anything like the book Going Infinite by Michael Lewis, it'll probably be a relatively sympathetic portrayal. My initial impression from the announcement post is that it at least sounds like the angle they're going for is misguided haphazard idealists (which Lewis also did), rather than mere criminal masterminds.
Graham Moore is best known for the Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing, and his portrayal was a classic "misunderstood genius angle". If he brings that kind of energy to a movie about SBF, we can hope he shows EA in a positive light as well.
Another possible comparison you could make would be with the movie The Social Network, which was inspired by real life, but took a lot of liberties and interestingly made Dustin Moskovitz (who funds a lot of EA stuff through Open Philanthropy) a very sympathetic character. (Edit: Confused him and Eduardo Saverin).
I also think there's lots of precedence for Hollywood to generally make dramas and movies that are sympathetic to apparent "villains" and "antiheroes". Mindless caricatures are less interesting to watch than nuanced portrayals of complex characters with human motivations. The good fiction at least tries to have that kind of depth.
So, I'm cautiously optimistic. When you actually dive deeper into the story of SBF, you realize he's more complex than yet another crypto grifter, and I think a nuanced portrayal could actually help EA recover a bit from the narrative that we're just a TESCREAL techbro cult.
I do also agree in general that we should be louder about the good that EA has actually done in the world.
According to the Guardian there is also one movie, another series, and several documentaries potentially in the works
The series is one of several projects in the works on the high-profile financial saga. It was announced in November that Girls creator Lena Dunham will write a movie based on Michael Lewis’s 2023 bestseller Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon for Apple and A24. Amazon Prime Video has a limited series in the works from Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo and writer David Weil.
There are also multiple competing nonfiction projects: one from Vice Media and the Information on effective altruism, and another from studio XTR and director David Darg that promises “unprecedented access to key players at FTX and the cryptocurrency community” in Bankman-Fried’s home base of the Bahamas.
A third documentary from Fortune and Mark Wahlberg’s company Unrealistic Ideas will focus on the relationship between Bankman-Fried and one of his most vocal critics, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. Bloomberg has already aired a nonfiction special on the debacle, titled Ruin: Money, Ego & Deception at FTX.
David Nash's Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow.
I don't think any other newsletter captures and highlights EA's cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this month's newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work!
Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyone's radar!
The global health Roundup is insanely good too. https://gdea.substack.com/?utm_source=homepage_recommendations&utm_campaign=822941
At Anthropic’s new valuation, each of its seven founders — CEO Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei and cofounders Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah — are set to become billionaires. Forbes estimates that each cofounder will continue to hold more than 2% of Anthropic’s equity each, meaning their net worths are at least $1.2 billion.
I don't know if any of the seven co-founders practice effective giving, but if they do, this is welcoming news!
Dario Amodei is the 43rd Giving What We Can Pledge member, (a?) Tom Brown the 1214th, and (a?) Jack Clark the 4002nd.
What happened to US Policy Careers?
They had several in-depth, informative articles. Shame if they are off the Forum and there is no way to access them.
I think most of their articles have been repackaged and can be found here: https://emergingtechpolicy.org/
David Nash's Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow.
I don't think any other newsletter captures and highlights EA's cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this month's newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work!
Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyone's radar!
Over time it was getting less engagement, and I felt that the content made more sense as a substack/newsletter than a forum post - it's not the kind of post that leads to discussions.