Have you not seen the terrible accounting they had? I'm sure some of the disclosures were bullshit, but for my part, I entirely believe the "fiat@" cell in the spreadsheet was much larger than (most of them) thought; they thought they had a record and the record was wrong because they really sucked at accounting and also at least one competently-manipulative person (Sam) was steering everyone else away from looking at it closely.
A lot of fraud is a mistake that the people responsible refused to back away from, and doubled down. The Madoff scam was, for example; it started with promising results that they couldn't sustain, they did a short-term trick to keep them up because they really believed it would go 'back to normal' soon, and then they didn't admit defeat for... more than 20 years. Madoff never AFAIK stated when he started falsifying records, but he admitted to not making any real trades any time from 1992 to 2009. Presumably not 50 years. 30 to 40, most likely. By '92 he knew it was pure fraud. Did he know in '81? Maybe. In '75, or whatever the first year was, six months after he started committing fraud? Probably not.
And then you look up a year later and realize you've frog-boiled yourself into something you definitely cannot get out of by confessing, even if it started as something that felt like an honest mistake. You can, at that point, cut your losses, accept a huge fine, and bail. That's very rare and appears to take unusual virtue. In substantial part because the social penalty for bailing then, and the penalty for keeping it going as long as you possibly can, are pretty much the same.
I do not know whether she made a mistake. I do not know who else there made a mistake. It may be no one. It may be all of them.[1] We do not have the information to know that. We may never have that information; they may take it to their grave, same as Bernie Madoff. You are entitled to believe she did it knowingly and understood the scope of her crime and continued anyway; this is an entirely reasonable belief that the evidence we have does not contradict. You are not entitled to consider it obvious.
Except Sam. I have been convinced by people who talked about him from before Alameda and FTX and reached the conclusion that he was unwise and manipulative and knew what he was doing was wrong from the start, that those things are true. People who have similar knowledge about Caroline's life before Alameda do not mostly reach this conclusion about her, though they hardly exonerate her either.
The accounting of "the chain of obligation" seems inflammatory to me. Exaggerated beyond the point where it is plausible. I don't think it's morally correct or reasonable.
Also, in a practical sense: If we had taken that perspective closer to the time, rather than use the legal process... there pretty much wouldn't be an EA funding ecosystem left. Not because there was no other source of money, but because every funder would have had to give back money they didn't have, all at once, money that had been donated through them but not to them, and which they'd have been held accountable for anyway. Cut the heart out of everyone but GiveWell and probably OpenPhil/Coefficient, and the ecosystem's gone.
Your contrasting examples for things we don't offset convince me we should offset more and change behavior less. We offset carbon; we offset vegetarianism; we should try to offset more things. It's a good strategy and it would do more good to frame foreign wars etc. in those terms.
Indeed, if you are at all concerned about animal welfare, the EA ethic to do the most good demands that you do both.
The essence of EA is to get the most effect for the least effort. GWWC is not a pledge to get as much good effects as you can; it's a pledge to devote a measured, specific amount of your life, effort, and money to good causes and spend it with the most effectiveness you can. And even that is too much for some people; they can't maintain it. I am, personally, on the short list of people who have been removed from the pledge list, which I suspect is significantly shorter than the list of people who stayed on the list and stopped fulfilling their promise.
Usually the effort is measured in dollars, but if the effort to get people to offset animal products is lower than to stop using them, do that. Almost no one is going to devote their entire spare budget to EA, and no one but Peter Singer will devote all their lifestyle. You cannot get everything and it's naive, presumptuous, and foolish to pretend otherwise. The marginal effort to help animals should go wherever is most effective per time spent doing it, which is pretty much always going to be offsets or arguing for larger offsets, not lifestyle changes.
And if it's easier to get governments to offset foreign wars than to make them stop waging them, then obviously we should do that.
committed vegans - which all EAs have the power to become!
This is preposterous. Frankly, thinking this discredits most of your post (everything from Why Offsets Don't Really Exist onward) by itself. Because it displays total ignorance of everyone who isn't vegan, and indication that you're engaging in motivated reasoning everywhere else.
No, all EAs cannot become committed vegans. Leave aside the ~5-10% who can't become any kind of vegan for health reasons, and the other 10-20% who technically could but whose health issues if they did would reduce their counterfactual impact by 20% or more. You claim those don't exist, which has remained a persistent claim by vegan EAs for over a decade despite being conclusively proven false repeatedly over the course of that decade. (Hint: your sources are hopelessly confounded. And their methodologies have been applied to intermittent fasting and found that it had no negative effects and some benefits, which, if you look at any study considering effects with mental health included, is shown to be ludicrously false.)
Focus on those who find veganism unpleasant but could be persuaded to do it for reasons of moral obligation, who make up the majority of the remainder, likely 30-35% of EAs with 15-20% who wouldn't find it particularly unpleasant. Why would you possibly think those people, even if became vegan, would evangelize? Let alone evangelize at the rates of people like you who have never experienced drawbacks or felt conflicted about it? No, there is no chance they will be anywhere near the 5 follow-on veganism attempts per lifetim.
People doing difficult things they dislike do not enthusiastically persuade others to do them. And despite the repeated disingenuous claims by vegans, veganism is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, a difficult life change that makes most people's lives noticeably, persistently worse for as long as they maintain it.
There's a story people tell about a new employee at a large investment bank. Some time in their first few weeks, they make a mistake that costs the company ten million dollars.
"I'm sorry," says the new hire, "I'll completely understand if you fire me for this."
"Why would I fire you?", their boss replies, "I just spent ten million dollars training you!"
This obviously applies here. Someone who has handled billions of dollars has given evidence of their competence even if it ended in fraud. If you believe they are genuinely aligned with EA (which I do without reservation in Caroline's case), and that the fraud was not intentional on their part (seems very likely), and are unconcerned with reputation and PR (Austin is), then what this looks like is a serious error in judgment, which cost billions of dollars (and jail time) training them. If you oversee them for a short time and their judgment is greatly improved (I'm not sure this amount of evidence should be convincing), then it can be an entirely reasonable decision, picking up a $100 bill off the sidewalk that everyone else sees as tainted.
Common sense is often uncommon, and often nonsensical. Austin may have poor judgment, but this is absolutely not "rank incompetence."
No shit rationalists dismiss animal welfare more. The people who don't, are far more likely to call themselves EAs. Same for global poverty. To a lesser degree, same even for pandemics.
You have egregiously confused correlation for causation. And played into the stereotype that animal activist EA is persistently the sloppiest and most prone to deception for a good cause.
Personally I think Eliezer's position is much more reasonable than Bentham's counterarguments; the things BB dismissed as ridiculous seem obviously plausible, even if they aren't relevant to animal moral patienthood. It may be there are good arguments against it, but they aren't present here, and I would not trust them from any animal activism EA I didn't already know well enough to trust by rationalist standards, because nearly every time I do that, I have more experiences that confirm the stereotype.
Especially since I don't consider being correct on this point urgent by my own moral standards; I will continue eating chicken even if I'm convinced they are capable of having moral relevance.
The 'stylistic choices' were themselves evidence of wrongdoing, and most of their evidence against claims both misstated the claims they claimed to be refuting and provided further (unwitting?) evidence of wrongdoing.
Also, the only known raids on the corporate assets happened post-crash and therefore long post-audit. Under the espoused worldview of the management, everything before that was plausibly 'good for the company'. In that it benefitted the company in raw EV across all possible worlds with no discount rate for higher gains or for massive losses.
If that's your logic, you should retract that whole section.
Have you not seen the terrible accounting they had? I'm sure some of the disclosures were bullshit, but for my part, I entirely believe the "fiat@" cell in the spreadsheet was much larger than (most of them) thought; they thought they had a record and the record was wrong because they really sucked at accounting and also at least one competently-manipulative person (Sam) was steering everyone else away from looking at it closely.
A lot of fraud is a mistake that the people responsible refused to back away from, and doubled down. The Madoff scam was, for example; it started with promising results that they couldn't sustain, they did a short-term trick to keep them up because they really believed it would go 'back to normal' soon, and then they didn't admit defeat for... more than 20 years. Madoff never AFAIK stated when he started falsifying records, but he admitted to not making any real trades any time from 1992 to 2009. Presumably not 50 years. 30 to 40, most likely. By '92 he knew it was pure fraud. Did he know in '81? Maybe. In '75, or whatever the first year was, six months after he started committing fraud? Probably not.
And then you look up a year later and realize you've frog-boiled yourself into something you definitely cannot get out of by confessing, even if it started as something that felt like an honest mistake. You can, at that point, cut your losses, accept a huge fine, and bail. That's very rare and appears to take unusual virtue. In substantial part because the social penalty for bailing then, and the penalty for keeping it going as long as you possibly can, are pretty much the same.
I do not know whether she made a mistake. I do not know who else there made a mistake. It may be no one. It may be all of them.[1] We do not have the information to know that. We may never have that information; they may take it to their grave, same as Bernie Madoff. You are entitled to believe she did it knowingly and understood the scope of her crime and continued anyway; this is an entirely reasonable belief that the evidence we have does not contradict. You are not entitled to consider it obvious.
Except Sam. I have been convinced by people who talked about him from before Alameda and FTX and reached the conclusion that he was unwise and manipulative and knew what he was doing was wrong from the start, that those things are true. People who have similar knowledge about Caroline's life before Alameda do not mostly reach this conclusion about her, though they hardly exonerate her either.
The accounting of "the chain of obligation" seems inflammatory to me. Exaggerated beyond the point where it is plausible. I don't think it's morally correct or reasonable.
Also, in a practical sense: If we had taken that perspective closer to the time, rather than use the legal process... there pretty much wouldn't be an EA funding ecosystem left. Not because there was no other source of money, but because every funder would have had to give back money they didn't have, all at once, money that had been donated through them but not to them, and which they'd have been held accountable for anyway. Cut the heart out of everyone but GiveWell and probably OpenPhil/Coefficient, and the ecosystem's gone.
Moral consistency in this sense is not an EA value.
Your contrasting examples for things we don't offset convince me we should offset more and change behavior less. We offset carbon; we offset vegetarianism; we should try to offset more things. It's a good strategy and it would do more good to frame foreign wars etc. in those terms.
The essence of EA is to get the most effect for the least effort. GWWC is not a pledge to get as much good effects as you can; it's a pledge to devote a measured, specific amount of your life, effort, and money to good causes and spend it with the most effectiveness you can. And even that is too much for some people; they can't maintain it. I am, personally, on the short list of people who have been removed from the pledge list, which I suspect is significantly shorter than the list of people who stayed on the list and stopped fulfilling their promise.
Usually the effort is measured in dollars, but if the effort to get people to offset animal products is lower than to stop using them, do that. Almost no one is going to devote their entire spare budget to EA, and no one but Peter Singer will devote all their lifestyle. You cannot get everything and it's naive, presumptuous, and foolish to pretend otherwise. The marginal effort to help animals should go wherever is most effective per time spent doing it, which is pretty much always going to be offsets or arguing for larger offsets, not lifestyle changes.
And if it's easier to get governments to offset foreign wars than to make them stop waging them, then obviously we should do that.
This is preposterous. Frankly, thinking this discredits most of your post (everything from Why Offsets Don't Really Exist onward) by itself. Because it displays total ignorance of everyone who isn't vegan, and indication that you're engaging in motivated reasoning everywhere else.
No, all EAs cannot become committed vegans. Leave aside the ~5-10% who can't become any kind of vegan for health reasons, and the other 10-20% who technically could but whose health issues if they did would reduce their counterfactual impact by 20% or more. You claim those don't exist, which has remained a persistent claim by vegan EAs for over a decade despite being conclusively proven false repeatedly over the course of that decade. (Hint: your sources are hopelessly confounded. And their methodologies have been applied to intermittent fasting and found that it had no negative effects and some benefits, which, if you look at any study considering effects with mental health included, is shown to be ludicrously false.)
Focus on those who find veganism unpleasant but could be persuaded to do it for reasons of moral obligation, who make up the majority of the remainder, likely 30-35% of EAs with 15-20% who wouldn't find it particularly unpleasant. Why would you possibly think those people, even if became vegan, would evangelize? Let alone evangelize at the rates of people like you who have never experienced drawbacks or felt conflicted about it? No, there is no chance they will be anywhere near the 5 follow-on veganism attempts per lifetim.
People doing difficult things they dislike do not enthusiastically persuade others to do them. And despite the repeated disingenuous claims by vegans, veganism is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, a difficult life change that makes most people's lives noticeably, persistently worse for as long as they maintain it.
There's a story people tell about a new employee at a large investment bank. Some time in their first few weeks, they make a mistake that costs the company ten million dollars.
This obviously applies here. Someone who has handled billions of dollars has given evidence of their competence even if it ended in fraud. If you believe they are genuinely aligned with EA (which I do without reservation in Caroline's case), and that the fraud was not intentional on their part (seems very likely), and are unconcerned with reputation and PR (Austin is), then what this looks like is a serious error in judgment, which cost billions of dollars (and jail time) training them. If you oversee them for a short time and their judgment is greatly improved (I'm not sure this amount of evidence should be convincing), then it can be an entirely reasonable decision, picking up a $100 bill off the sidewalk that everyone else sees as tainted.
Common sense is often uncommon, and often nonsensical. Austin may have poor judgment, but this is absolutely not "rank incompetence."
No shit rationalists dismiss animal welfare more. The people who don't, are far more likely to call themselves EAs. Same for global poverty. To a lesser degree, same even for pandemics.
You have egregiously confused correlation for causation. And played into the stereotype that animal activist EA is persistently the sloppiest and most prone to deception for a good cause.
Personally I think Eliezer's position is much more reasonable than Bentham's counterarguments; the things BB dismissed as ridiculous seem obviously plausible, even if they aren't relevant to animal moral patienthood. It may be there are good arguments against it, but they aren't present here, and I would not trust them from any animal activism EA I didn't already know well enough to trust by rationalist standards, because nearly every time I do that, I have more experiences that confirm the stereotype.
Especially since I don't consider being correct on this point urgent by my own moral standards; I will continue eating chicken even if I'm convinced they are capable of having moral relevance.
The 'stylistic choices' were themselves evidence of wrongdoing, and most of their evidence against claims both misstated the claims they claimed to be refuting and provided further (unwitting?) evidence of wrongdoing.
Also, the only known raids on the corporate assets happened post-crash and therefore long post-audit. Under the espoused worldview of the management, everything before that was plausibly 'good for the company'. In that it benefitted the company in raw EV across all possible worlds with no discount rate for higher gains or for massive losses.