Could you provide links to those statements by Hanania?

Not a gotcha, I just have barely heard of this guy and from what you say I expect all discourse around him to be a cesspool. 

Have you seen people dismiss concerns because Torres shares them (as opposed to dismissing Torres as a source)? I haven't, but I'm sure it's happening somewhere. I agree that would be bad epistemics.

Is there any level of bad behavior that you think merits totally ignoring someone? Where is that line for you?

Will, do you plan on answering questions in the comments here? I realize you're busy and good responses take time, but I wanted to check if answering was on your agenda at all. 

that makes sense, sounds like it wasn't the concern for at least your group. He does describe it as "The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless", so unless there were multiple waves of management quitting it sounds like the book conflated multiple stories. 

There part where SBF committed to something important in his trading company and then broke the agreement also seems more predictive of fraud than suggested by the phrase "management dispute".

People rarely leave over one thing and different people leave over different reasons. But I expect people hearing "left over ethics disputes" to walk away with a more accurate understanding than "left over a management dispute" (and more details to either sentence would be welcome). 

I think if all he'd said was "My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there", I'd have found that a satisfactory answer. It's also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn't looked into it very much. I'm inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important. 

Matt Levine is quoting from Going Infinite. I do not know who Michael Lewis's source is. I've heard confirming bits and pieces privately, which makes me trust this public version more. Of course that doesn't mean that was everyone's motivation: I'd be very interested to hear whatever you're able to share. 

My understanding is that this wasn't a benign management dispute, it was an ethical dispute about whether to disclose to investors that Alameda had misplaced $4m. SBF's refusal to do so sure seems of a piece with FTX's later issues. 

I disagree with that quote but I do think the fact that Will is reporting this story now with a straight face is a bad sign. 

My steelman would be "look if you think two people would have a positive-sum interaction and it's cheap to facilitate that, doing so is a good default". It's not obvious to me that Will spent more than 30 seconds on this. But the defense is "it was cheap and I didn't think about it very hard", not "Sam had ideas for improving twitter".